France!

Just like in my trip to Spain over spring break (which you can read about here), a lot happened on my trip to France, so I'm splitting it up over several posts.

Beforehand/ Wednesday, May 4
I knew that before leaving Europe I wanted to visit France. Its one of those things in the list of "integral study abroad experiences", along with wearing scarves and judging other less-enlightened americans for not having enough of a multicultural perspective. In a manner similar to my trip to Antwerp, I read about a dance competition being held in a city just outside of Paris and used that as an excuse to travel. My plan was to just go and watch, rather than compete.

"But Matt", you might interject, "why would you go all of the way to France for a competition that you are not even participating in?" First off, perceptive reader, I would like to thank you for your well-placed question, giving me an excellent opportunity to segue into talking about the competition in more detail. It is readers like you that make blogs like this possible. Secondly, this competition is not a typical one. Instead, the event promoters managed to get 7 of the worlds best powermovers (powermoves being the momentum-based bboying moves, such as spinning on your head, that people normally think of when they think of bboying). It was going to be a great time just to watch.

The week preceding the event had several holidays, so I had the time off and was able to leave wednesday night, spend two days in Paris, one in some other city, and then sunday in Dourdan at the competition. I would take the Eurolines night bus to get to France - it is about a 6-hour ride, so if I grabbed a late bus, I would be able to sleep on the way and get there early, without having to spend extra on a hostel.

I had this rough plan several weeks in advance, but didn't put too much thought in it, and so on wednesday I was still scrambling to figure out my travel plans. After reading travel website Wikitravel for a while, I decided to go to Marseilles on saturday. I then quickly bought my bus tickets and reserved my hostel rooms several hours before leaving. Around 8:50 wednesday night, I rode the train over to the bus stop, and began the long bus ride.
Having used this company once before (on my trip in Spain), I should have realized that getting any amount of good sleep was an impossibility. The seats are perfectly angled to keep you alert as possible, and the temperature of the bus ranges from too cold to awkwardly warm and humid. It is a little bit worse than airline seating - at least airline seats recline. Sorry - I'll stop whining now. It was convenient enough.

Thursday, May 5
I arrived in Paris around 6 am, and headed off to my hostel in order to drop off my bag and grab a map of the city. Since I got there so early, they let me have breakfast, which was great. I also grabbed some extra baguette rolls for lunch and dinner. The fact that they were free meant that they became the primary staple of my diet for the next few days.

Outside the hostel.

Arc de Triomphe

From there, I walked over to the Arc de Triomphe. It seems like there are a lot of triumphal arches in different cities I've visited. I then headed downtown in search of the free walking tour - I was impressed by the free walking tour in Seville, and so wanted to go on one again. However, I could never find the group, so I ended up just walking around the center of town for a while (not a bad fate in itself), eventually heading over to the Louvre. You enter the louvre through the largest of the three glass pyramid structures. They look cool but seem to work like a magnifying glass and focus the light, heating up the inside - I feel bad for the security guards who have to stand in that all day.

I was able to enter the museum for free because of my temporary residency in the Netherlands, and so I proceeded to check out the lower two floors, which contain the statue of ramesses II, the statue of aphrodite/venus de milo, the code of hammurabi, the french crown jewels, and a lot of other art.

venus de milo

I was surprised by the large amount of Egyptian artifacts present in the museum - they have over 50,000 objects from ancient Egypt, including scrolls, statues, and jewelry. For some reason, I only expected Western European art, so seeing the Egyptian collection was a nice surprise.

Though this is often the case with more famous museums, the building was as impressive as much of the art. I later learned that the building used to be a palace for French kings until 1682, when they moved to Versailles and kept the Louvre as a place to display their art collection. Its a huge and beatiful structure.
Eventually, I made my way over to the mona lisa. There was a big room set aside primarily for that picture, with several other pictures in the room as well. Honestly, I was surprised by how large it is - I had always heard of how small the Mona Lisa is, but it actually is a normal sized painting.

The French crown jewels in the Louvre

Mona lisa = actually smaller than my face.

Also that day: a sandwich and french fries - in france! To my dismay, the french fries were not leagues above other non-france french fries I've had before. In fact, they just tasted like normal french fries. Though, I guess thats to be expected, considering that french fries don't even originate in france. The scandal!

