I think of my life in five-year chunks. If any aspect of my time on earth has lasted half a decade, that’s a sizeable bite of the enchilada. Many things last even longer, sometimes surprisingly so: I’ve had happywaffle.com in my life for 25 years, my Firefly t-shirt for 20, Kiki for almost ten.
So, no matter how short it seems, my five-year anniversary in Amsterdam on Sunday/Monday1 is a long dang time. I can no longer claim to be fresh off the boat.
There are subtle signs I’m becoming a proper European. On my recent trip home I ordered a croissant at a café, specifically thought I was not going to be a Eurotrash snob about it, and hahahaha it was so bad I didn’t finish it. Similarly, after years of grumbling about Americanos and wishing for a big ol’ mug of American coffee, I ordered one…took a nice long sip…and thought “Huh. Bit watery.”
Loving animals is a core part of Kiki’s identity—one of her go-to t-shirts reads “Be kind to animals or I’ll kill you.” (I bought it for her.) The number of times we’ve risked adopting an animal is so high that it’s a wonder we’ve actually gotten so few.
Last year, a butterball of a hamster snuck past the defenses, so to speak. It all started with an act of Big Government that would make Ron Swanson grumble: The Netherlands banned certain non-native species as pets, among them the Russian dwarf hamster. Our local pet shop had one who’d been available for awhile, but nobody wanted because he was a biter. Kiki asked them: What will happen if you haven’t sold him by the deadline? Oh, I’m sure they’ll give us a little more time. But what then? Awkward silence on the line
Moments later, my phone rang: “Can we adopt a hamster?”
I first met Duo the owl before a move to The Netherlands was even a glimmer in my eye, opening duolingo.com on a lark one day at work and discovering how devilishly simple they’d made it to get started. After two or three clicks, I was learning the basics of Dutch: vrouw = woman, jongen = boy. Weeks later, I surprised Kiki on one of her visits to Texas by showing off my fancy new Dutch skills: “De vrouw heeft een appel.” (The woman has an apple.)
It only took a couple of months before Duolingo’s various casino-style “gamification” tricks got me on a daily streak that, as of this writing, stands at 2,500 days. Like most addictions, I never expected it to last this long. Unlike most addictions, it’s adding rather than removing brain cells.
I’ve often said that the worst part of moving to Amsterdam was getting used to it. Occasionally I’ll show around a visiting friend and have that moment of “Oh yeah, it is one of the prettiest cities on earth.” Mostly, though, I’m just heading to the grocery store.
That’s partly why I wasn’t buzzy with anticipation as the date approached for the ceremony that would permanently replace my American nationality with Dutch-American. I’ve been here over four years already; married a Dutch citizen; bought a Dutch house; slowly learned the Dutch language.2 I’m not sure what it’s like to feel Dutch, but I’ve been Dutch for a while now. This felt like a progression, not a sea change.
Still, paperwork means something. Most importantly: I can never be forced out of my adopted homeland or think of myself as less-than for being an immigrant. Most usefully: I can skip the customs line at Schiphol! Equally valid reasons to be excited when I got the letter telling me the king had approved my application for citizenship.
When I lost my job at Mambu last June (baby’s first layoff!), it was only a little bit surprising. I’d done a darn good job making myself valuable there—hell, I’d hosted the company-wide gathering only a few months before. But they’d been taking on water, so to speak, and eventually even the morale officers find themselves holding a paddle.3 I was sad, but already in the Acceptance phase when the fateful Zoom call came.
All things being equal I’d rather *not* be laid off (hot take, I know), but I was less than panicky. I’d gotten my Mambu job rather easily, and I’d chatted with some recruiters before I was even laid off, so I was confident in the job search ahead. As Kiki pointed out, it was kind of them to let me go at the beginning of the summer! I took an impromptu trip home, directed my improv play, made a “Funemployment” list of projects, and started my job search with a casual pickiness that I now regret. “I dunno,” I’d wonder, “do I really want to commute to the other side of Amsterdam?”
(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.
The opposite of curb appeal.
Still, once we got past the front door, we warmed to the place almost immediately. It’s over 100 square meters4, compared to the 585 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.
Identiy the midpoint of the intersection. You have half a second.
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.”
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.
They’re always arguing in the back seat, though.
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?
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 Rijvaardigheidsbewijzen6, 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?
