Moving to Minnesota!

This beautiful photo was available through m01229's flicker

This week, Owen and I decided to move to Minneapolis. The University of Minnesota English department has offered me a PhD position, which essentially means I will be paid to study and teach Shakespeare. This is a great joy. This is what I want to spend my whole life doing. This is reason enough to move, but there are many other reasons I'm excited for this new place to call home.

For my European friends: That's Minnesota.

One reason is a strangely sentimental layover from an odd chance on a new year's eve. When I was in grad school and Owen and I were still just dating I was supposed to fly out and spend the week with him and his family in Seattle. There was a blizzard in NYC, and my flight scheduled to go through JFK was cancelled, so I had to find a different flight through Minneapolis. As we landed it was a perfectly clear night and I got to see the sudden skyscrapers of the twin cities all lit and beautiful, and heard a mother from a seat behind me asking her daughter, "does it look like home?", in a comforting, midwest accent. And I was just a little overwhelmed that I was getting a glimpse of the place my parents had spent eight years of their lives. It was a 20 minute layover, but I think of it six years later with a great deal of fondness.

I can imagine you thinking, "So your parents lived there for a bit, and you have a happy memory of a layover there. What else is nice about Minneapolis? Isn't it just supposed to be super-extra cold?" I mean, yes. Yes, it is. But I like winter. I've dressed as winter at a costume party, and I grew up in Rochester, NY which has fierce winters. Not as cold as the midwest, I grant you, but cold enough to know it and miss it in the years I've been away. Yesterday it got below freezing here and I was so happy to be out biking in the snow I found myself singing out loud.


(If you're not convinced but want to look at lots of beautiful wintery pictures click here:  http://www.captureminnesota.com/galleries/1915)

This happiness, (however naive) is a great thing, because Minneapolis is one of the best cities for biking in the US, even ranks internationally in top 20 lists for biking cities, even considering the fact that it has brutally cold winters! You can read about one author's incredulity on this matter here. Their extensive bike-only freeways, their financial investment in making biking safe in the city, a prospering bike-share program, and mentality that biking is normal and expected make it much safer than elsewhere in the US.

People in Minneapolis are not just bikers, they're also readers. They're regularly listed as some of the most literate of American cities, ranked number one this past year by USA Today. I don't know how much time I'll have for pleasure reading on top of my regular coursework, but it will be such a joy to be able to be inside libraries of books I can read, and be surrounded by people who care about reading. And check out the beautiful new Minneapolis Central Library!

This will be me. 

There's such a great cultural scene in the Twin Cities! So much great theater! With a fringe festival! And Music! And excellent public radio! Although I am a little crushed to be moving to Minneapolis just as Garrison Keillor may be retiring from hosting A Prairie Home Companion (a radio show I grew up with, thanks to my parents' years in MN). In case you do not yet know the sound of Keillor's voice, let me introduce you via the Writer's Almanac.

We won't leave until the summer, but wherever live takes us, be it Minnesota or beyond, I hope to (as they say on the show) be well, do good work, and keep in touch. 

More of the tulips

—guest post by Owen

When Clara made her recent post about tulips and poetry, she didn't have access to my photos from our bike trip.  So now that my camera's pictures have uploaded as well, I'm making this second blog post to show them to you as well:

As part of our bike trip, our Dutch teacher took us to the coast at Noordwijk.  The terrain was quite new to us, as we'd never biked over wooded hills or along grassy dunes before in the Netherlands:

And then there was the sea itself!  Of all of us, Clara was the only one to get her feet wet.

Thanks for reading!

How Poetry is like a Tulip Field

On Sunday I went on a five hour bike trip through the bulb fields. Our Dutch teacher suggested we go to Noordwijk, her hometown, and led the way through fields of tulips. We did a little of this last year, but we were early for the tulips so it was mostly daffodils, and hyacinths, and what we found of them we stumbled upon by accident. It was a real pleasure to have a guide who knew the way so well. She even asked her friends which intersections or roads had the best views for this particular weekend. I've been wanting to write a post about poetry, but I also really wanted to post something about these bulbs so here are some ways in which fields of tulips are like poetry.

They both show the ordinary made extraordinary.
Tulips have always been a part of spring for me. My mom has some in the garden, they're in parks, and their sweet cups of color have always made me happy but experiencing the sheer number of tulips together that you see when biking the fields this time of year is so extravagant, so impressive. They don't even seem like tulips anymore, you experience them both as the flowers, but also as enormous blocks of color filling your vision. Poetry transforms words in a similar way. Not only does poetry make us look at the world around us in a new way, it makes us look at words in a new way too. Poets make you listen to words, feel them in meter, and notice their sounds or similarities.

