Not all of these are going to be polite. Sorry.

When people are trying to make conversation, they ask questions like, "What do you do?" And usually, this question gets answered by sentences alluding to occupation or activities that comprise a person's identity.

"I'm a student."

"I study engineering."

"I'm a writer."

"I teach English."

Since I'm currently unemployed, and a "trailing spouse" (academic speak for... well, exactly what it sounds like), I usually stumble through the conversation at this point.

Lately, though, people have pressed on beyond the point of politesse, and even people who know me quite well seem to be asking me, "What do you do?" in a real, literal way. Like, "How do you fill your day, you unemployed loon?"

I'm sure that anyone reading this blog is probably wondering the same thing, so I'll divulge some of my secrets.

Activity 1: Scour the Internets for job postings.
This involves looking at about 15 different jobs sites, including all the ones you've heard of and some you haven't. It involves a lot of clicking on links and rapidly closing the descriptions that open because they're in German, Czech, or Dutch, or because they require "fluency" in one of those languages. Fluency in French is not a requirement that always necessitates immediate ruling out of the position, but usually, that happens.

It also involves saving a lot of jobs that I think are interesting, but for which I am not inclined to immediately write a cover letter and / or revise a CV in order to apply. About once a week, I purge these lists of saved jobs, usually in no small part because the deadlines for many have passed.

Activity 2: Scour the Internets for signs that America is not devolving into insanity. 
This is not going well, but it is time consuming.

Activity 3: Scour the Internets for graduate programs.
This is usually a direct result of a particularly unsuccessful set of searches for jobs, and has a sub-activity, which is searching for fellowships, scholarships, and other funding. It usually ends when I remember how old I am, that my husband is already a student, and that most of the deadlines have passed.

Activity 4: Running. (pics)
I may or may not have mentioned that I have signed up to run the Prague Marathon on May 8. Whether or not I mentioned it before, it's true. So, I'm in the middle of a 19 week training schedule that I downloaded from Women's Running, and to which I have been sticking as best I can. Certain things preclude running, however. I took several days off for tendonitis in my left ankle and some other sort of itis in my knees. I also feel that I'm on the edge of a cold about 80% of the time, so sometimes, I take time off for that, too. But if you're following me on Strava, you know I am actually getting out the door and putting the miles in.

Activity 5: Prague-ing around.  (pics)
Oh, hey! We're in Prague now. Have been for a few weeks, actually. Did we neglect to mention that we had left Delft, gone snowboarding in Austria, and moved into a communist-era dorm on the edge of the Czech Republic's capital city? Oops. Well we did. And then we promptly moved out of said dorm because it retained too many communist-era amenities, like smoke filling the halls, an impossible to understand system for doing laundry, paying the rent, and accessing the Internet. (If you are thinking that by definition, "accessing the Internet" is not a communist-era activity, I understand your insistence on sticking to historical reality, but in a later post perhaps I will describe the situation, and then, I promise, you will understand just how accurate the anachronism is.)

Prague is gorgeous and intoxicating. It has already teased us with springlike days and a winter storm, proven itself to be both romantic and rough-edged, and stolen a big piece of my heart.

Activity 6: Laundry. 
It truly just never ends. I swear.

Activity 7: Writing letters and making cards.
Some of you have received them, so there is real evidence of this. Some of you have not received them because I have not made it a priority to go into a post office in the Czech Republic yet. Sorry. Some of you, I don't have addresses for, so, you know.

Activity 8: Confusing myself by trying to re-learn French, learn Czech, and not forget Thai. 
Yup, some days I sit down and I do lessons in a French grammar book, play Czech language games on my phone, and attempt to talk to Josh in Thai, which he hates. I feel both brilliant and somewhat insane when I try to put together a perfectly reasonable sentence and it comes together in my brain in at least four different languages. Sometimes Spanish gets in there, too.

Activity 9: Venturing out into the real world to meet people.
I have to say, as a person who actually really likes stability but who has cultivated a life filled with change and unpredictability and occasional meetings with madness, sometimes this is the hardest part. Especially when they deign to ask, "What do you do?" But really, I've met some nice people, both expats and Czechs, and am enjoying venturing out of my comfort zone and attempting feeble conversations forged in Czechlish and incomprehensible handwaving.

