Category Archives: Europe

Nee, ik ben geen Duitser

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We enjoyed the Museum of the Canals, just before my big screwup.

While I’m on the Dutch kick…

You may wonder why I’m still doing the lessons daily, since our trip to Amsterdam and other places where the language is spoken was over months ago.

Well, I enjoy studying it, in spite of the compound nouns and sometimes weird sentence structures. And I don’t want to break my streak, which now stands at 231 days.

Also… back when I was doing 10 and more lessons a day, before the Europe trip, an interesting thing happened. I suddenly was really, really good at the NYT word games I play — Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections. I mean crazy good. There was one week when I got Wordle in two tries three days in a row, and also hit the “genius” level — which means I “won” — three days in a row.

I could really feel the difference during those months. Obviously, exercising the part of the brain that learns new languages helps with intuiting words in my own language as well. And that’s a good thing to be doing at my age. That’s the good news. The bad news is that since I got back and have only been doing a lesson or two a day, I’ve been doing much worse at the word games. So I’ve started the last couple of days stepping it back up a bit.

Anyway, I’ve several good reasons for continuing my studies.

Which is good, because my studies were almost no help at all to me in Belgium and Amsterdam.

Which I suppose shows that the wisdom that comes with age is of limited value. We were in Amsterdam because one of my granddaughters was doing a summer intensive with the Dutch National Ballet Academy. Once we decided to follow her there, I started studying — and urged her to do the same. She said no way. She had heard that everyone there spoke English, especially at the ballet school.

Well, sure, I said, but don’t you want to be prepared for the unexpected? Admittedly, my frame of reference was perhaps outdated. I kept thinking about that time in “Band of Brothers” when Bull caught some shrapnel in his shoulder, and was separated from Easy Company when it was forced to retreat by an unexpectedly strong German counterattack. This was way out in the country near Eindhoven, and he had to spend the night alone in a barn. Eventually, after killing one of the enemy in a hand-to-hand fight, he managed to survive, barely, and even got some first aid from the farmer. But wouldn’t the situation have been a little easier if he had spoken Dutch?

I thought so. And we were planning some forays away from urban centers, where — in my imagination — people might not be so thoroughly educated in the current international lingua franca.

But here’s the sad truth: There was not a single instance, that I could tell, in which I used my new skill and it helped in any practical way. Oh, I would try. I’d walk up to people and greet them in Dutch, either to say good morning or something more urgent like waar is de wc?

I thought I was doing it pretty well, but they responded with neither appreciation nor scorn. They didn’t react in any way, except to answer me — in English.

I had tried this multiple times as we made stops on the way to Amsterdam in Ghent and Antwerp. No success. Probably my greatest triumph was a humble one. Speaking of the wc, when I got off the train in Antwerp, I went looking for one urgently. Finding it, I was happy the pay the standard euro to get in, but then found myself standing staring at the closed doors of the full stalls.

Next to me stood an even older man, a little guy who looked nothing like a tourist, who seemed more displeased than I was. He muttered something I didn’t quite make out (more because of my hearing problem than lack of understanding the language). I just shrugged and said, sort of the way a Russian might say nichevo (or so I imagined):

“We wachten…”

I think he nodded or something. Anyway, I took his response as agreement. At least he didn’t answer me in English. He probably thought I was a complete idiot and didn’t want to talk to this guy, but I congratulated myself for saying something way existential under less than noble circumstances. I was so pleased that when a stall opened, I let him go before me, even though I had been there first.

But then we got to Amsterdam, and on our first full day, I screwed up royally, and after that largely gave up on trying to engage the locals in their own language.

We had spent much of the morning visiting the Museum of the Canals, which was pretty cool. It explained how the canals and much of the city was laid out in the 17th century, with some pretty impressive 3D, multimedia displays.

We had gone there by tram, but were in a hurry to get back to the hostel, and called an Uber. Being the careful kind of guy who learns a language before visiting a new country, I checked to make sure this was our driver as we got in: “Pat?” I asked. He responded in the affirmative and asked, “Brad?”

Filled with confidence from the previous day in Antwerp, I answered:

Ja, ik ben Brad.

