07.28.06

In the morning I had to get to the train station by 8 AM. Groggy and unshaven I get there only to find out that the lady who sold me my ticket the previous evening mistakenly booked me for the wrong day. I was desperate to get out of Paris, I don't really know why, I just wasn't in the mood for that bustling city energy after cooling down in Arles. So I paid a surcharge to get placed in first class going from Paris to Amsterdam via Brussels.

It's a morbid thought but you know, if this train was to jump the rails the people in first class would be just as dead as the people in second.

Stewing lots of ideas around in my brain for this story, about WIllard. I'm realizing too that I'm drawing a lot of my ideas from my experiences working with TIm at Google. I kind of feel guilty, appropriating his life for myself, because the character is largely becoming him. But oh well..I guess that's what you do with art, you take the reality you're given and you make it what you want.

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In Arnhem now after an afternoon of walking around with all the weight bearing down on me in the summer heat. Had time to kill before catching a train from Amsterdam to Arnhem so I took a good long walk which ended up with me getting lost as I always do when there's canals involved. ANy city with multiple bodies of water cutting through it, I get lost. But I made it back to the Central Station okay albeit a bit dehydrated, and made it to the Stayokay hostel in Arnhem.

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Dutch breakfast. Skip over the yogurt in favor of breads and cheeses and muesli. It's funny watching how the kids here go crazy over bread. They literally squeal with delight when their mom comes back with fresh bread. They're all so wholesome, so cute, so dutch. Arnhem is a lovely town. I feel like no matter how many times I tried to write that sentence it came out trite as hell, and that's the thing, Arnhem is a bit of a postcard town, life there is strange and slow.

I took a bus to a nearby national park called De Hoge Veluwe. It was one of the greatest afternoons of my life. When you enter the park you go to a collection of racks with white bicycles and pick one out for yourself and ride it all over the park. It's mainly flat ground but there are hills here and there and long rides through expansive wide open meadows. Sometimes I would park my bike in the middle of a trail through a desert-like meadow, without a human soul around me as far as my eyes could see and not a cloud in the sky to beat out the sun. Crazy moments of raw solitude.

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I woke up early, ate a lean breakfast and made it to the Centraal Station with 5 minutes to catch the next train to Rotterdam. My body aches from backpacks and busrides but this part of the travelling is great. I wake up, eat breakfast and go to the train station and just pick one out eenie meenie miney mo. In a country as small as Amsterdam there are trains every hour between the major cities. I think for a few days I'll spend a night and an afternoon in a few different cities. TOnight Rotterdam, tomorrow Groningen, the next day Utrecht.

It's nice, this little life the Dutch have carved out for themselves in Arnhem. It's so different from New York. The pace is unbelievably slow. It's as if the common undercurrent to thought here is, "Just slow down now and we'll get this alllll sorted out." I'm definitely feeling like an aberration in a smaller town like this. The combination of my hair and my major metropolitan marathon pace make me stick out like a thumb tht's been trampled on by a football team with cleats.

The intersections, for such a small town, look entirely too complicated, evoking memories in my mind of photograph's on Lucy's wall of Japanese sidewalks. Well, not that complicated - on the Dutch scale we have to shrink that sown a good bit. THough we'd have to enlarge thepeople because the Japanese are tiny and the Dutch are Europe's tallest people - didn't know that, did you, hm? Aa New Yorker I'd join a crowd of Dutch people waiting at a crosswalk staring out over a field of criss-crosses of black and white and tram track, toeing the blacktop like a Formula One racer revving engine. Look left, look right, and for miles there's not a car or tram or bike in sight.

Yet the DUtch stand entirely still, looking quite serious as they await the great god traffic light's signaol that Yea, verily, the green man hath turned green. Naturally, this drives me mad. I just can't understand why you'd stand around waiting for some unseen system to tell you when you can go instead of just taking matters into your own hands. I'm not gonna be one of these, these, these slaves! I told myself. I'm crossing!

Of course, I forgot about the biks path as I did. I stepped out onto the pavement and I was inbetween a rock and a hard place immediately. It's amazing how bikes here can zip up out f nowhere whereas the cars all go entirely too slow. I danced around like John Wayne was shooting at my feet and finally made it past the biker lane and wound up at an island in the middle of the square where I nearly licked the side of a bus which whizzed by me. Cue tram, jump left, finally ended up stranded on aother island as a mi of cars buses trucks and bikes suddenly wove back and forth around me like some well-orchestrated DIsney color cartoon. As soon as it all came, it passed, and I was stood there slackjawed while the mostly elderly Dutch behind me snickered and glared disapprovingly.

Dumb American kid.