So last weekend was a weekend of firsts and special events. For starters, it was Kate’s 21
st Birthday. It would be the first time that I’d seen Kate or anyone from the Crescent Club since I left for my Year of Adventure in August. It would be the first time that I would leave the country by myself. It would be my first visit the Netherlands. And, it would mark the first time I had ever eaten a Dutch pancake.
Monday through Wednesday (February 28th to March 2nd, 2011) were a blur of midterms and papers.
Thursday (March 3rd, 2011) I get up and go to my internship at Caravan Production. Not going to lie, I love my internship. If I could I wouldn’t go to classes, I would just intern all the time.
Caravan Production is a production company for artists. Many of the artists work happen to relate to experimental dance, but there is a wide range of productions that they put on. From Zombie Aporia, the new creation by Daniel Linehan inspired by concertgoers to Edit Kaldor’s C'est du chinois telling the tale of 5 Chinese citizens trying to open themselves to the public through their native tongue of Mandarin. Artists approach us somewhere in their planning process be it just with a simple idea or a complete work ready for tour, and then Caravan steps in and does whatever that company/ artist wants. Usually, Caravan assists with administrative and production work. This work includes getting the show or artist residency at a theatre company or simply setting up travel plans. There’s a giant spectrum of work that Caravan Production does. What’s even more impressive is that the company was only founded 2 years ago, and they already have over 10 dedicated artists that they primarily work with.
Thursday, I spent the day at Caravan working on an artist’s application to the Dublin Fringe Festival. In order to do this, I had to go through the server and figure out all that I could about the show, to properly market the show. In Europe, you send in all this information about your piece. In this case they wanted things such as biographies of all associated with the project, a stage plan, a description of the show, a 15-word blip about the show. Plus, supplementary material of a DVD of the show, pictures during the production process, stage technique, etc. Long story short, I spent about nine and a half hours working on this application.
Then, I left my internship to have dinner with Annie and Elana at a cute little Thai restaurant near the Van Orley house. It was nice to have dinner with them and just catch up on their lives. Even though it had only been a week, we had much to discuss. Such as Annie’s recent visit to Edinburgh, and Elana getting to dine with leaders at NATO. After dinner, Elana and I went to DeBrouckere to go see Black Swan. The theatre was packed! Black Swan came out in the US end of the year, and its just now making its way to Belgium. That movie though was worth getting smashed between some Europeans. It’s the story of a ballet dancer who wants to play the role of the Swan Queen in her ballet company’s upcoming performance, but she is too white swan (aka orderly, precise, pure), and would then have trouble when it came to the task of also playing the black swan (aka saucy, free, inhabited).
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| Black Swan |
After that gem of a movie, I came home and got my stuff together for my weekend trip to Amsterdam.
Friday (March 4th, 2011) I got up and tried to figure out if the metro was running. Here are a few things that you need to know about Belgium. Number 1: they recently beat Iraq in the record of days of a country without having a working government. Number 2: there have been a fair amount of assaults and attacks on the public transportation drivers, so there have been strikes. Number 3, when Belgium has strikes that means nothing works, all public transportation is down, no one is there to pick up the slack, because without a government there is no one to implement the work and non one to make sure its getting done.
For once, the public transportation group (STIB and MVB) wrote a declaration on their website stating that public transportation (bus, tram, metro) would not be running Friday in solidarity to their fellow workers, and to plan accordingly. Since I knew that I had to be at the bus station at Gare du Nord by 4pm, and it was a 2-hour walk from my family stay, but a 15-minute walk from my internship, I decided to hope that the metro would be working to get to my internship. Eventually after having waited for about half an hour, the metro came! At my internship, I then found out that all the application work I’d done the day before had been for nothing. The artist decided she didn’t want to be a part of the festival, and that it would be interrupting her vacation time. After reading a series of rather rude emails from the artist in mention, I talked to my fellow coworkers about it, and simply went on with my day. Ah, the theatre! I guess I had forgotten how some artists could be, but then the emails came and I was quickly reminded that the diva in an artist never fully disappears. So, after that fun realization that everything I had done the day before was a waste, I worked on updating our promotional material for each upcoming show. I read the English descriptions, changed fonts, edited, inserted pictures, and sent emails to artists asking for information, a whole lot of desk job type work.
But after I did these tasks, it was time for me to begin my journey to the Netherlands!
I walked to the bus station and bought Kate’s birthday present at a nearby grocery store. I got here some Petit Lus, these bear-shaped cakes full of chocolate inside. At 4pm on the dot, I got on the bus and sat there for 4 hours, about an hour of which was spent watching the movie Entrapment, and the rest looking out the window and sleeping. I had forgotten how much I love being in a vehicle. I love sitting for long car rides they are quite calming. Anyways, around 8pm, we rolled into Amsterdam. From there I took a tram to the area supposedly near my hostel, then I got quite lost and asked many a person for directions. After an hour of wandering I found it, the Shelter Jordan, a Christian Youth Hostel. Not what I had been expecting for my hostel in Amsterdam, but it was clean and cheap. I found my room for Friday night, an 8 person all-female room. Two girls were already in the room when I arrived; they were Canadians who went to Europe looking for work in Ireland (I guess in Canada they didn’t get the memo about the whole Irish economic collapse). Now, they were just passing through Amsterdam as they continued their search for work. Joy. Instead of chatting it up with these ladies, I went downstairs to check my email as to when Kate would be arriving, because her train got delayed in Germany due to strikes and her phone wasn’t working outside of France. Just as I finished checking my email, in walks the jokester with her pals from Aix-En Provence.