Except I didn’t. What I said was,

Ja, ich bin Brad.

I heard it as I said it, and thought, Oh, no! I actually did it. Having had that tiny bit of German at an impressionable age — in high school — during my months of study, I had repeated pronounced similar Dutch words as their German counterparts. I blamed my teacher, Helga. (I never liked her much.) But that just made me practice harder as I prepared for the trip, determined it would never happen in real life.

The Uber driver could have let it go. But he didn’t. In a deadpan tone, he asked, “Are you German?” In English, of course, because he knew the answer to that was nein.

But I forgave him, because he was actually a nice guy, and we had a nice conversation on the way back to the Oost area where we were staying. In English, of course, because he spoke that very well. He wasn’t Dutch, but African. It was the same with all those Middle Eastern people who lived and worked in the area we were staying. You’d think they’d speak accented Dutch to European-looking strangers. But no, they went with English, mostly.

So I kind of gave up on the trying-to-pass-as-a-local thing. Obviously, it was completely futile, and unnecessary, even outside the international ballet crowd. I later learned why. We had an Uber driver who was actually Dutch — a lady named Saskia who had kids past high school age. She explained that so many of their school courses are in English that just before graduation, they have to deliberately take some classes to bone up on Dutch so they can pass their finals.

So that explains the natives, if not the immigrants from elsewhere.

But I was still discouraged, after all that work. Even now. Whenever the “Are you German?” incident comes up, my wife tries to cheer me up by noting that at least I could read all those signs. And yes, I could. I had enjoyed that from the moment we boarded our first train into Belgium from Northern France.

But still…

Antwerp had a nice station, but it could have used more wc stalls.

All that craziness back in the U.S. of A. while I was gone

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As we approached JFK on our return, I wondered why a guy can’t take a little time off from the madness down there…

What, a guy can’t go spend two or three weeks traveling abroad without the whole country going stark, raving mad behind his back?

Apparently not.

I’ll write about the trip later. I’d rather write about that, because the topic is more pleasant, and it interests me more. But this is sorta kinda a political blog, or was. Frankly, I’m less and less interested in that stuff every day, because politics has gotten so insufferably stupid. But most of the craziness back in the States had to do with presidential politics, and that seems to be all that occupies the country’s collective hivemind in years bearing numbers that can be divided into whole numbers by four — no matter what’s going on in Ukraine, or Israel, or China. Or Venezuela, for that matter.

So let me try to get it all out of the way, and once we’re caught up, we’ll move on to other matters.

Oh, one other thing — the years numbered as I described are also known as “Olympiads.” And that was going on, too, during our travels. I was reminded vaguely of it when we turned on a TV in our waterfront room in Calais (I think that was the only time we touched a boob tube during the trip), and saw apparently unending coverage of some event having to do with the Olympics. The arrival of the torch in Paris or something. Huge crowds in the streets and uninteresting popular music performed on an outdoor stage. Which, we recalled, was why we had decided to avoid Paris on this trip. (I mean because of the crowds, not so much the blah pop music.)

“La grand soiree” goes on and on about “la flamme olympique.” Which was why we were avoiding Paris…

But onto the politics. Now mind you, we’re not talking “politics” as the word was used during the first 60 or so years of my life. You know, relatively sane candidates vying seriously for serious offices by offering their credentials and their character to a discerning electorate. It’s a far weirder thing now. But you know that already. Social media, and all that. So on with it…

Trump weirdness goes into overdrive

Let’s take it in chronological order. Nothing back home intruded upon my vacationing consciousness while we were in London. But then in Canterbury, just as I we were trying to drop off to sleep (it being five hours later than here), the news popped that someone had taken a shot at Donald Trump, clipping his right ear. Which, you know, was like all we needed. I turned off audible notifications on my phone and iPad, and being extremely tired — as tired as if we’d walked all the way there with Chaucer’s pilgrims — went to sleep.

