Ammon Brown

NEDERLANDER! Yes, I am oficially part of the Nederlander family! For those of you who are clueless about my life at the moment, I am living in Den Haag (pronounced Den Hu-ggh with a loogie sound), Netherlands. Christine is doing an internship here prosecuting Yugoslavian war criminals and I am just tagging along.

I have been here for 2 weeks and I already feel like a local. I bought a cheesy used bike today so I can get around. Since the Netherlands are so flat I can get anywhere on my bike. The first day we got here was rather odd. Apparently it was the day of the Pentacost and everything was closed. We were beginning to wonder if there were any people living here or if everything is just closed on Mondays. Thankfully that is not the case. We have been in a hotel until our apartment was ready. We are subletting a very nice apartment. It is up three flights of murderous stairs in the attic of a converted brownstone. We have no front door, but anyone who can make it up those stairs is welcome to our paltry belongings. They’ve earned it.

Den Haag is a bigger city than I had thought. It is about 400,000 people so there is plenty to do. We went and saw the third Star Wars movie and giggled at the funny words on the subtitles. I feel bad chuckling but sometimes Dutch is just kind of a funny language. I have made minimal effort to learn it because everyone seems to speak English. The only person I met who did not speak English was a cab driver, but that is no different than when I lived in New York City.

One fantastic thing about the Netherlands is all the Turkish people. As a result of their presence there are tons of ‘Snackbars’ that serve Turkish pizza. Yum! Nothing like a tortilla covered with indeterminate meat product and wrapped around random vegetables with garlic sauce on it. For 1.50 Euros it is the cheapest way to eat.

So this is home until August. So far I am having a great time. I have been spending a lot of time in a hotel lobby, as they have free wifi. I would say I was in a coffeeshop, but that has a very different meaning here. We are planning a weekender to London and maybe one to Spain or Italy if we can find really cheap flights. Maybe Prague if it tickles our fancy. I will try to be more dilligent about updating this blog now that interesting things are actually happening to me!