Activity 10: Sleeping.
Admit it, this one made you jealous.

Part of the joy of walking around Delft is looking at other people’s windows. Note that I said "at" and not "in." As a general rule, I don’t really find it appropriate to spy on people through their windows, whether they are home or not. It feels too personal to do that. But I've discovered that the windows here are meant to be seen. There are a few windows that I think are also meant to be looked in, as well, with no curtains and people living their lives in full view of the cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists rumbling by.

De Nieuw Kerk

De Oude Kerk

After I went to the Mauritshuis in Den Haag, I promised that there would be more museum reviews. But then I didn't use my museum card to go to any museums for a while, and had a few other things to write about. Well, culture-loving friends, I finally got out to a few more museums: The Peace Palace and Escher in Het Paleis in Den Haag, Het Nieuw Instituut in Rotterdam, and the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam, where Josh and I saw The Hateful Eight.

Bust and portrait of Carnegie. The portrait is the same as the one that hangs in all the libraries he dedicated.

A display of the welcome banner and book of signatories from the first Hague Peace Conference of 1899.

The palace was finished in 1913, but the idea had been coming to fruition since 1899, when Czar Nicholas of Russia asked his cousin, Princess Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, if she would host an international gathering of heads of state to discuss the possible establishment of an international jurisdiction to govern disputes between states without resorting to war. A lofty and still somewhat ideal notion, even over a century later.


Escher Museum
From the Peace Palace, we made our way back to the train station, getting a little lost and then determining to go the the Escher museum if we could find it. Google maps and the construction in the area were somewhat confusing, but we got frustrated enough with our inability to stumble upon the palace and so decided we'd look for it in earnest. And we found it quite easily after I stopped looking at my phone.

A room on the first floor of the palace, probably used for reception or dancing (my conjecture).

Escher in het Paleis, or Escher in the Palace, as the museum is officially called, didn't take my museum card. But admission was only 9 euro, and by the time we got there we were cold and not ready to go back out to walk around for the sake of walking around. Ultimately, we closed the place down and both felt that the experience was worth every cent. The museum takes its name from the fact that it's an Escher museum which is housed in a historic palace which was once a residence of the Queen Mother and Princess, then Queen, Wilhelmina.

View from the Nieuw Kerk in Delft. This is same square where the Thursday market is still held to this day! It doesn't feature the mind- bending dimensions we are so familiar with in his prints, though.

Thus, you really get almost two museums in one, because each room, while containing a display of selected prints, sketches, and artifacts of Escher's phenomenal world, also has a banner describing how the room was used and what furniture it contained during the lifetime of Wilhelmina. But of course, the main draw are the windows into the mind of a playful genius, a determined and prolific artist whose influence on our sense of time, space, infinity and eternity are still not entirely played out.

To get to the top-most (fourth or fifth) floor of the museum, you have to climb a small and winding staircase that's part of a vertical passageway from the bottom to the top of the house, and hidden from view on every floor.

To move between other floors, there are more open staircases. It brings you out onto a landing from which you can look down on the floor below. Several rooms open off of that landing, and there are more "modern" interpretations of Escher's playfulness, including camera tricks with mirrors and angles. When we finished going through these fun-house reminiscent displays, we came back onto the square landing, and I found myself momentarily at a complete loss. Where had the staircase gone? The palace's angles were playing tricks on me themselves, and I was totally disoriented. The stairs were hiding behind a wall, and this time, we made our way down them all the way to the basement where we had stored our coats, winding around in a tight knot and feeling dizzy when we spilled out onto the tiled floor of what may once have been a kitchen and the servants' domain. It seemed an appropriate head space in which to end our tour, although, personally, I am more drawn to Escher's depictions of nature through the details of reflection and ripples than I am to the staircases, and Mobius-like contortions of landscapes, buildings, and spheres.

 

Het Nieuw Instituut: The temporary fashion museum
Determined to use my museum card until it's at least been a worthwhile purchase (I guess you could call that a New Year's Resolution), I made my way to Rotterdam on a Friday afternoon in January. I was going to go with a friend, but she landed a job interview with a family that needs a nanny, so I found myself making the half hour train ride alone. From Rotterdam Centraal to the museum district is another very short (7 minute) bus ride. I arrived at around 2 p.m. so I didn't expect to see more than one or two museums.