That didn’t mean it would leave me alone over the next couple of days. I kept seeing this kind of stuff:

I found out that kid with the rifle, who couldn’t hit his target squarely despite being given minutes to aim in an ideal sniper’s position — but tragically managed to kill an innocent bystander, and seriously wound others — was also dead himself. I guess that’s the way it goes with deadly weapons fired from four to five hundred feet by someone who never received Marine training….

Oh, hang on — don’t get the impression I wanted him to kill Trump. No way. Total nightmare scenario, that. Worst thing that could have happened. Things went plenty crazy enough without that. Meanwhile, we were hearing how much the whole thing would help Trump get elected. Which I suppose we should expect, since “sympathy voting” is an old tradition. Voters in general are easily swayed by emotion, that goes especially for voters who might be susceptible to voting for this guy.

Where we were, the usual response tended to be “those crazy Americans and their guns,” from a column my wife read in Le Monde to the African Uber driver who took us across Amsterdam several days later. (We’d left England, and were not subjected to The Guardian, which adores that line of discussion.) We could ignore Le Monde (I could especially, since I don’t do Paris talk), but we felt we had to be polite to the driver — he was a very nice, intelligent guy — so we said things like, “Yes, you have a point, and it’s hard to explain, and no one knows what to do about it,” while thinking, Can we talk about windmills or something?…

That mass of crazy sort of blotted out our awareness of the GOP Convention over the next few days, although at one point I did stop to think, wasn’t he supposed to be sentenced by now? Wasn’t the sentencing date just before the convention? I even looked that up briefly, and saw an explanation having something to do with the recent Supreme Court decision, which made no sense, and I moved on. Fortunately, I had lots to distract me…

Wow, this post is taking some time, innit? That’s why I hadn’t written it yet. But to move on…

Joe drops out

Well, I had sort of expected this to happen before I got back. The pressure bearing down on my main man Joe, no matter what he did or said, was reaching a level that no one could withstand. Not even the kind of guy who would step up to save his country — and knew how — despite being at an age when he had served enough, and richly deserved to stay at home and enjoy his grandchildren.

But people weren’t interested in that anymore, if they ever had been. They were too busy twitching in response to things that mattered more to them than the unavoidable fact that a qualified alternative hadn’t emerged in 2024 any more than it did in 2020. And Kamala Harris, who would be the obvious replacement at this date, had been about halfway back in that pack of 2020 also-rans, in terms of qualification for our highest office.

Y’all know very well what my position was: The country, and the world, needed him to stay in office. Not that it would have been good for him — it was the worst possible thing for him personally, and I’ve felt guilty for years for my willingness to exploit his willingness to put himself through it. But Americans, and the rest of the world, needed him to keep his hand on the tiller. Because there was no one else.

It might help you to understand my long-held position if you reflect that my mind doesn’t center around such questions as “Who can win the election?” For me, the question was “Who should win the election?” Of course, you need someone who both should, and can. That’s the trick, and Joe knows it as well as anyone. Which was why he dropped out.

Which means we now ask ourselves other questions… but I’m going to have to take a break and do some paying work, or none will get done today. I’ll try to get back and finish this before the day is over, because I really want to put this stuff in my rear-view mirror…

…OK, I’m back, and now I want to correct what I just said. We don’t need to ask ourselves any questions at all, old or new. The world may be nuts now, but it’s a lot simpler.

Now, the choice is between Donald Trump and… somebody else. Kamala Harris, with close to zero experience that applies to the job of president, is a bit of an unknown quantity. But that’s OK, because it clearly brings us to a simple point. I’ve often said that anyone would be better than Donald Trump. Kamala Harris doesn’t quite qualify as “someone chosen at random off the street,” but she shares a characteristic with that person — I don’t know anything bad about her. She’s basically a neutral character in this situation.

Well, I do know one bad thing — the way she stabbed Joe in the back in that first debate in 2020. Major cheap shot. But Joe forgave her, so I feel obliged to do the same.

So, no bad things (maybe you know some bad things about her, but I don’t). And she’s running against a guy with more bad qualities than anyone who has ever reached this point in American politics.

So there’s nothing to think about. You vote for Kamala, and you hope she keeps Joe’s team in place — people like Anthony Blinken and Merrill Garland. People who know the job. That way, there’s a chance for things to be OK.

