La Vague de Chaleur (Aug. 2003)
A Blue Flag Adventure (Aug. 2002)
Patio Talk (Aug. 2002)
Decoder Rings (Sept. 2002)
Eeyore and Tigger (Oct. 2002)
Wonder Woman Hangs from a Wire (Dec. 2002)
Serves Two (June 2003)
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Decoder Rings
September 2002
Last weekend we left our parenting shoes in France and caught a flight out of the country for a long weekend away. Frequent flyer miles were expiring and we decided to hit a city we had never visited. We wanted a city that was easy to maneuver, friendly, and which didn't resent English speakers. We chose Amsterdam.
It wasn't the break from the children and their continual requests to go to the lake, or go catch lizards, or go to a friend's house to play, that we needed. It was a break from trying to decode French. We were tired. Our decoder rings were running low on "juice". Our brains were fried after two months of the back and forth translating dance. Surely we could muddle our way through the daily life without too much pain. Surely we could order food, pick out a tasty loaf of bread, or say hello to our neighbor. Seems easy enough.
Until you have to order from a menu where nothing is recognizable and even when it arrives, or for a long time thereafter, you have no idea what you are eating. You think it's veal, but it could also be lamb. Is "lapin" rabbit or lamb? Is lamb a sheep and an ewe or is it a ram and a lamb? Whatever. You eat it, it is delicious, but you never know. Wouldn't it be nice to know? You are not afraid to ask what it is but when they tell you in French you are like a deer in the headlights on a dark mountain road and you can't exactly remember what they said and, like always, your French-English dictionary is somewhere where you are not.
Then there is the bakery. Surely you can point and grunt to the right loaf. But that's not enough. Every boulangerie has over twenty choices of bread and you don't want to be such an obvious tourist as to order the status quo baguette. You have got to be more specific. For inside every loaf is a different story. It should correspond not only to your taste preference, but also to what you are serving for your next meal. What if a crunchy outside and chewy inside clashes with lunch? Or, a soft outside with a dense inside is a perfect match to dinner, but you didn't know that? You try to lean over the counter and point but the others don't appreciate it, and anyway the chocolate éclair sauce is all over your shirt. Your French is so basic that you end up with a tasteless baguette instead because you know for a fact that it is a feminine gender noun and heaven forbid if you made a grammatical error at the Boulangerie. So, with confidence you announce "une baguette" because the other loaves are too difficult to pronounce and you have no idea if they are feminine or masculine gender loaves. You hate baguettes.
How about when you are spoken to by your red-faced neighbor and you have no idea what you've done to upset him and most likely he's not upset he just wants to say hello and discuss some frivolous neighborly topic, but no matter, he is now upset because you don't understand that he's not upset. When you return to your apartment you replay the conversation in your head and you think that quite possibly he was intimating that the chewy outside with an airy inside would be the best for lapin but in fact he was also trying to tell you that they were all out at the boulangerie. And by the way, you have chocolate on your shirt.
So we were tired. We flew to the land of English language speakers, red light district tolerators, and hash and cannabis entrepreneurs. A city of tolerance, smiles, menus we could decipher, strangers we could understand, and bakery items we understood down to each ingredient. We sat in cafes until they closed; we sipped beer before noon and coffee after midnight. We ate, we walked, we admired the city in all its crookedness and we relaxed.
Are you curious as to whether or not we plunged our innocent selves into debauchery? Of course you want to hear if we sat in the "coffee shops" and smoked until Dutch almost sounded normal and the passage of a day went unnoticed in the dim lights of the dark interior. Of course you want to hear if we walked the red light district and paid to see a sex show filled with Japanese tourists and gawking British boys reeking of beer. Of course you are curious, as you should be. But that's not really the point.
The point is that it is a lovely city with leaning buildings and wide canals. It is a mostly sunny city where the people are always friendly. There are many museums to enjoy interesting and diverse art. There are restaurants representing most foods from around the world. The city is full of bikes and you could rent one to see the many unique neighborhoods from atop your plastic seat. There are English bookstores, diamond factories, and flower markets. There is so much to do.
What did we do? We returned to France rested, ready, and with our decoder rings recharged.
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