Sort of on a whim, I decided to go to Het Nieuw Instituut, which is an architecture and design museum with constantly changing displays. I didn't know what to expect, but I wanted to look at something a little more modern than seventeenth century paintings, and I wasn't in the mood for natural history. Which is how I ended up at the temporary fashion museum that's taken over the entirety of Het Nieuw Instituut since last fall.

There are several exhibits. A collection of the couture donned by Eva Maria Hatschek, the wife of a Swiss diplomat: "Literally everything she wore was made by the great couturiers or custom made by a dressmaker on the basis of patterns that were purchased at the big fashion houses - a practice that was still quite prevalent back then. Designs by Chanel, Givenchy and Yves St. Laurent form the solid basis of a wardrobe that can be read as a self-portrait of the woman who put this collection together." I liked this collection, which features over 600 pieces, artfully hung from the rafters or displayed on mannequins for easy, up close inspection. It is impossible not to imagine the hours of work that went into crafting each piece, and somewhat more difficult to imagine where and when and for what occasion each outfit was donned. I would have taken pictures, but I locked my phone in the locker with my jacket and couldn't be bothered to go get it.

A Fashion Data exhibit felt very temporary and a little amateurishly produced, but imparted the disturbing information it comprised pretty effectively. In case you weren't aware, (fast) fashion is one of the dirtiest industries on the planet. Textile production uses inordinate amounts of water, leaving much of that water polluted with chemical dyes, generally exploits the labor of designers and factory workers in low income countries, and produces nearly incomprehensible amounts of waste, much of which ends up in landfills around the globe. (Yes, even the stuff you send to Goodwill and your local thrift store is more likely to end up in a bale, shipped to Africa or Latin American, or in a landfill, than someone is to actually buy it at your local store. If that seems like madness, it is.)

The Hacked exhibit is a different take on the problems of the fast fashion industry - it is both a comment on the waste and destructiveness of the global fashion industry and a way of speaking up and speaking back to that industry from the standpoint of designers and independent clothiers who also suffer from the breakneck pace at which new styles appear in store windows. It is the project of two Dutch designers, Alexander Van Slobbe and Francisco Van Benthum. "By appropriating and upcycling the remnants from this industry of overproduction, Van Slobbe and Van Benthum transform themselves from product designers into process designers who see waste as their material. Hacked is not only a critique of the effects of the contemporary fashion industry but also an exploration of possible new roles for the fashion designer in the design and production process." Part of the Hacked exhibit included a store, in which they sold some of those upcycled items - t-shirts, sweatshirts, and purses, mostly. Many of these items had clearly been finished before they became rejects, and in The New Haberdashery (another small exhibit), the designers were selling fabric, including expensive-looking and heavenly feeling wool suit fabric, several colors of leather, and gorgeous floral prints, the reams of which - yards and yards of material each - had been recovered from factories or warehouses somewhere along the supply chain of well known brands. It was a small glimpse into the amount of waste inherent in the production of each season's new look.

Along with the cloth in The New Haberdashery, the museum was selling patterns by Dutch designers, and had a neat row of sewing machines at which visitors could work on the designs with the help of museum staff. On the day I visited, a university class was taking a cue from reality TV, and about 10 students in materials science were being given 7 hours to sew a dress from an array of rather drab looking cloth. Alexander Van Slobbe was there giving them pointers and encouragement. To a young man who couldn't seem to figure out how he was going to attach sleeves to a dress he'd given a boat neckline, Mr. van Slobbe gave the incredibly helpful suggestion that perhaps he should simply pull the neckline down 5 or 6 inches and create a sleeveless design. The young man looked relieved.

I may still return to the museum to spend some time in the haberdashery, now that my sewing lessons are underway and I'm not (entirely) terrified of the concept of a sewing machine. The temporary fashion museum and Het Nieuw Instituut's focus on clothing and the fashion industry clearly won't be around long enough to implore you all to go see these particular exhibits, but if the caliber of the installations and the bookstore are any indication, Het Nieuw Instituut is going to be worth many a visit regardless of the topic of their latest shows!