Whereas, with the other guy, nothing — at home or abroad, on any level — will be OK.

So there’s not a lot to discuss. Vote for Kamala.

To be more encouraging…

That’s not sounding like a really enthusiastic endorsement, I realize. Let me try to offer something better.

Back before we headed to London, some smart, thoughtful people — not just the freakout crowd, or the people who never liked Joe anyway, like the Bernie Bros and the editorial board of the NYT — were starting to suggest that maybe someone else could take Joe’s place, and it wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

One of those thoughtful people was Ezra Klein. If you can gain access to his podcasts, I do recommend checking them out. No, that wasn’t a link to his podcasts. This is, though.

Sometime way back on July 5 — a few days before we left the country — he did a podcast titled, “Is Kamala Harris Underrated?” This being based on the assumption among smart, thoughtful observers that she hadn’t shown us much yet. But he suggested that now that we’re in this fix of the abundantly qualified and accomplished incumbent’s numbers plummeting, maybe she possessed qualities that made her better than we thought. Among other things, he said:

There are ways in which Harris seems perfectly suited for this moment. She’s a former prosecutor who would be running against a convicted criminal. She’s the administration’s best messenger on abortion by far, running in the aftermath of Dobbs. She’s a Black woman with a tough on crime background, running at a moment when crime and disorder have been big issues in American politics.

And unlike Joe Biden, who I think has very little room to improve from here, the American people don’t really know Harris. The opportunity for her to make a different impression if she was speaking for herself, rather than for the administration, is real. Now, that doesn’t mean she’d be able to pull that off. That’s a hard political job. But she’s a lot sharper in interviews and debates than I think people are now prepared for.

She has a résumé and some skills quite well-suited to this moment. It definitely doesn’t seem impossible that she could rise to the task. There is a reason she was considered so strong in 2019 and in 2020. Wouldn’t you want to see her debate Donald Trump?…

OK, that’s not a really ringing endorsement, either. But he said enough good things — or at least potentially good things — about her that I felt a little better about the situation as we prepared to take off. I felt like Joe might not be running when I got back, and I was glad I was going to miss those last days before that happened. And Klein made me feel like maybe things would be OK. At least, after January, Joe will finally get the time off that he has so richly earned. (About time he had a little Joe time.)

And so far, they have been pretty OK. She seems to have done OK with her first big test — picking a running mate. I’ll probably write more on that subject in coming days.

But I don’t think I’ll be writing as much about the presidential election as I might have otherwise. Maybe because it’s all so simple now. We’ll see. In any case, I look forward to writing about other things. And now that I’ve dealt with this stuff, I can go on and do that.

I don’t think it will be another month before you hear from me…

I’ll come back soon to tell you about our trip. Until then, enjoy the flowers…

 

I didn’t break Duolingo? If not, it wasn’t for lack of trying…

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I was afraid for a moment I had worn the app out. I had been pounding away at my lessons, day after day, for weeks, doing all I could to learn Dutch.

Then suddenly one day — early April, I think — the icon for the app went from this:

To this:

Screenshot of my iPad screen on April 6.

Had I broken it? It seemed to be the most obvious answer, given my relentless activity. But it turns out just to be something Duolingo does to attract attention from time to time. And it appears to work.

The icon soon returned to normal, and I continued my efforts, sometimes doing as many as 20 lessons a day.

Why? Because one of my granddaughters is doing a summer ballet intensive in Amsterdam. Her mother will be there with her for the start of the program, but then my wife and I will be there for her for the rest of it, and accompany her back to the States. That’s where we’ll be based in the latter half of our upcoming trip.

But we’re doing more than that. As a celebration of our upcoming 50th anniversary, we’re flying first to London, and we’ll stay there a couple of days. We haven’t been to town in some time (since the beginning of 2011), and one must go occasionally.

Then, we’ll have a couple of days in Canterbury, to see what the Anglicans have done with the place since Becket’s day. Then on to Dover, and then we’ll look over our shoulders at the white cliffs while we cross to Calais. That’s what the Germans expected the Allies to do in 1944, but we faked them out and went to Normandy. I’d like to go there and visit the beaches, but it will be in the wrong direction. After Calais, we’ll go to Dunkirk, Lille, Ghent and on to Amsterdam.