That evening, I went over to the Eiffel tower, and took some pictures with it. It was not hard to find the tower, because it rises so much over the rest of the skyline. I didn't end up going in the tower. I later walked along the Seine, found another one of the statues of liberty, and checked out the hippodrome d'auteil (a horse racing track) on the western corner of the city.

That night, after I returned to my hostel. I walked to a nearby convenience store and bought some cheese and meat to put on my baguettes. It wasn't that far from my hostel, but I still managed to get lost for a few minutes on the way back. PROTIP: never say to yourself "hey, i didn't get lost on this trip!" until you actually get home.

Entirely unrelated song post:
This is a song by Kyprios, a Canadian rapper that used to be in rap group Sweatshop Union. I think I originally heard this song on the indie rap blog pigeons and planes. The production is really unique for a rap song - kinda dark and drum'n'bass-ish, and it works out really well. Plus, you can download it for free! (Without getting fined over 200,000 dollars for pirating a few tracks). Check out the link below.
Kyprios - Go Away (Superhero Remix) by listentosuperhero

The Vineyard Church! Bob Dylan! Sugar land!

Vineyard church in amsterdam

After mentioning going to church in my previous post, I thought I talk about it in some more depth. As far as I know, there are only a couple contemporary church services taught in English that are in Amsterdam. I attended Crossroads, one of those churches, once, but wasn't too motivated to return. A couple of weeks later, a friend mentioned the Vineyard Church to me. The vineyard is a movement that started in the US, and this church was recently planted by people in ohio. The website says this about their founding:

"Sent out by Vineyard Columbus (Ohio, USA), seven adults and four children moved to Amsterdam in 2008 and early 2009, in order to assist in the forming of a new community of Jesus-followers in the city. They united with an already existing group of about 15 people, made up mostly of Dutch folks, in the hopes of establishing this community together."

My friend knew the founders of the church from his home in cincinnatti, so when coming here he had been planning on attending. I had heard about the vineyard, but didn't know much about it. In case, you the reader, didn't either, here is the wikipedia article on them: Association of Vineyard Churches. I can also highlight the significant (and by significant, I mean rather strange) points from the article:

• They are "neo-evangelical" - important because the term neo-evangelical sounds cool.
• It was founded through a combination of Bible studies held by Larry Norman and Chuck Girard, both of whom were pioneers in the CCM (christian contemporary) genre. Ugh, CCM.
• Bob Dylan attended some of these bible studies.
• The headquarters of the movement are in a city called Sugar Land, which I think, its safe to assume, is one of Candy Land's sister cities.
• It is described as the middle ground between evangelicalism and pentecostalism.

The service is held in what used to be a coffee shop, and instead of having rows of pews or chairs all facing the front, the chairs are more grouped around tables or scattered throughout. The sermon and announcements are given in either Dutch or English, and then translated into the other language. Most of the worship music is done in english, which works fine since almost all of the Dutch in Amsterdam have great English. One of the people who is completing an internship at the church mentioned that it is 70% Dutch, and 30% other nationalities, so I've gotten to meet a lot of people from other cultures that way. It has a really informal and tight community feel - I felt really welcomed the first time I came, and actually have gotten to know people. In the past at some churches I've attended, I've gone to the service for a while without actually getting to know anyone, but it makes a huge difference when you build relationships with the people at church. I'm going to miss it when I leave.

A couple of shots from right after church has ended:

Queen's Day! Bullet points!

April 30
Throughout my time here, when I've talked to Dutch people, they've excitedly told me about Koninginnedag, or queen's day, and asked what my plans for the day were.  The day is a celebration of the queen's birthday, although it is not actually on the birthday of the current Queen, Queen Beatrix (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrix_of_the_Netherlands). Instead, its on April 30th, the birthday of the previous queen (Queen Juliana).

There are a few things that make Queen's day a unique and crazy holiday:

• All of the city streets are packed with people - everyone is partying and milling about, and the canals are packed with boats, all blasting music and full of dancing people. 

People partying on a boat.  Note the full dj setup.

• The city turns into a giant yard sale - people set up a spot on the street and sell their stuff, whether it be books, food/drinks, clothes, or other random trinkets.  Even the kids join in the festivities - I saw kids performing musical instruments, doing gymnastics, or selling things of their own.

• Everyone is dressed in orange.  The royal family is the "house of orange" - William of Orange was the guy that led the dutch in revolt against spanish rule, which was the basis for the founding of the nation.