Eye Film Museum
Our first trip to Amsterdam was epic. Josh had gotten us tickets to DJ Scruff for a Saturday night show (It started at 11 pm. We got home at 6 am on Sunday. This post is not about that.), and then subsequently he realized that the Tarantino's Hateful Eight was coming out. Incidentally, the last available showing at the Eye Film Museum, which is one of the few theaters in the world that regularly screens film in 70 mm and other gone-by-the-wayside formats, was at 11 am on that Saturday morning! I was very skeptical about doing 18 hours in Amsterdam, but it had to be done and the Eye Film Museum was a more than worthwhile place to spend 4 of those hours. We arrived a little early for the film, but not early enough to have a look around. The theater was small, and packed, but the seats were comfortable and reasonably spaced, so even the tall Dutch woman sitting directly in front of me couldn't block my view, and I wasn't arm wrestling either Josh or the woman next to me over the armrest.

After the film ended, we had access to the lower floor of the museum for free. We decided not to pay to see a special Antonioni exhibit. (I don't know who Antonioni is. Also, Josh doesn't have a museum card, so he wouldn't get a discount.) That was more than enough to be impressive. We were allowed to take the sandwiches that we'd packed to some stairs overlooking the museum's restaurant, and ate quietly, while staring out the enormous floor to ceiling windows that look out over the Ij river. It was a lovely scene.

Where we sat was actually an audio exhibit of behind the scenes commentary on the production of a number of iconic films, including Jaws and Chinatown. The cameraman for Jaws revealed how and why the film was shot as it was: the mechanical shark they'd built, and which appeared prominently in the storyboards, never worked. So they couldn't film it. And they didn't have an alternative - until the cameraman asked himself, "What would Hitchcock do?"

The rest of the museum that we walked through featured displays of early moving pictures devices and cameras. In one dark room, 6 interactive screens allow visitors to find and watch clips of some of the museum's archive of over 47,000 (!) films. In addition to being a working theater, a museum exhibiting retrospectives on filmmaking greats, and a general education center on the history and technical development of filmmaking technology, the museum's mission is to preserve motion pictures in perpetuity.

Also, it's a great place for kids. Many of the displays in the free part of the museum were very interactive. Make your own green screen movie and watch it unfold in front of you; create your own flip book (which you have to buy in the museum store, of course); and a number of consoles that allow for private (1-4 people) viewing of some of the museums' archived movies or playing motion picture trivia. We didn't get to do much of this because families were taking up most of the interactive spaces. It was a Saturday afternoon, after all.

It's yet another place I'd easily go back to and spend a few hours. The view from the cafe alone would probably bring me back!

As you can probably tell, there's plenty to see and do no matter where you are in the Netherlands! I still have to make a few more trips to museums to get my money's worth out of it, so you'll hear about a few more places, I'm sure.

I am not awesome at relaxing. But I am really good at procrastinating. This is a terrible combination to be born with (or to have nurtured into you).
Above are leaves (duh) and to the right is a multi-layered cut that was inspired by a picture of a mycelium (fungus). Yum. I'm working on coral and other designs too.

So, this is how I'm relaxing. In addition, I'm trying to give myself permission to learn and do things that I never allowed myself to have time to do before, even though I probably should have started a long time ago. Hence, the sewing that I keep hinting at.

This particular activity is also part of the perseverance resolution, and a slightly smaller resolution of allowing myself to do things that I'm not actually awesome at (like relaxing, and sewing, and making things). I mentioned in an earlier post that several times, either because I can't understand a calendar, or a miscommunication, or a holiday event, I wasn't able to start the sewing lessons that I wanted to take. Well, finally! I was able to go. In the first lesson, I sewed a very small bag with some scrap fabric. Then, I bought myself a pattern for a dress and some fabric, took out 125 euros in cash and handed it over to a very sweet lady, and have spent the last two lessons (4 hours) painstakingly tracing the pattern, pinning it to fabric, and cutting outside the lines.

That there's the fabric. Teal sleeves (3/4 length) and collar and the pattern for the body of the dress. If it turns out to be wearable, I will post pictures of me wearing it, too.

