I’ll be right back I have to excuse myself

At the risk of being too graphic, toilets here really keep you guessing.

It doesn’t matter what I’ve done, the toilet does the same thing: the water goes up and up and up and up and doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to go down.

I panic and and quietly say no no no why are you doing this and the toilet’s like “You know I don’t have to explain myself.” and the water keeps rising. And I beg and it doesn’t listen and I think maybe it will go down like it did all the other times and the toilet is like “No, not this time. This time the water will never go down.”

Then the water always goes down, it’s always fine. I wash my hands, and I try to regain composure but my blood pressure is probably off the charts by now. And I know it’s only going to be a few hours before I have to do the whole thing again.

50 ways to injure your lover

You know when you go to  a museum, and you’re not watching what you’re doing and you accidentally trip a child who falls on a glass sculpture and destroys it? Me neither, but that’s the sort of thing liability insurance covers.

You know when you toss your friend a beach ball but it’s actually a bowling ball and it hits them in the knees and breaks their legs? If I had a euro for every time I’d done that, plus two more euros, I’d have enough to pay for liability insurance. It’s not very expensive, and supposedly 90% of Dutch people have it. My guess is 90% of Dutch people can’t be wrong, and if everyone around me is concerned about spilling syrup on a stranger’s cell phone just as they are sending an important message, I’ll pay 2 euro a month to be ready in case it happens.

But the agent at our bank won’t take yes for an answer and insisted on explaining more benefits of the insurance before I could sign up.

“Say you’re on a bike, and it’s a bit rainy, and you collide with another cyclist and really, really injure them.”
“Say you are drinking some quite hot water and you spill it on a stranger or friend and the water burns their face and their arms because it’s too hot.”
“SAY, you adopt a dog or a cat and maybe it is biting a child. Because here the liability insurance also applies.”
“Or say you start a small accidental fire the dining area of a restaurant or bar because you are too close to the candles.”
There is no potential situation so far-fetched or bizarre that it will not be covered by liability insurance. Why just say it covers accident, injury, or damage when you can describe a problem so detailed it sounds like it was written by a personal injury lawyer using Mad Libs to craft the script of Home Alone 4?
The website for liability insurance picks up where my agent left off. Boaz and I will now be safe in the beyond-extremely-unlikely event of “damage caused by a leaking washing machine (if it is your own)” “you knock down an antique vase or tablet” and a vague allusion to the possibility that I might “hurt someone while working around the house.” It seems obvious they got this list from a poster that described things that surprisingly are more common than shark attacks.
My coworker explained to me that Dutch people love to be insured, just in case. “We’re insurance fanatics.” she said. I like the idea of insurance fanatics, of all the things to be fanatical about, and I like the idea of a nation-wide agreement to all be insurance fanatics.
There are lots of things individuals love to be fanatical about and here’s where I’ll list some. Knitting, skiing, antiques, the beach, and maybe sports unfortunately. But if 90% of the country is going to be into something, it might as well be insurance.
What are 90% of Americans fanatic about? I’ve been too busy using antique platters for target practice to think much about it, but it might be bulk shopping, which is its own kind of insurance.

Orange and olive salad

My best friend in middle school hated salads.

Most people have a food they hate. But, a salad can look and taste a million different ways: fruit salad, caesar salad, potato salad, tuna salad, taco salad, pasta salad, bean salad, cole slaw, plain lettuce with dressing, niçoise, she hated them all.

“I wish I could do salads,” she’d say, the way people say they wish they could pull off a center part. “They seem so healthy and easy and fresh. But, I hate them.”

I never bothered her about it. In 7th grade I was just happy to have a best friend, salad-hating or otherwise. I wasn’t her best friend, she had a best friend named Becky who went to a different school and was supposedly amazing. “UGH I wish you could meet Becky,” my best friend would say. “She does the best voices and is crazy about pink jewelry.” I wished Becky would get hit by a bus, not one that would kill her, just one that would hit her hard enough to require her family moving to Switzerland for physical therapy.

This week at work there was a leftover salad that was just orange slices and black olives. Like something a very busy parent would make their kids for Halloween, if their kids didn’t have taste buds.

A typical Dutch salad, I said to myself.

Everything I see here becomes one of the most important and common things about Amsterdam, and this salad was no exception. Here are the most famous things in Holland: windmills, clogs, cheese, the huge bedside lamps in our temporary apartment, a woman named Kelli who does reception at my office, and a sad-looking salad with oranges and back olives.

It’s not the smartest way of thinking but everyone does it: the second-most popular thing to say when you find out I’m from Minnesota (the most popular thing being to repeat MinnesoOoota back to me in an accent) is to tell me about a layover in the Minneapolis airport.

“I wanted to buy some mixed nuts, and all they had was chips and crackers. No nuts. I could never live in Minnesota because I love nuts.”

Minnesota has nuts, I’m sure of it. Twenty minutes in the Delta concourse might feel like a lifetime but it’s not long enough to be knowledgable about the cuisine of the entire state. But when you’re sitting in an airport looking at a wall of not-nuts or sitting in a breakroom looking at the weirdest salad you’ve ever seen, it’s hard to be sure.

On my first day in Amsterdam a little old man was walking down my street with a little white dog on a leash, when teenager biked between them. The leash got caught in the wheel and the bike fell over, and both men started laughing hysterically. They were on the ground trying to get the leash unstuck, and introducing themselves. The dog started licking both of their faces.

I hoped this was a classic Dutch thing that would happen every single day, I hoped Holland was a country where people several generations apart were constantly tripping each other in complicated ways and then giggling about it in the middle of the street while cute dogs danced around tangled in bicycles. But it hasn’t happened again yet, so it might have just been random.

Maybe it’s possible to have a sense of what’s random and what’s important but so far I’m just as bad as the people looking for nuts at MSP.

It was hard to say if the salad was an every day thing or something I’d never see again, so I ate some of it just in case. It tasted exactly how you’d expect orange slices and black olives to taste. I guess I hate salads.


I looked up the salad to find this photo and maybe it’s Italian. It didn’t really look like this.


Short play in one act.

Scene: The most popular market in Amsterdam (not the textile one). A man stands behind several crates of the largest carrots on earth. Brooke walks up wearing the same thing she has worn the last few days, ready to chat with people.

Brooke: Hello!

Man: Hi there.

Brooke: (pointing to a carrot) What is the word for this in Dutch?

Man: Vortel.

Brooke: Wogtern?

Man: Vortel

Brooke: Goltenp.

Man: Vor…

Brooke: Wem…

Man: V…

Brooke: Nevermind, thank you.

Man: Don’t mention it.

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