Amsterdamlim-mlim-mlim

Recently I’ve been scurrying wildly from city to city, thereby hindering new blog entries. (Just for fun, let’s see how much we can nominalize that already-terrible sentence: Given the various wild scurryings from city to city that are a recent occurrence in my life, my blog has encountered a hindrance with regard to new entries.)

Earlier this month I made a trip to Amsterdam. Details to follow. Then I spent a few more weeks in Berlin, mostly scrambling to finish my microfilm scrollings and saying extended farewells to the awesome friends I barely had time to hang out with... and then poof, my time in Berlin came to an end. (...mostly poof. I’m going back for a couple weeks in April.) I’m now in Weimar, dividing my time between squinting at Liszt documents and gazing out the window at red rooftops.

I’ll talk about Amsterdam in a minute, but first:

I invented a useful word for researchers of nineteenth-century Germany. The word is: mlim. It means the little nubbins in Kurrentschrift that all look the same, especially es and ns and ms but also craggy rs and as. Let’s say you are transcribing a document in Kurrentschrift. You come across a word you can’t transcribe, but at the very least you can describe it! Ex: "this word has either a g or a z followed by mlim-mlim-mlim-mlim-mlim.” Usually in this case the word is genommen but it could be benennen or zernammen or geneemenamenonanmm. Or you can simply say, das sind böhmische Dörfer für mich, which literally means “it’s all Bohemian villages to me” but figuratively means, “it’s Greek to me.” (I personally prefer "it’s all mlims to me.” Let’s make this happen, people!)

However, in the event that you actually want to transcribe the mlims, you will need some special materials:

1) a magnifying glass (= Lupe, don’t even try to germanize English on that one)

2) a piece of paper to parse the endless stream of mlims in various locations until a word emerges

3) an archivist

4) a pillow to scream into

5) in rare cases: an archivist to scream into?

Actually, this example is fairly legible.
Does that mean I'm now badass?

I’m so glad I had an opportunity to explore Amsterdam a few weeks ago.  The city is absurdly beautiful. It was just a brief weekend trip, but I managed to cram in:

• gouda (as in, literally crammed that in)
• rode a yellow granny-bike along the canals
• a walking tour given by a Dutch guy whose name sounded like Blam (!) and who successfully rocked the man-bun
•  flea market
• 5 minute walk through the Red Light district, which was 5 minutes too many
• brewery in a windmill that (it turns out) is currently collaborating with a brewery in Chicago
• creepily marveled at a guy making himself a salad in his houseboat
• farmer’s market + best handmade veggie burger of all time
• found myself retracing the same four streets over and over... at which point I realized that it’s always better to have a local show you around
• depressing visit to the Anne Frank house in which I bumped my head very loudly and painfully in the hidden-bookcase-passageway; fellow visitors glared; reminded self that because I am Jewish I have the born right to bang my head as much as I damn want in the Anne Frank house
•  tried Indonesian food for the first time
• Stroopwafeln, cookies of the angels

And no, smoking weed is not on that list. I’m too much of a nerd. Though I did enter a “coffeeshop” in search of a hot chocolate and, through a cloud of marijuana smoke, saw someone sniffing cocaine at the bar like it was no big deal. I think the witnessing of 1 major vice counts as at least 1.6 minor vices. (...nerd logic.)

That was the aspect of Amsterdam I found strange, though: because of its reputation for being a place of licentious freedoms, it attracts the worst kinds of tourists... like, the kinds of tourists who buy knit caps that spell “Amsterdam” in pot leaves. And to accommodate these visitors, the city has blocks and blocks of ticky-tacky shops full of bongs and fugly shotglasses. Meanwhile, a group of tourists died only a couple weeks prior to my visit: they bought cocaine in the Red Light district only to discover (too late) that it was white heroin. The same city that can take your breath away with glorious canals and cool markets and  cycling culture (there are 3 bikes per capita there! And lots of theft, which I don’t understand, since there are more than enough to go around), or with its 17^th-century rowhouses and boats and cobbled streets – this same city has a seedy underbelly. I found this contrast puzzling. But I still loved it and want to go back.

Drooling over the canals. Wait a minute... are the canals made of drool?

The flea market: perfect place to buy a wedding dress, a spacesuit, or both!

Canals of shoes

It's birdiful

Giant goofy "omg this place is awesome" grin

SO MANY BIKES

Whomping willow

A coffeeshop (with chill cat!).
Later that evening: witnessed cocaine snorting at the bar. Also pretty decent hot chocolate.

Begjinhof: a medieval courtyard inhabited by spinsters.

Fungi at the farmer's market

Houseboat with greenroof

Windmill brewery with tasty beer

Ornate houses

Church and moon

Biking and Rijking. Sadly the museum was packed and we couldn't even get through half the ticket line. Sigh. Next time.

Meanwhile, back in Berlin, the trash pile that had been accumulating in front of my building for four months grew sentient and began to question its own existence. It bore a sign for several days that read

Warum

Warum

Warum

along with several hashtags about cleaning up Wedding. And the Wedding activists were true to their word. Just one day after it discovered its own existence, the trash pile was gone. My building was returned to its former splendor, perfect timing for the awesome goodbye-party I threw, in which I had listed the trash pile as an important landmark for locating my front door. But somehow people found their way, which was good, because I went insane and cooked like 8 things:

Somehow we managed to eat most of it.

Then I packed my bags and headed to Weimar, where I am currently wrestling with mlims. And though a chilly breeze blows along the Ilm (yes, even the river here sounds like mlim), the first rustlings of Spring are in the air...