And finally, I'm tackling perseverance and kindness to myself by running. Specifically, I signed up for a marathon in Prague in May. Yes, a marathon. A full 26(.2) mile marathon. I've discovered that exercise is perhaps the most important aspect of maintaining mental health for me, and that I also kind of like running. But like all of the other things I kind of like, but still manage to procrastinate to the point of not doing, I needed a goal and a purpose.

Hence, marathon training. Wish me luck!

It's been a good year so far.

We rang it in in Rotterdam, where the Netherlands holds its national fireworks show at the Erasmus bridge, which is essentially the middle of downtown. We didn't really have any New Year's eve plans set, but we heard about the fireworks show in Rotterdam from our Airbnb host on Texel Island, where we spent a couple days on either side of Christmas. He said it was the biggest fireworks display in the country, that it's really impressive, and that we should see it.

So, we went. We rode our bikes!

It's only about 14 km (around 9 miles) between our house and Rotterdam, and it's entirely flat, so it was theoretically doable in 45 - 60 min. We had a few detours along the way, mostly because of discrepancies in our abilities to read a map and also the differences between what Google says and what actual, physical street signs say. The bike lanes here are incredible; they go throughout the whole country, and they are marked separately from roads carrying vehicle traffic, which makes it quite convenient to go from one place to another, because you really just have to pay a little bit of attention! Of course, once you're in a city, things get slightly more confusing, and a little busier. Nevertheless, we made it there in just under two hours, and still in daylight. The only problems we encountered were the fact that my feet went completely numb (my shoes were too tight) and that we both felt like popsicles.

Because we'd arrived while daylight still prevailed, we had about six hours to kill before the official fireworks show started at midnight. Fortunately, there's a lot to see in Rotterdam, even in the fading light, and perhaps even more fortunately, there were plenty of really impressive unofficial fireworks going off all over the city the minute it got dark enough to see them. Fireworks are only legal in the Netherlands between 6 pm and 2 am on New Year's eve, and people really seem to love their explosions.
These are official fireworks, being set off from the Erasmus bridge. You can see the television camera in the foreground of the left pic - the whole show is broadcast live on two or three national channels. In addition, the broadcast is shown live, as is the countdown, projected onto a 40+ (? dimensions aren't really my thing) storey building that's behind the bridge. Before the fireworks started, we could see and hear the broadcast.

I think they were predicting something like 40 thousand people coming out to watch the show. Since Josh and I got there so early, we actually walked around this space quite freely in the evening, only to find it packed and continuing to get even more so as we came back around 11 pm. It was a jolly good time. I'm not sure if all the beer, wine, and pot being consumed on the spot was legal or not, considering how very, very public of a space we were all in, but everyone was having a great time. The official show only lasted for about 8 glorious minutes, but in the moments leading up to it and just after it ended, the unofficial explosions were lighting up the sky in front of and behind us.



And these are some unofficial fireworks lighting up the sky right behind us, and in other parts of the city.

We rode our bikes home, arriving at about 2:30 am, and avoiding the discarded scraps and exploded bits of fireworks all along the way, while listening to the blasts of the last of everyone's supply in the distance.












The next morning, we dragged ourselves out of bed and onto a crowded train, and then an even more crowded street car to make it out to Scheveningen - the beach in the Hague - for the "New Year's Dip" a 40 year old Dutch tradition of plunging into the North Sea on New Year's Day. We got a couple of the 10,000 tickets made available for the event and then pushed our way, along with several hundred others, through the gates leading to the beach. And then we dropped our gear, stripped our winter clothes off, and plunged!


This sunny, clear day was the perfect way to start 2016! Despite the fact that we look like normal beach goers on a normal day, I assure you that I could not feel my toes while this picture was being taken, and neither of us was brave enough to get our heads totally soaked!




The event is sponsored by a soup company, UNOX, which was giving out "goodie bags" along with the tickets. In the crush to get into the gates and our rush to get down to the beach, we missed our goodie bags. Luckily, while we were getting some split pea and ham soup (YUM) from the UNOX people, we were told they probably had a few left. I inquired with one of the UNOX volunteers? workers? breaking down the boxes that used to hold the goodie bags, and she said there were none left. She felt bad. Then she called over a younger worker, also breaking down boxes and stacking pallets, and, asking where I was from, suggested that the girl, who was wearing her own UNOX hat, give it to me. And she did! And I immediately put it on. Note all the layers that I've added in this picture!