• Bands play all day over at museumplein (a big open field right next to the Concertgebouw and the Van Gogh museum). I think they were mostly Dutch bands - the area was really packed.

Museumplein, early in the morning before it was super crowded

I spent most of the day downtown, just wandering around, and then went back later that night to see if any of the vendors had left free stuff behind. All of downtown Amsterdam was filled with trash.
I've never seen so much trash lying out on the street before - there were food wrappers and broken beer bottles everywhere.  At several points I got off my bike and carried it to prevent the tires from being punctured.  My foraging efforts proved successful, as I found a cool backpack and a glass goblet/wine glass thing.

Dam square turned into a carnival.

That next day, I went with another Calvin student downtown to the church we've been going to all semester.  Normally our trip down to church is somewhat hampered by the normal hustle of urban life, but the city was a lot more empty and quieter than normal.  Everyone was obviously recovering from the weekend of action packed festivities.  Add "queen's day" to the ever-growing list of things michigan needs.

Dutch Resistance! Queen's Night!

April 29
The day before Queen's day, Dan and I visited the Dutch resistance museum.  In world war II, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, even though the Netherlands had remained a neutral country.  Not cool, nazis.  At first, the nazis didn't rule over the Dutch as extremely as they did some other countries, but it gradually became more and more severe. The dutch were not fans of invasion or Jewish extermination, so throughout the war they hid Jews (Anne Frank hid in Amsterdam) and resisted the Nazis through a series of strikes.  The resistance, though underground, was strongly organized - they had there own illegal newspapers, and a system of loans, funded in part by the defrauding of the Nazi-controlled Dutch national bank, to support their efforts.

One of the stories of someone involved
in the resistance.

The resistance museum focused on the stories of different individuals who were part of the resistance movement, so it was a lot of reading.   It was fascinating seeing what happened from so many different perspectives.

A dutch poster from WWII.  I believe it reads something along
the lines of "The nazis will try to eat your fiery bread.  Don't let the nazis
steal your bread, because they have bony hands."

That night, I went to tricking practice, and on the bike ride home stumbled upon a fireworks show going on over a lake, in celebration of Queen's night.  I'll talk more about the holiday in my next post, but Queen's night is (obviously) the night before queen's day, and all night people are out partying - its a huge holiday for the Dutch.

Flowers and stuff

April 23

Along with lax drug laws, legal euthanasia, and the well-known red-light district, one of the things the Netherlands are known for is flowers! (one of those things is not like the others.) Flowers are a large part of the Dutch culture - in dutch-infested Michigan you have the tulip time festival, and Calvinism's five theological points of TULIP were developed at a church synod in Holland.  I already talked in an earlier post about how flowers are shipped out daily from dutch markets to all over the world.  So, while it is springtime and before the flowers were cut, we decided to go check out the famous Dutch flower fields.

We left in the morning on our bikes in search of the fields - although we had a general set of directions, soon we were resorting to asking other bikers or gas station attendants about where we could find the flower fields. Since we were out in the countryside, the wind was blowing strong, which slowed us down. In the Netherlands, when the wind is blowing, there are only 2 directions that it goes - almost directly against you or directly against you.  There is no alternative.  At times, I have biked to class, encountering a strong headwind both coming from and going to class.  Its crazy. The combined factors of us zigzagging around the countryside with little idea of where we were going and that Dutch wind meant that it took a lot longer than expected to find the fields.

Once we did find them, though, it was really impressive - there was a huge range of color that went on for a really long distance.  We took pictures for a while, and ate lunch by the fields, and then began to head back.
One of the guys in our group wanted to bike around longer, so he split off to do his own thing. Unfortunately, he was the only one with a bike pump, and 5 minutes after he left, my bike got a flat tire. Ugghh.  We were 3 kilometers from the closest bike shop, so I hopped on the bike rack of one of the guys, while someone else wheeled my bike along his as he pedaled.

The hilarity continued - I was going to have the bike shop replace the inner tube, figuring that they could do a quicker and more efficient job, but was informed that the shop was closing within 5 minutes of us arriving, not to reopen until 4 days later (this was right before Easter).

Instead, I bought a cheap patch kit and a pump, and we set about fixing it ourselves.  The pump worked fine, but the patches from the patch kit wouldn't stick, so every few miles I would have to stop and refill my leaky tire.  All in all, we ended up biking 80 kilometers that day, and I was pretty exhausted from biking with a half-flat tire on the way home, so I just crashed for the rest of the night.