They are both rare.
One of the things so special about tulip fields is how easy they are to miss. Eleven months of the year, they're green or brown like any other field. It's as if they've magically transformed into something different--I feel the same way about flowering trees. Most of the year they're pretending to be normal, unassuming flora, but for a short time they're covered in pink blossoms, or maybe in the fall it turns all crimson and orange? It feels as though you've been let in on a secret to see this little glimpse of beauty. I love poetry, but I realized writing this post that I didn't bring a single book of (nondramatic) poetry with me when I came to live in Holland. Most people spend a tiny fraction of the their time reading, (even if they read literature) reading poetry.

Tulip fields and poetry are both arresting.
Especially on an overcast day, the brightness of the colors of the flowers is so arresting that it's difficult to look away. When you're biking this means you need to keep a little of your brain paying attention to your biking so you don't swerve into a ditch or another biker. If the flash of distant color hides behind a barn or warehouse, I find myself biking faster to see it reappear on the other side. Poetry feels the same way for me, I remember reading the WWI poets for the first time in high school and how those words caught me up. Wilfred Owen's description of the soldier as "guttering, choking, drowning" in the gas around him and just keeling in the horror of those words. I remember reading poems (some upsetting, some beautiful) again and again, because they drew me, captured my attention in ways that more commonplace descriptions of the same events or ideas could not.

They are both experiential.
I've been on the train going through the bulb fields this time of year, you'll see a whole train car go silent as everyone stops conversation and looks out the window. Even those glued to their phones look up to see what has got everyone's attention. Much poetry is written to be read out loud, often experienced as a group. Some of my favorite experiences of poetry have involved friends getting together and reading poems out loud. Maybe all of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Maybe reading the American Lit assignment in the sunshine of the quad. In a camp I worked at each camper wrote a sonnet for another camper as a means of bonding, and you really had to work hard to put together your thoughts into a strict structure. Recently in Dutch class we were listening to songs in Dutch, and Owen was so moved by the words of this particular song that he translated it out and read it to me in English. We were both a little teary eyed by the end of it.

I wish I could take everyone reading this biking through the tulip fields, but I can at least point you in the direction of some good poetry. If anyone's interested I can put together a big list of some of my favorite poems, or poems to read if you're not sure you like reading poetry, but for now I'll just leave you some Keats.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Who are your favorite poets? Do you have a favorite poem? Write poetry yourself? I'd love to hear about it.

A love letter to the bicycle.

The times I've written about biking on this blog, it's been mostly negative. When I started I was really scared, and then I had some very minor accidents, which scared me some more. These things made it onto the blog, and so sometimes when I talk to my friends back home about biking, the mental image they still have of me is of me crashing and being so terrified my knuckles are white on the handlebars. So I am writing today to amend that image because over the last eleven months my feelings have changed, changed utterly.

So here is the love letter to the bicycle, to mine in particular, and to biking in the Netherlands.

At home in Leiden

I love that now I bike so frequently that when Owen and I walk somewhere we get annoyed and confused with our legs for how slowly they walk. "How are we still going past this narrow building? If we were biking we'd be two blocks down by now."

The skies here are incredible

I love all the financial benefits! I love not needing to put gas in the tank. I love that our most expensive bike repair has been 60 euro. I love that when my bike breaks down I can carry it or walk it without any problem.

Biking with Owen to the Hague

I love how strong and free biking makes me feel. On days when I teach violin lessons in Leiderdorp, I bike for about a half hour through town and then through the fields for a bit. On nice days, especially when the wind is fighting me a bit I let out my hair and the speed of biking and the gusts of the breeze blow it out behind me, and I feel like I am life itself.

My first long bike trip alone, in November

I love that biking has given me the Netherlands. The huge skies swooping down on all sides to kiss the perfectly flat ground. The silver canals shimmering in the sunlight. The flowers blooming everywhere. The streets of the Hague, or the giant garden in Lisse, the shores of the North Sea, I can get to them all with the force of my legs and the two wheels they power.

here is a week's groceries on my bike.

I love carrying things on my bike. My violin, the week's groceries, a backpack or a bike bag full of sundries, are just the everyday things I've transported with my bike. I've also biked with dining room chairs, vacuum cleaners, luggage and a small tree on my bike, and love that it's become no big deal.













