The quest for a dresser

We are making great strides in moving in. We have a books on our shelves, hooks for our keys, and cookies in the cookie jar.

But one of the things that was surprisingly difficult for us was finding a dresser. Most of our furniture came from IKEA, and we were able to check out the various options in the IKEA in Haarlem before we left the Netherlands. That way, we were able to get our new apartment pretty much mapped out before we came.

But while there's much more closet space here than in our place in Leiden, the rooms are more square, so wall space, not floor space, is at a premium. That means using taller, narrower storage whenever possible, so we wanted one of these dressers from IKEA:

But when we looked to see what was available in the states, what we found was more like this:

Where are all the tall, narrow dressers? IKEA isn't offering them anymore in the U.S., the country where they have been sued for the wrongful deaths of several small children who have been crushed in the last few years by chests of drawers tipping over. When we went on our big trip to IKEA last week, signs exhorting customers to affix their furniture to the wall were everywhere.

My knee-jerk reactions:

• "I don't have children! Why shouldn't I be allowed to buy furniture for myself, just because someone else might do so irresponsibly?!"
• "The furniture already comes with brackets to mount it to the wall, and the instructions include that step!" (Sure I've ignored that step in the past—living in a cinderblock dorm room does tend to prevent one from making any kind of hole in the wall—but the consequences of that neglect are my responsibility!)
• "If IKEA really were contrite about these deaths, they'd pull the furniture line everywhere, not just in the one country where they got in trouble!" (It's as if, when they rolled out the slimmer and eco-friendlier KALLAX replacement for their iconic EXPEDIT series, they had only done so in countries that are particularly uppity about environmentalism.)
• "It's not even that big a problem!" I mean, yes, it is an enormous problem if it's your child, and apparently a child in the U.S. is killed once every two weeks by furniture tip-over, which is awful. But given that there are over 21 million children under the age of 5 in the U.S., this works out to a probability of about 99.99938% that your newborn will survive your furniture.  If we were looking at, say, the Netherlands instead of the U.S., at this rate there would be a high probability of no child ever being killed by an IKEA dresser.

But on reflection, maybe discounting the size of the U.S. isn't such a good idea. Maybe a big country, where precedents are set for many at once and where legislative decisions have an exceptionally wide scope, has an extra responsibility to err on the side of safety. Maybe that's why small countries should belong to supranational organizations that impose annoying regulations.

But what does all this mean for us? It means we got our dresser at a thrift store.

Enjoying Leiden on foot

We did a lot of walking around on the last few days we were in Leiden, for a couple reasons:

• We had to transport several large objects (including four suitcases and a couch) across the city, which meant lots of walking to and fro.
• On our last day, we sold our bikes as one of our earlier errands, so everywhere else we went that day (Hortus Botanicus, De Valk, etc.) we visited on foot.

These were reasons of necessity, but I really appreciated having the opportunity to notice new things about Leiden that I never had before. For example, over many front doors there there are rectangles of glass spanned by arcing dividers, and I made it a project during these walking adventures to photograph as many as I could spot. Here are a few of my favorites:

I love the way every one is different, but they are all stylistically unified. And all so beautiful.

How about you? Have you ever made a happy discovery because you were forced to go at a slower pace than you were used to?

Rotterdam Redeemed

—guest post by Owen

Until a couple of weeks ago, I had only negative associations with the name "Rotterdam."

• Rotterdam is the setting for the unhappy beginning of the Ender's Shadow series by Orson Scott Card. This series also led me to mistakenly believe Rotterdam was in Belgium.
• Our trans-atlantic shipment of household goods was held hostage in a Rotterdam warehouse for two months.
• Our trip to Prague fell through because our flight out of the Rotterdam airport was canceled.
• We were once nearly stranded in Rotterdam overnight because Dutch public transit stops at 8pm on New Year's Eve. (Kudos to my amazing family for being so chill through that unexpected part of the adventure.)
• And on top of it all, "Rotterdam" starts with "rot." (It doesn't actually mean "rot." In fact, the name "Rotterdam" comes from a word meaning "mud.")

But none of this is Rotterdam's fault. So I'm pleased to report that our latest intra-Netherlands excursion (incursion?) has lifted the mental stigma I've attached to Rotterdam in the past.

It started when a friend of Clara's noticed that one of the entries on a list of beautiful libraries was in the Netherlands. "Have you been?" she wanted to know. No, we hadn't, but a little digging turned up that it wasn't too far away, so we filed the idea away for later. A couple weeks ago, we had a Saturday free, and decided to go.

Photo from bustler.net

This amazing library—the Boekenberg, or "book mountain"—is in a suburb of Rotterdam called Spijkenisse. Here are some pictures from our trip:

Our first trip on the Dutch metro system we didn't know existed. It goes all the way from the Hague to Rotterdam!

The outside of the Boekenberg.

The top floor is a study area where we read Our Town together.

The inside of the mountain has rooms for reading, like this children's section.

Elsewhere in Spijkenisse, we saw our first example of yarn-bombing in the wild.

We also caught this beautiful rainbow.  Our cries of "Kijk naar de regenboog!" did not seem to excite passers-by, though.

We explored a bit of downtown Rotterdam as well.  The cranes are so beautiful.

The architecture is beautiful too.

That's it for today! Thanks for reading. Have you ever been pleasantly surprised by a place you'd put off visiting?

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.

The cows say... what? Visiting a farm in the springtime.

Every week I babysit two little kids, and sometimes I tag along with them on adventures like going to the farm. This farm is free, open to the public, and in a park in a residential area just outside of Leiden, and it is complete with a little cafe (I got hot chocolate made with fresh milk), a playground, sinks to wash your hands, and lots of animals. And let me just say, the spring is an excellent time to visit a farm. So many babies.

Giving the donkey some attention

getting some attention from the baby goats!

Ellie wanted to kiss all the animals. We did our best to restrain her.

there was a whole big area where you can just frolic with the goats

They thought the stroller was super yummy

Some babies were too little to go out and play with the bigger goats.

I've never seen these birds in the US

Or this one.

But some animals are familiar, just say different things here. The roosters say "kukuruku"

The sheep and goats say "maa"

And in the Netherlands the cows say "boo." In Germany and Italy they say "moo" so I'm pretty sure it's just a Dutch thing. 

"boo"