Travelogue 1042 – April 21
Keep Your Workplace Tidy

Rotterdam is a dynamic place. There is construction happening everywhere in this city. It never ends. The roads are being dug up everywhere. Every week, you can count on some regular route of yours being disrupted. The city does provide fair warning online. I should be looking it up every morning: wegwerkzaamheden.

I took this photo out the window of the hospital. This old building that they’re tearing down was once part of the hospital complex. You see rooms on the bottom floors opened to the air by the demolition. With war in the news, it’s tempting to say this looks like photos from the warzone. But it doesn’t at all.

Look how neat the site is. That is what drew me to take the picture. It seems so Dutch to me, contained and tidy. That little bulldozer looks like a toy on its neat, sandy track.

Look at the style of the building. It’s typical for Rotterdam, this stacked look in light colours, with domino windows and shallow balconies like the trays you stack on your desk. This is the post-war city standing inside the booming millennial one. On the left you see the sterner style of the new hospital buildings.

Travelogue 1041 – April 18

An Easter Day

Easter this year was a dazzling spring day. It was stunning, both in its beauty and its emotional impact. We’ve had our sunny days before this one, but the benevolence of this Easter Sunday’s rained down on us like something altogether new. I don’t know how many of the other Rotterdammers who were walking the streets yesterday felt as grateful as I did, how many had experienced the winter as unusually long, but there were certainly a lot of smiling faces to mirror back my relief.

As a family we took a walk downtown, along the Westersingel canal, admiring the sculptures there – climbing on the sculpture’s pedestals, in the case of the girls, – looking over the glinting surface of the water, and watching all the people go by. There were many who had had the same idea, all of them lightly chatting and strolling on in full contentment, with ‘not a care in the world,’ as the old phrase would have it. It’s such a comfort that we are allowed days like this.

In early evening, I managed my own walk, along the humbler canal behind our building, the Spaansebocht canal. It’s a ragged little park, but my attention was swept up as I walked slowly along the paved pathway, swept up into the brilliant sunlight in the new leaves above, into the varieties of cherry blossoms still blooming, red and white among the spring greens, and into the intermittent little melodies of the birdsong. In the canal, I saw my first ducklings of the season, tacking across the calm canal water in the wake of their mother, who skittishly eyed the human who had stopped by the water’s edge. There were four babies, one yellow and three black. As though obeying a quiet edict of the season, the pair of swans who had made their home here all winter were nowhere to be seen. The canal was left to the ducks raising their broods.

Travelogue 1040 – April 13
Flying the Ukrainian Flag

My American friends are curious how the Dutch feel about the war in Ukraine. My replies to them are brief and unhelpful. The Dutch are not the most emotionally demonstrative of people. I’ve seen no one shouting at the TV or recruiting for a Dutch Donbas brigade. I don’t really know how they feel about it, or how it differs from responses in America.

We did raise for Ukraine at my girls’ school. I think the parents felt good about choosing that for the year’s fundraiser. Honestly, though, it did little to alleviate the anxiety and tedium involved in events like these. We had to dream up activities with our children and then become the primary consumers for their performances and crafts. It sounds fun, and some of it is. For example, the kids who were musicians got to play outside the entrance to the school on scheduled mornings, the Ukrainian flag rolled out in front of them, with buskers’ caps open for change. That was a pleasant way to start the day.

Those of us whose children made crafts, though, were forced to submit to the market experience upstairs, cramming into the narrow hallways of the top floor of our school in order to stop at every table among a suffocating crowd and coo lovingly over the beautiful creations. Children swarmed around us, while parents pushed their own lovelies to the front of the line in a desperate bid to get business done and over with.

That was about as personal as the Ukrainian experience has been so far. Otherwise, it seems like we’re all just watching from afar and feeling the same dread, whether we’re Dutch or American.

And commenting, and commenting, and commenting. I’ve noticed that comments about Ukraine follow a similar pattern to those about ‘The Slap’: “Sure, it was wrong, but ….” Those first four words buy hundreds more. Will Smith and Vladimir Putin have a lot in common, it seems. I wonder if this sort of chatter bodes ill for the rule of law. We seem to be forgetting that justice is blind. Not even nice fellows, or emotionally wounded fellows, get to assault other human beings. Not even all the accumulated moral trespasses of NATO members, and there have been quite a few of them, buy poor Vlad a free pass to invade a free nation. Full stop.

What if we exercised the full stop more often? “It was wrong.” What if we bit our tongues on the wise disclaimers? It might be liberating. It might taste a little like humility.

Travelogue 1039 – April 1
Één April

It’s April Fool’s Day and Nature’s trick has been to leave a blanket of snow over everything during the night. The girls were excited, looking out the windows and shouting. Once we were outside, and on the way to school, they wanted only to run and leave tracks.

It’s a moody climate, and it’s a moody people. On the tram, you read the weather in people’s faces. Yesterday, as clouds gathered, moods had soured. Passengers were sullen and withdrawn. They scowled, and they slumped in their seats. This morning, there is something else, a brightening of sorts. It’s not a sunny good cheer, but a kind of exhilaration. The sharp cold, and the sight of snow may not have been what anyone wanted at this time of year, but it was a change, and the change was exciting.

Approaching the school, we could hear the children screaming. The snow had turned to slush on asphalt and pavement, but it had accumulated on the artificial turf under the playground toys. The kids were running in circles, scooping up snow, making snowballs and chasing each other. My girls were shy, only standing and pelting each other.

When Baby Jos comes home after school, she tells me stories. Did I know there was a fish with human teeth? Did I know there was a tiny forest animal that was made of deer poop? Did I know there was a dog who could fly? My job was to say, “Really? I didn’t know that.” I had to be coached to respond in the right way. Then she shouted, “April Fool’s!”