(Having a place to live is a privilege. Being able to buy a home, even more so. Owning one as nice as this, ten times more than that. Everything that I describe below, especially the parts that sound like complaints, I do with the understanding that we are astonishingly fortunate people.)

Let’s start with the names, cause they’ll certainly be the first thing you notice. The row houses along Reinwardtstraat in east Amsterdam were built in 2003 (practically yesterday, in European time) and are architecturally unremarkable. But some Y2K-era architect decided they could heighten the street’s curb appeal with… names, installed in different fonts and colors, one per building. It’s super corny, and it limited my enthusiasm for the Reinwardtstraat apartment when we first saw it.

Still, once we got past the front door, we warmed to the place almost immediately. It’s over 100 square meters¹, compared to the 58² we’ve been working and living in for the last two years. It’s in the Dapperbuurt neighborhood, half a block from an outdoor market à la “Notting Hill,” and only one block further from a gorgeous park. It’s half the distance to my work and a three-minute walk to train and tram stops, effectively making most places in the city much more accessible.

We’d barely begun our home-browsing process when our realtor sent this listing. It checked all of our boxes, but we kept our expectations realistic: in this crazy market, stories of placing dozens of unsuccessful offers over many months are routine. “We’ll find the perfect place,” I had assured Kiki, “and then somebody will buy it before us. Then we’ll find another perfect place, and we’ll lose that one too. But at SOME point, we’ll find the perfect place and get it.”

Yeah, no. This was the second house we visited, the first offer we placed, and after two days of roller-coaster haggling, it was ours. Imagine waking up early one morning, packing your lunch, applying sunscreen, and setting out for a long, zen day of fishing… only to pull a giant flopping marlin into the boat on your first cast. You’d probably scream like we did.

Continue reading Thank God it wasn’t “Joey” →

My previous blog post detailed the Sisyphean ordeal of passing the theory exam to get my Dutch driver’s license—navigating a terribly-written, horribly-translated textbook and website to pass an exam with questions so arbitrary or unfair that they sometimes read like absurdist literature.

It was all so patently ridiculous that I figured the practical portion of the process—where I actually drove a car—would be simple by comparison. The free trial lesson at my neighborhood traffic school didn’t dissuade me of this notion: I hopped in a nice Audi SUV with a cheerful instructor who navigated me around the neighborhood, kindly pointed out my mistakes, and identified the old habits I’d need to unlearn. It was an encouraging first session.

My friends, this is what we call a “bait and switch.”

Continue reading 2 Fast 2 Rijbewijs →

I can claim to be a hipster about a few different, mostly very un-hipsterish things. I was friendly with Adriene Mishler back when she was running free yoga classes in the lobby of Salvage Vanguard Theater. I actually wrote a blog post in 2010 recommending Ben Rector, a full twelve years before he collaborated with Snoop Dogg (really). 

But my favorite “knew ‘em before they were big” example is Kristin Moore, a painter whom I met at the East Austin Studio Tour five years ago. Something about her little Instagrammy square panels grabbed me, and I bought one in 2018. A few months later I bought a second one that I mailed to Kiki, so she could visit Waffle House whenever she wanted. Reuniting the siblings was a special treat upon moving to Amsterdam.

Now, I don’t know anything about art—although, to quote “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” nobody knows anything about art. Kristin’s Artist Statement does a much better job than me at describing what her work is “really about.” But besides evoking wanderlust and so forth, the visual juxtapositions of endless soaring skies over vanilla retail buildings—all of it, both majestic and mundane, rendered in painstaking detail—feels supremely American. Which means that, now that I live abroad, I appreciate it even more. And quite apart from “stirring the soul” or whatever art is supposed to do, it’s also just super well-made—have you ever tried blending acrylics?

Continue reading Tacos at Dawn →

When I got to the Netherlands I had to learn many important new skills: speaking Dutch, biking through rush-hour traffic in pouring rain, making my own tortillas. What I did not need to learn was how to drive. Like any native Texan, I’ve been doing that since I was 16, and anyway owning a car in Amsterdam is an active inconvenience. Still, we rent or borrow cars now and then for errands and day trips; and so I needed to exchange my US license for a Dutch rijbewijs. 

Sadly this was not a simple swap at the government office. I had to go through the entire process, starting with passing the driving theory exam. Thus did I make the acquaintance of the CBR—Centraal Bureau Rijvaardigheidsbewijzen¹, or Central Driver’s License Bureau—which held the keys, pun intended, to my driving privileges. I’d heard that the process for getting a license was onerous, but they offer the test in English, and I’ve got 27 years of driving experience. How bad could it possibly be?