I love that biking has brought me intimately close to the weather. Characters in books are always talking about the weather, because it mattered so much more when people didn't go from temperature regulated houses to temperature regulated cars and back again, with shelter along most every step of the way. Here all those weather conversations make sense. I love that everyone looks out for the weather, watches and listens, plans their errends so that they miss the rain. And when the weather is good? You know those perfect days when you have a kind of long drive and you decide to open all the windows and just let the weather in? On a bike you get all that whoosh of speed and wind but without any car obstructing that experience. You smell the lilacs, you hear the birds, you feel the little sprinkles of rain as the start to fall. It's a full bodied experience and it's wonderful.

When Owen asked what I wanted to do for our anniversary, I said, "Let's go on a bike trip." So we went to the Hague, just a couple hours each way, and we rented a place to stay so the whole weekend we could bike around the city and wouldn't need to rely on public transportation... we'd just be free! It's been a big adventure, but I should stop writing now... I'm biking with a friend to the seaside.

Bike paths are a big deal here. 

Keukenhof, Springtime, and all the bulbs.

"It is like heaven."

Holland in the springtime seems a bit like an experience beyond this present life. One of the big exports of this country is bulbs, so there are literally fields (and fields and fields and fields) of bulbs. Last Friday, Owen and I biked through some to get to the Keukenhof, one of the most prestigious gardens in the world. When we went, the tulips were just starting, and many of them were still closed, but there were many daffodils still and the hyacinths were at their peak.


We biked there and back (about an hour each way, supposedly, but we took our time and kept getting a little off track, so it ended up being a lot more) and the whole time it just felt like such a gift. Being here in this country is a gift. Being able to bike is a gift. The existence of such a park is a gift. Life itself is a gift.













They even have the park arranged so that every time you turn a corner there's something more to look at, and there are benches and fountains and places to just chill if you're getting sort of overloaded by the extreme amounts of beauty everywhere.






Another lovely thing about the Keukenhof is that they are pretty careful to make it pretty normal looking. It's not garish or overblown, and while it looks incredible and luxurious it doesn't seem like too much. It's like any chunk of it would seem like a normal park, except it's thousands of those chunks all out together, and carefully scheduled so that it will look good for a long while. Crocuses and tulips planted in the same beds so that they can tag team the display or some places where they have like five types of flowers all mixed together in long lines.







 There were (in addition to the gorgeous bulbs and generally impressive landscaping) an amazing number of flowering trees, many of which were raining petals, so that the air swirled with them. The immaculate grass in the whole park is off limits, but there are so many little walk ways and stepping stones that you never feel the want.

 We were so happy the whole time. We'd look at the map and ask each other "where do you want to go?" and we couldn't even answer. "Everywhere! Anywhere! We can also just sit on this bench for the rest of our time!"









And everywhere we went we discovered more beautiful parts of the park.












 Some of the tulips were so elaborate I had to check the sign to make sure they were actually tulips.












They had all sorts of things besides just flowers, too. There were playgrounds, a turning windmill you could climb up into, a petting zoo, a zip line and this excellent hedge maze.

There were also a lot of just interesting pieces of landscaping with an an adventure style flair. Zig zag ladders are surprisingly scary to climb.

















Many places along the edge of the garden were lookouts, where you could see the fields of bulbs.












We had biked through some on the way there. The fields of hyacinths are something beyond description. You smell them before you see them, and then you can't smell enough of them.

They also had some greenhouses with plots of specialty flowers, all patchworked in close together. I'm looking forward to learning more about tulips and their history and impact on this country. There's a museum in Amsterdam all about tulips that I'm looking forward to visiting.














But for now, I'm enjoying them in windows, in the grocery stores and markets, people's little gardens and in the parks. If you'd like to hear a little bit about tulips, here's a nice video by John Green about tulips and The Netherlands.

Misadventures of the Trailing Spouse: More Bike tales, Calculus, Dutch and Foul Smelling crockpots.

I am learning new some skills. This means that there's a lot of things that I'm doing all the time that I'm not good at yet.

Example #1. Biking.
Now, for everyone who read my first story about biking, I should say I have made a lot of progress. I am no longer frightened of biking, and enjoy the freedom of being able to zip around town, particularly now that we have suitable raingear and I don't get drenched if I bike in the rain. That said, however, I'm still not a fast or confident biker and this past week or so I've had three bike crashes. In the first one, a bus came up behind me and was honking (probably not at me) and I got scared so I started biking even closer to the curb, and when I looked back to see if Owen was still with me, I swerved into the curb and ended up catching myself beautifully on the concrete. Scraped knuckles, some small bruises, but all my stage combat work has taught me to fall well, and my instincts kicked in nicely. I was mostly just rattled (as busses are usually extremely courteous towards bikes) and once I got home and had a good, "I'm glad I'm alive" cry, everything was fine.

