Under the Rijksmuseum
We went to the beach. When I reported this later to my friends and family, they looked incredulous and betrayed, as if I'd announced that I now wore diapers. Did you just say Holland has beaches? Yes, Holland has beaches; in fact, it has islands, and Lijsa and I camped on one called Texel my first weekend in the Netherlands. It was a pain to get to -- bus/train/bus/boat/van -- and the campground was packed: many of the tenants were there for the whole summer, fanned out before their formidable multi-room campers with card tables, espresso makers, and kayaks. But the island was fair. We rented mountain bikes, with actual gears, and pedaled its twenty-kilometer coast road. It was hot, just like the North Carolina beach in July. We had broiled fish and prawns, just like at a seafood house in Maryland or Oregon. Except that instead of Corona we drank Hoegarden (pronounce 'Heu-chaarden', more or less, like you're spitting), and it was much better. I had three. With lemons. I got tan.
Just before leaving North Carolina for Europe, I taught at a young writers' camp. One of the lessons I gave was about travel writing. "Is it possible," my little blurb went, "to travel without leaving home?" I suppose I had the Norihide show on my mind, but on July 22nd in Amsterdam, that challenge arose again. The appropriate question, though, is not whether it's possible, but whether it's necessary. The world keeps visiting all over me.
On my way to the Rijksmuseum -- the vast national treasury of Dutch painting -- I stopped in a little Indonesian joint for takeout food. There are many such restaurants in Amsterdam; the Dutch once subjugated parts of Indonesia, and among the few benefits of such an occupation is the concomitant emigration of good food (which, frankly, the gastronomically challenged Dutch need). I'd passed many places to eat rijstaffel in Amsterdam; and for the first time, I saw how many Indonesian words, like kantor ('office') and rokok ('cigarette'), actually originate in Dutch. I'd been to Indonesia two years earlier; and strolling now down the wide, clean boulevards of Amsterdam's museum district, carrying my corn fritters and tempeh goreng, I had trouble making the connection between this tidy, tiny nation and the vast, chaotic, sultry archipelago it used to occupy. Perhaps it fit that the takeout food was bad and I threw half of it away.
I crossed the big grass concourse that anchors the district, and then walked the promenade that runs under the museum and takes you to the entrance. As I passed beneath, I came upon a quartet of musicians playing distinctly nonwestern music. I saw that they were arrayed in elaborate Asian silk finery, and between songs that featured their 'throat singing', which looks as strange as it sounds, their representative told us that they were from Mongolia. You could buy their CDs there under the Rijksmuseum. The woman listening next to me was carrying an Eagle Creek backpack identical to mine, and it turned out that she too was American. We listened to the Mongolians play for a few minutes. Then we went our separate ways.
There it was again: two Americans, marked by their travel gear, digesting Indonesian food, watching Mongolians throat-sing under the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Cultural borders that no longer need crossing. Travel to the Netherlands, and Java and Mongolia will meet you there. Drive to Carrboro, NC, and a Japanese Shinto priest will lead your thrift-store meditation. Art is leaking; music is spreading; language is bleeding. There's a café in Amsterdam called 'Get A Life!' (I think it's a marijuana bar, actually) and a boutique named 'Housewives on Fire'. A popular fruit juicebox is called 'Cool Best'. Now that we all understand each other, we may finally have begun to stop making sense.