Happy New Year, everyone!

Thanksgiving came the week before exams in Josh's world, and not too long after my arrival. A few other American students arranged a potluck Thanksgiving dinner, and I took a few pounds of savory mashed yams to contribute to the table. Someone else had managed to find a couple of turkeys and had even convinced the people who run the kitchen at the school to allow the use of the ovens for cooking them - and so there was turkey to go with the stuffing, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, gravy, bread, green beans and other random additions to the buffet table. Even without pie and cranberry sauce, we managed, along with some 20+ others, to get sufficiently full and happy as to make it feel as though Thanksgiving had happened.

Zwarte Piet in a bookstore

On December 8, a Tuesday, Delft held a festival of lights where they lit a Christmas tree in the main square. This meant that my sewing class was bumped (again). But we did get to stroll through Delft and experience some of the joys of a Christmas Market, which basically meant that all of the streets were filled with carts selling small crafts or Christmas ornaments and decorations, handmade clothing, etc., and all the shops were open late and the restaurants were selling hot chocolate and mulled wine. I will take a Christmas Market over Black Friday any time. Every time. In fact, if I am never in the U.S. on Black Friday again, I think I will be completely and totally okay with the idea.

I also went to a Christmas Market in Dordrecht with several of Josh's classmates (because Josh elected to stay home and study).

 I only stayed in Dordrecht long enough to start getting frostbite on my toes (it was cold, and windy, and I was wearing Mary Janes without socks), and then I went home. I am happy to say, however, that that was long enough to both eat a delicious bowl of green pea (and ham) soup and drink a cup of hot wine (gluhwein), and hear some Christmas carols.




Before it started to get dark, we also took a reprieve from the wind by climbing 275+ steps up to the top of the Dordrecht church's clock tower. This church houses Europe's largest carillon and which has a magnificent view of the harbor and the surrounding city (although it's hard to snap too many pictures before feeling like you might get blown off the side!) Dordrecht used to be the largest port in the Netherlands, but now the massive Rotterdam port now claims that title (and is actually the largest in Europe).





This clock was added in 1626! The church was built over about 5 centuries.





And, in case you're wondering, for Christmas, we found ourselves eating alone in someone's childhood bedroom - the top floor of an AirBnB rented out by a very kind old man on Texel island, in the northern part of the Netherlands. I didn't snap any pictures of it, but we had mashed potatoes, sausages, creamy tomato soup, couscous, a salad, some wine, and delicious cream puffs for dessert.

The truth is, I feel very odd writing this blog. In Peace Corps, we had (a) purpose, a sense of focus, and a very different set of circumstances. Everything was new and different and completely foreign to us, and to you, our presumed audience. In some ways, this experience is similar - we are living in a completely foreign place, and the differences between here and home are quite vast, indeed. But at least for me, I lack a sense of purpose, or at least an organizing principle that helps me to determine what to write about and what to share.

Because Josh's program is so international, most of our friends here are not Dutch. In fact, there's only one Dutch person in the program. The others hail from all over, and we have been meeting them, slowly and surely, at large gatherings, and the birthday parties that seem to be thrown every couple of weeks for some member of the program or another (they were even kind enough to include a birthday party and song for me my first week here, you may remember). Their stories are so much more interesting than my own, at least to me. A man who is living outside of Iran for the first time in his life and waiting for his wife to arrive here. Another man who left an infant with his wife in Egypt; a lot of men from all over the world who have left their wives and children. A woman from Honduras whose husband came to visit for the holidays. A Serbian woman who informed us that Americans aren't much liked there. Lebanese Christians and Muslims.

We hear stories of people who left home to study and returned to rebuild homes destroyed because of civil and ethnic unrest. People whose experience outside of their home country brings into sharp relief the sense of apprehension and fear that they live with daily at home. Others whose parents own large engineering firms with global connections. Who had jobs working 12-hour days in factories; who were once robbed at gunpoint in a hair salon. Who can't go back to do research in their country, because they're Syrian. Who may not be able to go back at all, because they're Palestinian.

