Trine Blogs: Orange Overload
In an effort to get out of the house more, I’ve made the best of the past couple of weekends and submersed myself in Dutch culture. Perhaps a bit too much, as now my feet are threatening to come off, my skin is itchy and I am bike-less.
The weekend before last I took my boyfriend to Theaters Tilburg for a concert with the Dutch band Omnia. The concert itself was great, and afterwards we were lucky enough to meet with the band. Let me just ask; has anyone met a celebrity before? Someone you thought was great, an actor, a singer, a football player, an author? Anything like that? Then you’ll most likely know the “red-face-dry-mouth” condition that hit me as soon as I got in line to have my CD autographed. I managed to mutter something about the CD and the concert, they asked me where I was from, and I started an incoherent babble that didn’t stop until someone brought the band beer, and I was able to skulk off, which in itself is amazing considering that most of my blood was in the top half of my body. (And this isn’t the worst, you should have seen me when I met Viggo Mortensen. I was 14, and it was the height of the Lord of the Rings craze. I just about peed myself, and then the local TV station interviewed me afterwards. They got about a minute’s worth of red-faced staring. sweaty hands and “OMG it was so great!!!11!!”)
When we exited the theatre, I was still high on life (and light-headed from the blood rushing back to my feet). But I came crashing down as I realized someone had stolen my bike. My dear Kenny; my Black Avenger; my noble steed. Gone. Why someone would bother taking it, I haven’t the faintest; it was rusty and old and with no working lights (because they’d all been nicked over the winter). I’ve come to understand that the Dutch regard for personal bike property boils down to “This is yours, until it’s mine, because I’ve taken it”.
Not to be deterred, I decided Amsterdam might be the place to take in this year’s Queen’s Day celebrations with a group of lovely friends. The weather, as most of you probably know, was absolutely amazing. I managed to turn my ghostly pallor into a shrimpy pallor, and was mistaken for a Muslim (again) due to the scarf I put over my head to keep from passing out with heat. Queen’s Day at 25C is a tricky one; you have to drink enough liquids to keep you hydrated, but not so much that you have to pee. You try to find a place to relieve yourself as a girl in a buzzing city that doesn’t require you to wait so long your bladder is practically fighting its way out of your abdomen. We walked around the city from morning till evening in search of good music, guided by our resident pet monkey whose map-reading skills left much to be desired, and by the end my boyfriend was shooting me worried (and pained) looks as I grunted with every step and dug my nails more and more into his hand from the pain in my feet. Also, I sat down in gum at some point or another. Gum is really hard to get out of your pants if you’ve sat on it.
My feet still hurt four days after, my skin is splotchy where I forgot the sunscreen, I never want to see the colour orange again, and I’m bike-less. But I feel energized and ready to continue. It’s one month to go now, and then… And then. Well. Until then, a friend kindly lent me her bike in exchange for me baptizing it (Ser Hubert), and while the weather has taken a dip, I feel confident the sun will come back. It has to, because I’m going to Paris for a thesis-free break and I want SUN. I’ll swap the “oranje” for the “tricolore” and I’ll see you in a week or two. Allons-y!
Trine Larsen (23) from Denmark studies Management of Cultural Diversity at Tilburg University and blogs for Univers.
