Hamsterdam!

Straight off the flight, the first bar I see in Schipol airport is "HELLO THERE..." Bar. It actually bore a font that screamed quotation marks (the Dutch, always ingenius at problems of design) and was filled with 45 year old men without dates at crusty tables. Crusty: not as in dirty, but as in old, because the Dutch would NEVER LEAVE ANYTHING DIRTY. I'm from New York City, and this state of affairs stands out for me.

This morning I ate scrambled eggs with spinach and pesto and drank appelsap out on Krista and Baas' balcony, hoping to at least see a piece of litter or something. A pigeon dropped off a present for me, but that's about it. I read "Koken met Linda," aka Linda McCartney's vegetarian cookbook...in Dutch. With is to say that I looked at the pictures, and tried to decipher the words. Baas has an imersion blender, so all I could think while looking at the images was TOMATO SOUP! TOMATO SOUP!!! True to form, my first venture out in this new place was to the grocery store. Food is fascinating to me, especially when it's called Chippers or Aardbein.

There Krista and I were at the store--where a sign announced that it is "Hamster Week," meaning that discounts abound throughout. I can't not laugh at things like kaas, so I got a lot of the typical Dutch look-down-and-away responses. Kids are raised to say "Be normal!" whenever anyone deviates, so K and I manage, in contrast, to take big loud American to a whole new level.

Why not? My brassiness came in handy at Cafe Quibus, where we made friends with cigarettes and wine and their owners, another Bastiaan and both Martin and Maarten. Martin insisted a) that he works at Dutch Playboy, and b) that I have no idea how to inhale (smoke). We discussed breasts until his bedtime, at which point K, B, and I all rolled home and came up with retorts for the drunken Turkish teenager that yelled at us that K'd be hot if she stopped eating. "You'd be hot if you stopped talking!" "You consume calories and are therefore unattractive!" "If you were a corpse, I'd love you!" (This was followed up over the next days with packs of Turkish teenagers now wanting to take both K & I out.)

In contrast to my new boyfriend: a green conure who talked back and forth with me animatedly, but was a little afraid to zoom close enough to eat the peanuts in bags hanging from the roof. I whistled and tweeted with him, urging him to take the plunge. "Eat!" I said. "Make a mess!" I said. "I like you satisfied!"