Bike crash number two was rattling because it was so soon after the first crash. There were a lot of slippery wet leaves in the bike path, and I must have just lost my grip or something because next thing I knew the leaves and I were becoming very well acquainted. Again. No injury worth speaking of, just had a good, "why is this happening to me?" cry and got back on my bike the next day.

The third time I crashed my bike was on the way home from church and was the scariest by far. Owen and I were biking home from church and we had just zipped through an intersection on a yellow light, and found ourselves going a good bit faster than the bike ambling along in front of us. All of the sudden he swerved and then slowed down even more, so instead of trying to pass on the left (like a sensible, sane, person) I instead caught a glimpse of the giant signpost, and knew I was done for. You know in Calvin and Hobbes, when Calvin tries to practice catching or batting a baseball? The ball grows fangs and chases him. I feel this way about posts. I see a post, (which to anyone else would just be a normal unremarkable post) and I see it grow teeth and snarl, "Ima get you." My brain has time to think, "Post, what are you talking about, I'm here in the bike lane you're over there, and oh no!" Something happens, and the post gets me. This happened to me when I was little too, and I think the best explanation is one I learned in a skiing lesson. "If you're looking at it, you'll go to it." So advice to all of you who don't bike much, or might possibly be less experienced than I am: don't look at the things you don't want to run into. If you think "I'm gonna run into that." Look at something else! Preferably something far away! This crash needless to say was messier. Owen looked back just in time to see and hear my head hit the road, I got a giant bruise on my arm, the bruises around my knees were a veritable bouquet, and one of my fingers and toes still hurts five days later. It was also very public, as the older man I nearly ran into stopped and made me sit on the sidewalk for five minutes, kissed the top of my head, and told us in Dutch if I wasn't okay we could call the ambulance, and it would be okay, we would not need to pay for it! A couple other people stopped and everyone was asking me if I was okay, and I was trying hard to stop crying so they would believe me. In the end, I sat for a bit and biked the rest of the way home, but it wasn't fun, and now I'm confronted with the whole, new task of finding a general practitioner, so that I can go to a doctor, whenever that becomes necessary. I'm also beginning to seriously doubt the wisdom of a whole country biking without helmets.

Example #2. Speaking/Reading/Understanding Dutch.
It will be a great joy to be able to speak Dutch, but it is pretty tough when you're starting out. The use of the English language is one of the things I have spent a huge amount of my life studying and practicing, and my ability to communicate is an ability I treasure, so floundering in Dutch class, not knowing what to say when asked a question, or just exasperation at not being able to express myself is a hard thing. It's sad to pass bookstores and feel like a diabetic kid in a candy shop. I'm learning, I'm working on it pretty much every day, but it's hard. I also have a lot of tasks to do like, calling about the customs paperwork for our shipment, and let's just say calling government offices is never fun, even in your mothertongue. It's wretched when you have to write down the "Speekt u Engels? Mijn Nederlands is neit goed..." so that you don't freak out and forget when you have a person speaking rapid Dutch on the other end of the phone.

Example #3. Calculus.
Owen's teaching calculus twice a week, and I get to sit in on his classes which is really exciting and interesting. Also humiliating. Somewhere I had got the idea that if I worked hard and paid attention, I would not just get the math, I would excel! I had not thought I would be decidedly below average in my speed in picking up concepts, or struggling over the notation. For the second class, I had not had time to review the notes from the previous class (something I thought of as being helpful perhaps, but not necessary,) and I was the only one in the class to fail the first quiz. Lesson learned, I studied hard for the next class, and got a perfect score on my first homework (without even getting help from the teacher!) but it was still humiliating. Since then I've learned that most of these students have already taken calculus (why they're taking Intro to Calculus, I'm not sure) and that has made me feel a lot better about everything. But still. Not something I have any of the skills to breeze by in. Just have to put in a lot of hard work.