We’ll mostly stay there until we fly back, but will take the odd day trip to places like Bruges and Nijmegen. While in Nijmegen, I hope to catch an Uber or something into Germany, just so I can say I’ve been there, too.

You see, I’ve never been to Europe before. Ever. There’s been no occasion to do so in my 70 years. I’ve done South America, the Caribbean, Asia, Hawaii. And as y’all know, I’ve been to England and Ireland. But never crossed the channel to the continent.

My wife’s been. She and her friend Mary backpacked across the continent for a month or so just before she met me in August 1973. They had a great time. But she hasn’t been since then, and she is taking preparations for this invasion very seriously. I mentioned 1944. Well, my wife is very organized — there has to be somebody like that in every organization, and she is definitely the one in this outfit. Ike would have approved of the way she has sought to effectively deploy our finite resources upon each objective at the right time, with maximum effectiveness.

And while I have been able to make strong contributions to the planning (contributions that consist of saying, “I wanna see this! I wanna see that!”), most of my effort has gone into learning Dutch — as much as I can, anyway, in these short months of preparation. Yeah, I know most people in Nederland speak English. But I figure I’m bound to run into someone, somewhere — perhaps out in the country — who does not, and I want to be ready. My wife will handle the French — she’s been there and she studied it before that, and she’s brushing up. I’m learning Dutch, from scratch.

Fortunately, Engels is moeilijk, maar Nederlands is gemakkelijk. Or so Duolingo keeps telling me. But it’s a bit of a slog nonetheless. Becoming fluent in Spanish was as easy as falling off a log when I was 9 years old. I think I read once that that’s pretty much the end of the period of life when learning a second language is as easy as learning the first one. My brother was only 3, and I’m not sure he noticed there was a difference between the two tongues.

My Spanish (most of which I’ve forgotten, anyway, to my sorrow) is of no help here. Of course, English is a help with this one. I certainly know right away what is meant by such Dutch words as “park,” “fruit,” “week,” “weekend,” and such — although they’re pronounced quite differently. The tiny bits of German I remember from high school are sort of a mixed bag. Sure, much of the language obviously comes from common roots, but that frequently tricks me into using the German version instead, and getting the word wrong.

The hardest is the article “een” — meaning “a” or “an” — and for many weeks I had trouble stopping myself from saying “ein” instead. Also, when an S comes before a T or a P, I want to pronounce it “SH,” which I think is the way it’s done in German — at least, I got it from somewhere (we have a one or two German speakers here; maybe y’all can tell me whether I remember that right), and I think it was German. But if the readers on Duolingo have it right, that’s not the way it’s done in Dutch.

Of course, Dutch people are as likely to speak German as English, and are likely to understand. But I want to get it right.

And I’ve made a good bit of progress. One sign of that is that recently, I’ve cut back on using the button that slows down what is being said to me, as I’ve gotten impatient, and often get the faster sentence the first time. To me, that means more than having a tremendous vocabulary. It means I’m starting to grok the language (or at least, the simple bits I’ve been taught) holistically. And to me, being an intuitive sort, that is pleasing.

I don’t expect to carry on any deep conversations. But maybe I can order food (something that is a huge minefield for me with my allergies), handle simple transactions, and the like.

Besides, it’s fun to learn something new. Anyway, I’ll keep tackling the lessons for the next few days, and hope for the best. And enjoy the cooler weather. Today, the high in Amsterdam is 68 and the low is 56. In London, it won’t get above 62. I’m looking forward to that.

If it gets hot, I’ll just sit down and order een glas bier. And of course, if I forget and say, ein Glas Bier, they’ll probably bring it to me anyway.

Which reminds me. I won’t be interested in Dutch cheese or Dutch chocolate. They’re poison to me. But I do want to sample the beers, and I don’t know squat about them, beyond Heineken and Amstel. And I don’t want to order those, because then they might think I’m a tourist or something.

So if you have any advice on that front, now would be the time to share…