I think about privilege a lot here. About the intersections of my privileges and my very, very few disadvantages. About the paths that have brought all of these people here - and about how little we understand those paths or the obstacles (or tailwinds) that have obstructed or pushed people into these present circumstances.

So I apologize for posts that are disjointed, or aimless, or bland. I am having trouble bundling my experiences and parsing them into digestible chunks - for myself, let alone for anyone else.

The universe has been conspiring to keep me from learning to sew for a long time.

Today has been an exercise in the ridiculous already.

This morning, I started my day off by reading and email from a Peace Corps Thailand pal of mine who is now in Sudan teaching English at a university. In beautiful prose, she described the process that led to her performing on stage with an West African dance troupe after only a week or so of practice, and I was so moved by her descriptions of the dancing, the drumming, and the physicality of it all that I almost cried.

It was 7:15 when my alarm went off, and almost 7:20 by the time I reached for my phone to read the email I knew was waiting there for me. The email had come in last night, but I didn't let myself read it, knowing it would be something to coax me into wakefulness as I lay in the dark, wondering just how much longer the sun was planning to sleep in before gracing the world with its presence. (For the record, at 8:00, the street lamps were still on and the sky was still an eerie orange color that it takes on from artificial light bouncing ceaselessly off the low hanging clouds.)

I got up, made coffee, made tuna salad for a sandwich for Josh, and then grabbed our fairly sizable (and stuffed) white plastic laundry basket and hauled it to the other end of the second floor (that's the third floor to all of you still in America), and then up the elevator to the fifth floor. On exiting the elevator, I dug my key out of the waistband of my yoga pants, maneuvered myself and the laundry basket through the door leading from the elevator and stairs out into the main hallway. I stuck the key in the lock to the laundry room door and nearly broke my wrist twisting it (two full turns before the door actually unlocked).

The laundry room is high-tech. There are three front loading washers and two or three dryers (I don't remember, because we don't use them), and they are all metallic and industrial looking. In addition, there is a machine on the wall where you have to put in your chip card (like a hotel card, except that it has that microchip that's now appearing on all the credit and debit cards in the U.S.), and then this voice tells you to "Touch the screen to start. Please select a machine. You have selected a machine. Please press approve or cancel. Press approve or cancel. Do you need more time?" She is rather demanding. All of the washers and dryers have an LED screen that reads "PAY" until you go deal with the robot in the payment machine.

The washers also have integrated soap and fabric softener, I think. So you just select a temperature and an icon that depicts either one or two liquids being poured into the machine, shut the door, pay the piper with your chip card, and the magic happens. It's 2.50 (euro) per load. "Stuff that machine as full as you can," says Josh.

Today, I stuffed the machine as full as I could, walked over and inserted the chip card. And she started talking, per usual, but the touch screen wasn't lighting up, so I couldn't see what machine I was selecting. It was a little like when I dropped my first cell phone one too many times in high school, and had to memorize all of the menus and the order of my friends' names in the phone book so that I could still use it to make calls - the screen never worked but the rest of the phone did so it wasn't worth buying a new one...

Having done this a few times, I put my hand where I generally thought the machine #2 icon would me, and she said, "You have selected a machine." And I wanted to ask her, which one?? "Press approve or cancel." I felt around on the flat touch screen hoping to land on either "approve" or "cancel" and figured that whichever machine I picked would go from "PAY" to showing a time and I could just switch my clothes from machine #2 to either #1 or #3 if necessary, but I didn't get the right button. Instead I got, "To select a language, touch the picture of the flag." Shit. I took out the chip card. I put it back in. "Touch the screen to start. Please select a machine." Still no images on the screen. This time I selected a machine and then, presumably when I hit "approve" got, "You don't have enough credit." Double shit.

I unloaded the clothes and brought the whole basket down to our room.

Josh left for school after telling me that I can't call, but have to email, about maintenance issues and that I could do so from his DUWO (our building manager) account, but would have to log in and he didn't remember the password.