Example #4. Slowcooker shenanigans
Owen brought home a slowcooker (very rare in the Netherlands) from an Asian grocery store. The lady running the cash register had to make sure he knew "this is not a rice cooker" "Oh, yes, I know. It's for cooking things at a low heat for a long period of time." "Good." I thought, "Hurray! Something I know how to use and do!" However I spent my whole morning looking for a new apartment (we have to be out of this one in about a month) and didn't get the food into the crock pot til after lunch. But I thought, "that's okay. 8 hours on low won't work at this point, but 4 hours on high will still have this food done in time." So I carefully washed the slowcooker, and put together the meal and turned it on high. And the house slowly began to fill with the scent of.... burning plastic. I was horrified and worried, "Is this normal? Do we have a defective machine?" but found reassurance on the internet that this is indeed normal, and should only happen the first time or two as the encasing around the wiring breaks down. The house smelled so bad that I opened the windows and still had a terrible headache, so I thought. "It's a crockpot. Full of liquid. The chicken in there is frozen. It will be fine if I give it a stir and then go to the library." So that is what I did. It made me feel a lot better to not be breathing in any more burning plastic fumes, and I got some work done, ready to come home and find that the crock pot had burned everything around the base, and that only two hours later, the chicken was totally shreddable. Ladies and gentlemen, beware the vigorous Asian crockpot. I was able to salvage the meal (which did not taste at all like plastic or even burnt stuff, and was actually pretty great) but I think it will take some work to identify the cooking patterns of this particular crockpot, and it may be awhile before I have the confidence to put it on the "auto" setting.

This has all sounded pretty sad. So let me end with this. My last year at Mary Baldwin I started weight training. Just a couple times a week, at first, and not for long at all. I had a class at the gym from 8-9:30, so it just made sense to stay for another half hour before heading back to the dorm and showering. When I started it was terrible. I hated it. I was in pain, and as one of my friends grimly told me "your muscles are actually ripping so they can grow back stronger." I had never felt so weak or pathetic, and the worst part was that when I started it didn't start going uphill. It went downhill first, for a good while before going uphill. But as I did it, I started to like it. Between Thursday and Tuesday I would miss the crazy happy exhileration, and I would find myself trying to figure out if I could go another day. By the time the spring semester rolled around I didn't have a class at the gym but I went anyways, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday the whole semester. Can I just say how fantastic it felt to lift or press or pull twice or three times as much as when I had started? By late spring I would see girls come in and I would have to try not to smile at their surprise when they used machines after me and found they needed to take off a lot of the weight before they could make a rep. So here's hoping that in six months, or eight months or by the time we leave this country, I will be happy with my past self for all the hard work when the work was hard.

Also! In all my free time when I'm not learning Dutch, calculus or battling asian slowcookers, I now write a weekly column for the Shakespeare Standard, you can see my articles here: http://www.theshakespearestandard.com/author/clara/

Misadventures of the trailing spouse: Bike tales of doom.

In the book, Expert Expat: Your Guide to Successful Relocation Abroad, the authors dedicate a whole chapter to the particular needs and trials of the "trailing spouses": those partners of the internationally employed who get to come along for the ride, but often have a far harder time adjusting. While the working spouse's life may make sense and even be similar to life in the home country, his or her partner might not yet have all of the bases covered to aid in building a home and a life in a new place. Some dear friends of ours gave both of us this book this past spring, but especially pointed out the candor and relevance of the chapter on trailing spouses. I've needed that relevance and candor this week. I am still loving it here, enjoying the new experiences, and could not ask for a better teammate, but rather than sharing all the wonderful things, today I will share highlights of this week's misadventures.

In very brief form this week has been:

• Full of me not being able to talk to anyone (like at all, not even, like, "hello! beautiful morning, isn't it?" or answer the cashier's "would you like a receipt?" ) because I am cripplingly unable to speak Dutch.
• Full of meeting Owen's department which was delightful and a pleasure but also included one member of his faculty asking me, "what will you do to amuse yourself while you're here in Leiden? Cook delicious meals for Owen?"  (I do plan on cooking and eating many delicious meals with Owen, but I would rather it not be thought of as my occupation.)
• Full of people being surprised and delighted when they find out "oh you can work!" only to ask what I plan to do. I have no idea. I just got used to the idea of not "working" for money, so that I could do research, and creative projects. I haven't really had a chance to re-adjust myself and think up an entirely new plan.
• Full of attempting to get a bank account and having difficulty for stupid reasons (1. "You need photocopies of all these documents.  No, you may not use our photocopier over there." 2. Owen made photocopies! Forgot to print scans of our passports. 3. The bank is closed Saturday, Sunday, and Monday?)
• Full of trying to buy regular rolled oats so I can make granola that Owen can eat only to find I've bought rolled four-grain cereal including rolled wheat. 
• Full of getting lost walking in the hot sun, and not knowing how to use the bus system.
• Full of even getting together with a couple of friendly ladies from church only to remember that making friends takes time, and that building friendships—like learning a language, or getting a map of a city inside your head—takes time and effort, and isn't instantaneous. 

