Cultural Notes 3: Suburbia, Canals, Being laid-back

Suburbia

There is none. Seriously. You are either in narrow, winding cobblestone streets, or out in the middle of farmland. There is no sprawling maze of houses and yards to be had in this place. I suspect this is due to the density of population. It's either city or doing something productive, no middle ground. It's a little strange, though, when out biking around, due to the very sharp contrast in geography.

So, yeah, the University is actually a little bit away from the city proper, and I bike or bus through narrow patches of forest and farmland on essentially a daily basis. It's sort of strange, having a city so uninsulated. I went on a little bike trip today to explore around, and two minutes away from my dorm is nature preserves and the forest primeval, more or less.

They have REALLY nice bike/jogging paths out here. I also ran into, uhh, basically a ruined fort, from WWI. There were people looking around, and some signs pointing out the historicity of the place, but not much above-ground that could be seen. You can go on a tour of it during the week, so maybe I'll do that. If there had been no tour available period, I probably would have just jumped the fence and gone for it. Here is the moat, which doesn't look like anything, but marks the borders of the structure.

And here's a little pill-box thing.

We had no idea this thing was here until we just outright stumbled onto it. That's something else about Europe - they have got a LOT of history over here. Like, they can't even find enough places to keep it all. It's like being in the house of an old lady who collects everything in the world, only the size of a country, and she's collecting entire buildings and never throwing them away. So, that's pretty cool.

Canals

There are a lot of Canals here. I mean, lots of them. Apparently, some fairly large portion of The Netherlands is actually below sea level. At some point way back in the day, they got tired of having such a small country. They fixed this by, quite literally, pumping water off a lot of places, and building dams and dykes and canals and every other thing. My understanding is that those historic windmills actually helped pump water, but I could be mistaken. In any case, the point is: Do not get the impression, when I talk about cafe culture, terrace culture, and how laid-back Europeans are, that they are not industrious sonsabitches when the mood strikes them. These dudes literally BUILT some non-trivial portion of their nation's landmass. Heavy stuff.

Also, ducks live in them and they generally make the place look cool.




To give you an idea of how many canals we are talking about, I will include a picture of Amsterdam, which is fairly representative.

That's a lot of canals, isn't it?

Being Laid-Back

People in Europe are not in a hurry, I guess. For that reason, nobody mows the medians or the little grassy area near the curb, a lot of the time. I see this kind of stuff all the time on my way into and out of the city. I figure they think, "Hell, we've been here a thousand years now. Grass is still going to be there for the next thousand years. No point in mowing the damned thing now, it'll just grow back up again in the time of our children's children, if not sooner!" Or, maybe they just don't give a shit. In any case, I note that here this is typical, whereas in the states it would be indicative of a poor or run-down neighborhood.


The other night, I had dinner with one of my colleagues from Washburn and some of the local university students. We managed to scrape together some ersatz burritos and get a table out on the deck overlooking the courtyard, and had over a French guy, an Irish guy, and a guy from...I think Spain, maybe Italy. We had some beers and one of the huge goddamned spliffs that you can buy here, and I just never caught where he was from. Oh, yeah, there's a shop in town where you can just walk in and buy pot, right out in front of God and everyone. They don't let people sell anything harder than that, but, well, I think even that's sufficient to shock the folks back home. We had a pretty interesting conversation about law, politics, societies in our countries, and all that. Very cool. I think it must be the terrace-culture thing that Herman was talking about in response to an earlier post.

P.S. More Bikes. This was across from the mall.


Wow.