I was so happy to see Kate! Sometimes you forget how much you miss people until you see them after a long period of time. So we were reunited and I met her friends that she’d spent her spring break with. Then, since none of had eaten dinner yet, we went in search of food. We wandered the city for quite a long period of time before we found ourselves at a snack shop. By then, it was around midnight, and we were all quite tired, so adjourned back to the hostel.
Saturday (March 5th, 2011) I got up around 8:30am, since I am apparently an old lady and can no longer sleep in. So, I got changed, checked out of my room, checked into my new room for Saturday night (a 4 person room, with people who I never ended up meeting), then I went downstairs for the complimentary breakfast. At breakfast, I chatted it up with a girl, from what I want to say was Croatia or Slovakia, who told me about how she loved staying at this hostel because of their nightly 7:30pm Bible-study, I politely nodded my head telling her about how this was my first time staying here and how I thought it was nice enough. Around 10:15am, Kate’s friends come to breakfast with the message that Kate was still asleep, and would not be making it to breakfast. Lazy. So I got to eat with them and get to know more about how they were enjoying France and their spring break to Berlin, Prague, and now Amsterdam.
From breakfast, we woke Kate up and went to the Floating Flower Market in the downtown area. I was jealous because they all bought their host families tulips, and all I wanted to do was buy tulips for Hony, Aunt Barb, and Mom, but then I recalled the fact that its illegal to transport any type of vegetation across the ocean because the new plant could end up ruining the current ecological state. From there, we went in search of lunch. First we went to this pancake house, where the waiter sat next to me and said, “Hey Baby, I miss you long time.” It was at that lovely comment that we decided perchance this wasn’t the place for us and we left. We headed to the Van Gough Museum and found a bro-tastic sports bar that advertised Dutch pancakes. I ended up with a superb bacon and peach pancake: sounds disgusting, but was truly scrumptious! And after that detour, we found ourselves at the Van Gough Museum.
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| Tulips! |
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| please take note that the size of these tulip bulbs are the same size as onions! |
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| Janice, Annie, and Kate |
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| Getting ready to see some art! |
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| Janice and Kate at the monumental I (am)sterdam |
From the museum, we went back to the hostel to nap for a while, and then we went to Porta Corta, a pizza place to have dinner with Fulani and Jacob. Fulani and Jacob both go to Beloit with me and both are studying abroad in the Netherlands. Seeing all these familiar faces was just what I needed. After being gone for such a long time I had forgotten about so many people, and was worried that they’d forgotten about me, but reuniting with these old friends just assured me nothing had changed. The people had changed, inevitably, but not the friendships. After dinner, Fulani told us about the Scruplewaffle McFlurry’s that the McDonalds in the Netherlands boasted, so of course we had to try for ourselves. NOM NOM NOM! So tasty.
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| Fulani, Janice, and Jacob rocking it out |
Jacob wasn’t feeling all that well then, so those two departed and the rest of us went to the ice bar Xtra Cold to celebrate Kate’s Birthday. At the ice bar, they loaded us up with parkas, gloves, and 3D glasses. Then, we were given the lowdown and allowed into the actual ice bar part of the bar. EVERYTHING was made of ice. This is a place were clearly dreams were made. They had ice sculptures everywhere and the seats were ice covered with polar bear skin. Even the cups were ice! About 10 minutes in and the movie started, that’s right there was a movie too. It was a 4D movie that was basically like watching someone play Mario Kart, interesting, but not what we were expecting from a 4D film at an ice bar. After that, we got our dance on for a little while, then we were informed that our 30 minutes in the ice bar were over and if we stayed for longer we risked the chance of permanent damage to ourselves and our electronics due to the cold, so we left. We walked around Rembrandt square for a while, then decided to call it a night, since we all had early departure times the next day.
Sunday (March 6th, 2011) I got up at 7am and got myself situated for a day of travel. I said goodbye to Kate and her friends, then went off. I somehow managed to successfully make it to the tram by myself, then from the tram to the metro to my bus station. I sat at the bus station for about an hour reading a book, then boarded the bus back. Again I slept for most of the ride and watched the Disney film 8 Below while dozing in and out. By 12:30pm I had arrived back in Brussels. I wandering around the city for a while enjoying the sunlight, then took the metro home. First thing I did when I got back was laundry because my clothes were dirty and smelled disgusting. After some fun times at the Laundromat, I returned home and tried to plan Mom and Aunt Barb’s epic journey to Europe, but fell asleep. Eventually, I just decided to give in and I went to sleep around 10pm.