This week has also been the week of the bike. THE WEEK OF THE BIKE. In my previous post I mentioned that everyone bikes in Leiden and that it's much safer than pretty much anywhere else in the world, and that the roads even have stoplights for the bikes. I did not mention that I personally have only biked about half a dozen times in my life, and two of those times involved spectacular, bloody crashes—over the handlebars, still bear the scars-style crashes. Other vivid experiences with bikes involved taking a dear friend to the ER after a bike accident, or hearing about NYC biking with car doors opened in loved one's faces. I did not mention that I am terrified of biking. 

So here I am in Leiden, haven't been on a bike in half my life, (the last time I was thirteen or so and fell over an embankment and sliced open my leg on the pedal) in a country where two year olds with training wheels are laughed at, and where no one wears helmets. Owen and I go off to buy a bike, and though I delay all morning long, the afternoon finds us walking just around the corner to Budget Bike to see what we can find. We have an agonizing terrible Dutch/terrible English conversation and figure out what we are looking for. One of the workers suggest a bike which fits our price range, which looks big, but they start at lowering the seat. Once lowered they take it out to the street (yes, street with cars) and I teeter onto it and try to press on the pedals while getting any of my body onto the seat and fail. The worker makes a face, says something like "more small" and goes to lower the seat again. After this attempt it is STILL too tall for my short body, and I am feeling seriously embarrassed. Surely, if I were a better biker I could ride a bike without it needing to be low enough for my toe-tips to touch the ground. The store owner comes out and insists the bike is plenty small and tries to get me going on it. I wobble like crazy in several different attempts to start biking, and he looks very surprised (disgusted?) and says something like "Oh! beginner!" and suggests we go to his other store on the other side of town where there is much more selection.

So on to bike store number two! Owen walks his bike alongside mine, assuming that we will ride back together. At this point, I am so terrified and humiliated that the idea of calmly biking home together seems a wholly unrealistic fantasy, but I go along. I think to myself, "I must get a bike today, if I want to get a bike with Owen along for moral support." I am in grave need of moral support. When we get to the second "Budget Bike" we are disheartened by the bikes boasting "low prices" of three or four times as much as we were hoping to spend. We are not looking for a bike for me to travel across Europe on. When I get to that stage, we can trade in whatever beginner bike we get, and get something cushier, faster, with more gears. I'm just looking for a no frills bike, a bike just for now. The employee at this shop speaks much more English, and shows us the upstairs of the store where all the kids' bikes and discount adult bikes are stored. What joy! What excitement! We look at several bikes, one is purple with a basket, but has Minnie mouse on the decor... One is burgundy, just the color of my old car, but only has front wheel brakes—Owen says those are the ones more likely to flip you over the handlebars. And then we see this one. A blue and yellow bike with tough kid details, a bike clearly designed and marketed for a 10 year old boy, but a bike which fits me beautifully, and on which I feel more safe than I've felt on two wheels. It is exactly the price we had budgeted, and it seems meant for me. 

Out on the street my fears return, so Owen and I walk our bikes to some quiet streets so I can get my bearings. When I anticipated my own biking fears I had told myself. "There are no hills. You don't need to worry about getting out of control. The whole country is at sea level." All true! Except, alas, the city of Leiden is full of canals, and with the canals come sudden and steep little bridges. Over my first bridge as I crested and started the chase down the other side I became very aware of the narrow street, the bumpy brick pavement and the absolute lack of any kind of railing between me and the waters of the canal. I saw my life flash before my eyes, especially the bike-crashing parts of my life, and remembered how very dangerous it is to jump (or fall) into the canals because they are full of bikes. WHY ARE THE CANALS FULL OF BIKES??? Are they the bikes of perished riders? no, no. Bikes with only one bike lock. While everyone has a lock on their bike to prevent a thief from riding (locking up the wheel), not everyone uses a chain to attach the bike to an unmovable object. As a prank, college students like to throw the unchained bikes into the canals late at night. Would my sweet little blue bike become one of the canal bikes? No! I pulled myself together, used my brakes (both front and rear) and slowed it to a comfortable coast—staying well away from the canal—and as I came up to Owen I shouted, "I am still alive!"

That's all for today, friends. Stay tuned next time for tales of birthday celebrations, of museum explorations, and hopefully of us finally getting a Dutch bank account.