I remembered at 9:15 that you can borrow a vacuum from the housecleaning staff between 9 and 9:30, and decided that our room needs a vacuuming. I looked at our map of the building, which indicates the location of housekeeping, laundry, etc., and noted that the housekeeping room with the vacuums is on the second floor. I'm on the second floor so I walked down the hall and found: a Muslim prayer room where the housekeeping should have been. Shit.

Back in my room, I looked at the map again. Oh right. I'm on the second floor which is actually the third floor. The housecleaning room is on the second floor which is called the first floor. (They count the ground here as the ground, not the first floor). So I left my room, jogged down the stairs closest to me, and found myself trapped between two residences. Double shit. That's when I remembered that someone had told me that there are actually only two floors that go across the entire length of the building: the second (mine) and the fifth (where the laundry is), and so I had never encountered this issue before. Back up the stairs, over to the other elevator bay where the prayer room is, down those stairs, and voila! Smoke filled elevator vestibule and open door to find three cleaning ladies, one caretaker, and a half full ashtray.

I borrowed the vacuum, promising to get it back in ten minutes, and told them about the laundry machine. "Yeah, it's working already. The touch screen was just malfunctioning. You can use it now." says the caretaker. Okay great, and ... "If I don't have money on my card..." "You have to do it online. It's a whole..... system." "Great thanks. I'll be back in ten minutes."

The vacuum worked magnificently. It's a little round one, like a miniature shop vac, with a flexible hose and then a long metal hose that doubles as the handle. Very efficient. The cord is long and winds up easily into the middle of the vacuum with a handle you just twirl around the top. I even used it on the kitchen floor in lieu of sweeping (score! I hate sweeping).

Upon returning the vacuum to the smoking housekeepers, I first tried to prop up that long handle against the wall where others were propped up, and then sent the whole pile of them tumbling down. I backed away slowly as the woman in the green headscarf with nice eyes laughed at me. It was a nice laugh. She crossed my room number back off the list where she'd written it down in the first place, 10 minutes earlier.

"I have one more question. Recycling?"

The woman with the cigarette, the tired eyes, hair that is a kind of faded red orange but is actually gray, and a lot of wrinkles on her face, not being helped by that cigarette, kind of waved the butt around before putting it out. "What are you recycling?" I thought this was an odd question, but I answered anyway, because I do actually want to recycle my plastic bottles, paper, glass bottles, etc.

The man was on the phone. The other woman said something about every other Friday, and maybe bringing the recycling to the housekeeping room itself.

"This neighborhood doesn't have recycling," said the kind-eyed lady. "Even us, we just have to put everything in the trash."

I wasn't sure what "even us" meant. I decided it meant nothing and that I would just figure it out later. It's only Monday.

Back in the room with the clean(er) floors, I log into Josh's computer and his MyDUWO account, manage to navigate myself to the page where you can add credit to your laundry card, and now there is another login page staring me in the face. If Josh didn't remember his MyDUWO password (I reset it for him in order to log in), then he definitely doesn't remember his laundry ID. I press the help button, and am helpfully shown a picture of the screen that should appear when I insert my laundry card into the card reader on the fifth floor, and right there, circled, I see the button I can push in order to get the card to display the username and password that I need to use to log on to the system in order to add more money to the card.

For the record: The laundry is on the fifth floor. I am on the second floor. (Keep in mind that these floors are actually one floor higher than whatever floor you're imagining, if you're in the U.S. It's not important to the story. It's just something you have to get used to.) In order to do my laundry I have to: Walk to the laundry room. Insert the chip card. Get the username and password. Walk back to my room. Put the username and password into the computer. Add money to the chip card. Gather my laundry. Go back to the laundry room. Insert the chip card. ... Touch the screen to start. Select a machine. Select Approve. Watch the balance dip another 2.50 lower.... and then wait 38 minutes.

Why can't I just take my computer with me to the laundry room and do the computer things there, while in the laundry room, you ask?

Supremely valid question, but I also already thought of that. There is no wireless in the building. So I have to be in the room to use the internet.

Maybe I will just do the laundry tomorrow.

The last post was a bit of a teaser and a reminder to myself that I need to write, and write often. (It is part of my strategy for getting myself to go out and explore. If you want to live vicariously through me, then I have to do things worth doing, even vicariously.)