Depicted: the very definition of suave.

Transportation: Its the worst.

This isn't going to be a long post, but i just wanted to post a quick update about my bike, since I wrote about it earlier in the semester.

This entire semester, I have hated the clunker with a fiery passion, but it has managed to get me where I needed to go.  BUT.  It finally broke down on me to a point beyond repair - one of the arms (or should I say tines?) of the front fork snapped as I was on my way to a barbecue.  This last spiteful, dying act of my bike was successful, as I was not able to make the barbecue, but instead had to find a way home.

Several days later, I returned with a plan.  I didn't want to perform expensive repairs on a bike that I would only have until the rest of the semester, so I wanted to use a combination of an energy drink can and duct tape to set the fork in place.

I laid the cut up can along the duct tape and wrapped that around the fork, so that the can would provide stability.

Flawless plan, yeah?

I was able to make it roughly a quarter of a mile before my solution failed, and I was forced to think of an alternative.  I went to the local bike shop and was told that it would be 25 euros (approximately 37 dollars) to fix. This price wasn't too bad, but I decided to keep my options open before I paid for the fix.  After doing some research, I found a bike available on markplaats.nl, the dutch version of craigslist, for 25 euros!  Without much conflict, I took the metro over to the sellers house, and purchased the new bike.  This bike isn't brand new, but is definitely an improvement!

Tulip field included with the purchase of bike.

Entirely unrelated song post:
Another drum and bass track by Ruby my dear.  It samples the intro track from Lupe Fiasco's album "The Cool".
The Dreaming Tree by Ruby My Dear

Parks! Reviews! Hippies!

Park review: Amstelpark, Vondel park, Westerpark, Amsterdamsebos
Although Amsterdam is a very dense city, the city planners still managed to include several municipal parks. I've visited several of them, and so instead of writing several different posts about my trips, I decided to stick them all into one post. Also, since reviewing different city parks might be considered kinda boring, its going to be mainly pictures. An online picture book, if you will.

As mentioned, there are a lot of parks in the city, but many of them are pretty small. Those bloodstain-looking splotches on the city are the locations of the larger parks around Amsterdam. Of those on the map, I haven't yet visited Vliegenbos or Beatrix Park, so I'm not going to review those.

One of the fields in Amsterdamsebos

Amsterdamsebos (dutch for "amsterdam forest") - by far the largest park in Amsterdam. It is technically in Amstelveen, the city just south of Amsterdam (I live at the very north end of Amstelveen), but the two cities aren't very distinct, as you can probably tell from the map. This park is huge-not only does it have fields for soccer, field hockey, and cricket (!), but it also has long, winding paths throughout the forest - separate ones for walking, biking, and horseback riding. Its also only a 5 minute bike ride from where I live, so I go over there a lot.

A church in Amstelveen that's visible near the edge of the forest.

Westerpark - This is a bit farther away from where I live (about 9 kilometers), up in the northwest end of Amsterdam, so I've only been there twice. This park is also pretty large. On the quieter west end are some canals and more wildlife growth, but the eastern end is set up like a beach - when I visited there were a lot of people sitting around or barbecuing, giving it a relaxed and festive feel.

A panorama of westerpark.

Vondelpark - I've only been here once, at the beginning of the semester, so I don't have too much to say. It sticks out in my mind because our Calvin prof has told us how hippies used to camp out there several decades ago, but it made the park so bad that they were kicked out. On queen's day (konniningedag, a dutch holiday celebrating the birthday of the queen), kids will go to that park and sell stuff(think lemonade stand/garage sale combo) or perform.

I didn't have any photos of vondel park, so the photo I grabbed from this dutch tourism website of hippies in vondel park. You can tell its authentic, because its in black and white.

The entry to Amstelpark

Amstelpark This park feels much less 'public' than the other parks, in a good way- the trails are more narrow, and, at least when I visited, it was much more quiet and peaceful. The park also borders the Amstel river, so you can walk along that and watch the people rowing/running/biking if you get tired of nature.

A bird chilling in a high-rise nest in amstel park

My favorite thus far? Amsterdamsebos. You can spend hours there and still not see it all, which is surprising for being so close to the city. However, they all have their own unique and interesting vibes.