Continue reading It’s pronounced RYE-be-VISE →

It’s the most unqualified success among the goals I gave myself upon moving to Europe. My courthouse book is an eternal work in progress; my painting hobby is advancing glacially; the improv career is, like so many other things, limited by COVID. But (thanks largely to that very same pandemic) my plan to read more has been a grand slam. In the before times, I’d be lucky to finish three books a year, ticking through 10-20 pages per night as I drifted off to sleep. Last year I finished 37 books¹, just over three books a month. 

Continue reading I read now. I’m a reader. →

Within my first weeks in The Netherlands, I’d already stopped noticing how many darn bikes there are. After a few months I was used to the gorgeous view along the Amstel River next to our apartment. I’m in one of the great cities of the Western world, surrounded by history and architecture, with Stolpersteins underfoot and buildings around every corner that would stop you in your tracks if you saw them in Austin.¹. And yet, now it’s just home.

Here’s an experiment: take a look at my typical route to work—which I bike once a week or so, sometimes for a meeting, usually just for a change of scenery—and drop the Google Maps street-view guy anywhere along it. Within a couple of tries you’ll probably land on some beautiful sight. That’s my goddamn commute! I hate that I’m getting used to it.

December 14th and 15th are the anniversary of my Big Move.² Every day, the last few weeks leading up to it, has included a whole lot of “one-year-ago” moments: turning in my badge at Apple, visiting the Blanton Museum, taking my final courthouse road trip, marking the days off my big countdown wall calendar, staying at the Driskill Hotel, and selling my car almost literally on the way to the airport. The first weeks in Amsterdam weren’t a bit as eventful, thanks to lockdown, but after literal years of a long-distance relationship, being with Kiki almost 24-7 was just what the doctor ordered.

Time passed; the lockdown ended; I got a job; I began to explore and learn the city. On September 15th, my nine-month Amsterversary, I was the cool substitute teacher for Improv 101 at Boom Chicago. It was my first improv class in precisely 18 months and two days—the previous class was a free intro for Merlin Works, and if you had told me on that night when and where my next one would be, I’d have been utterly mindboggled. The improv has picked up since then, with occasional shows and coaching gigs (and, weirdly, hosting videos for an elevator company). Most exciting was the return of Pints & PowerPoints, which emerged on the Boom Chicago stage in November, TWENTY MONTHS after its last appearance back in Austin. 

And our slow makeover of the apartment continues. I wish I’d done a video tour of the place when I arrived, cause it’s almost unrecognizable now. Recently installed: a set of light-blocking curtains that make it possible to watch TV in the daytime. Still delayed: our fancy new bed, which was delivered after a two-month wait only for the delivery guys to realize the bedframe wouldn’t fit up the stairs.

Of course there was the weather. As I gripped my sword and stared stonily into the middle distance, the cold returned, and with it another lockdown. It’s not gray and rainy ALL the time, but the days are short as hell—on the winter solstice, we get seven hours and 41 minutes—and when the sun comes out it stays low in the sky to the south, stubbornly hiding behind buildings and providing little warmth regardless.

But that comes with the territory—literally. The things I enjoy about Amsterdam greatly outnumber the things I don’t. Every day I feel a bit more integrated, a bit more comfortable, a bit more Dutch. My Duolingo streak is over 1,200 days. I do typically European things like buy bread at the bakery, use two-button toilets with comically small sinks, bike through freezing rain like it’s no big deal, and walk out of the doctor’s office without paying anything.³

The pandemic gave all of our lives a slower pace, with free evenings greatly outnumbering busy ones, but the Big Move has made my life slower still. On a recent Friday night I found myself lounging on the couch, sipping whiskey and reading my Kindle, with Percy purring on my lap, watching planes inbound to Schiphol through the window. Three years ago, such a quiet night would have felt like an unusual luxury.  Now, it’s just life; and life is good.

It’s not accurate to say that The Netherlands has two Christmases. December 25th is still Christmas (Kerstfeest in Dutch) and a good number of kids still expect presents from de Kerstman (literally “the Christmas-man”), who looks like an American would expect. Normal Christmas stuff, in other words.

But… *Yoda voice* …there is another.

Here’s the deal, as best as I can make it out: back in the 4th century in present-day Turkey, St. Nicholas was a real person renowned for his generosity. Fast-forward a few centuries, and Christian children in various places were getting presents on Nicholas’s feast day, December 6th. Fast-forward a few more centuries, and Martin Luther encouraged people to give the kids gifts on Christmas instead, cause Jesus > saints, amiright? 

But all he succeeded in doing was to create more holiday gift-giving fellows. All across Europe, like a bunch of Spider-Men popping out of the multi-verse, new Santa characters evolved with their own back stories and traditions.

In Nederland and Belgium the local version is called Sinterklaas. He’s still from Turkey. His holiday is still December 6th¹. Instead of arriving from the North Pole on Christmas Eve via flying sleigh, he arrives from Spain (Spain?!) in mid-November via steamboat. Instead of a bunch of toy-making elves, he has an awfully, terribly racist helper character² He rides a horse named Amerigo to get around. Instead of candy in stockings, it’s candy in shoes. And so on. 

“But they dress completely differently!”

—My downstairs neighbor, when I told her about my confusion between the two white-bearded Christmas men

The craziness does not end with the Turk-on-a-steamboat business, because like all Santas, Sinterklaas delegates the actual gift-giving to regular folks like you and me. And Sinterklaas—the holiday—is a pro-level Secret Santa. Once you’ve been randomly assigned your recipient (mine was Kiki’s sister Mima) then you’re tasked with three labors:

1. The present
2. The wrapping, which is called a surprise³ and is meant to reflect the interests or personality of the recipient
3. A poem about the other person that they read before opening the present

The gift itself was easy enough: Mima got a nice pepper mill. For the surprise, Mima got a giant ball of yarn; lucky for me, there are literally dozens of online tutorials to be found, and the directions for this one were simple enough. The poem was also pretty straight-forward, though it reads a bit like an 80s rap.

My Sinterklaas-giver was Kiki’s mom Kien; she gave me a nice book about Dutch water infrastructure, a charming poem, and a surprise of a little doll riding Air Force One like a cowboy on a horse. Kiki got socks and a scented candle hidden inside an honest-to-god gingerbread house.

All in all it was a successful Sinterklaas, even if it was over Zoom (such a common way of gathering these days that I almost forgot to mention it). Now, God and COVID willing, we begin prepping for a trip back to the USA, where our Christmas traditions are COMPLETELY NORMAL.

Money, I’m glad to see you again. Funemployment, I miss you already.

This week I joined the Dutch workforce as an instructional designer for Mambu. Mambu sells cloud-based banking software, which admittedly doesn’t quite have the sexy cachet of “I work at Apple.” But after 17 years at the World’s Biggest Corporation, they’re just the sort of employer I’d been hoping for: a smallish company that’s growing fast and gives me the opportunity to contribute in a foundational way. 

On Monday morning I biked, trammed, and walked my way through the spitting rain to the super-slick office building on the river where Mambu (normally) occupies the 14th floor. As you’d expect for pandemic times, I was ushered across an empty floor into a conference room with three other new hires, where an IT guy handed us MacBooks and helped us complete our onboarding process. It wasn’t the grand entrance one would hope for with a new career, but there *were* free snacks and a welcome box with Mambu-branded trinkets. 

By Monday afternoon I was back home and seated at my new home office—that being the corner of our bedroom with a space just big enough for the smallest desk Ikea sells. I’m facing the window, so it’s not the worst WFH situation, but I’ll be more than ready to at least occasionally visit the HQ.

I neither expected nor got a riveting first week—it’s been a lot of app downloads, password setups, and hi-how-are-ya’s with my new coworkers¹. I’ve also completed a bunch of required new-hire training courses, which is rather meta, since my team wrote the courses; I’m meant to understand the content but also to own it moving forward.

I’m excited about the job. It’s a warm fuzzy feeling to feel qualified for the work I’m doing, to have smart ideas about how I can help make the training better. I’ve got good first impressions about the company too, which has strong diversity and anti-harassment policies and just hired a Director of Sustainability (she was one of my three fellow new hires!). 

Meanwhile, my residency in Nederland is past the five-month mark. I’m less than a week from reaching a 1,000-day streak in Duolingo, and coincidentally am almost done with the *entire* Dutch Duolingo course. Final verdict: while Duolingo will IN NO WAY make you conversational in a new language on its own—and is often frustratingly obtuse about how Dutch people *actually* speak²—it’s still a great way to soak up common words and phrases to the point that you can almost-but-not-quite interpret the latest De Speld headline.

Which reminds me: we are officially OVER the weather. I knew what I was in for, moving to northern Europe in the wintertime, but I’d at least hoped for a lovely spring as a reward. Instead—with a few gloriously sunny days excepted—Amsterdam had its coldest April in 35 years, and May isn’t doing much better. But it’s spring just the same: tulips and peonies are in abundance, and the days have reached an alarming length, with light lingering in the sky well past 10pm and starting up again around 5am. I’ve got to wear my eyemask to have any hope of sleeping until the alarm goes off. By midsummer it’ll almost never be completely dark outside.

No explanations will be given.

• Two jigsaw puzzles
• Two loufahs
• HEB tupperware
• My old car’s license plates
• Two samples of Dolly Parton perfume
• A roll of Dolly Parton wrapping paper

• Hydrocortisone
• Sleeping pills
• Trader Joe’s peanut butter cups
• An Apple Extended keyboard made in 1992
• A bare plank of wood
• An oven mitt
• A bear balaclava