Travelogue 528 – October 25
The Round in London

The meetings are over. This morning all I have to do is make my way to Heathrow. But I have some time. And I have a light hangover that needs some attention. That's standard after meetings with the Brits.

I close up Graham's place. He is in New York visiting his daughters, and he was kind enough to allow me to stay at his place two nights. It was such a peaceful place to stay. He stays in a flat inside a large house in Holland Park. The place is one room plus a bathroom. It has white walls and white carpet. The bed is covered in white. I move very cautiously, afraid to leave a mark.

White is the theme of the neighborhood. Holland Park is a collection of quiet streets around this mild hill in west London. It's a rich area; the houses are large, and most of them are white. Or maybe that is cream. There are a few painted in a pastel Haight-Ashbury theme, but most remain white. They stand mute, stoically secure in their neo-classical lines, as though each were stamped in plaster. I feel as though I must whisper here.

I take my hangover to Portobello Road, which is only a ten-minute walk from the house. Those San Francisco colors must have bled through from here. It's a road famous for its street market, which is setting up as I arrive, vendors of hats and vegetables leisurely arranging their tables. There's one table I'm fond of, selling vintage sports equipment, old boxing gloves, old soccer balls, old rugby balls, all looking as though cut from the same cow seventy-five years ago.

The shop fronts along Portobello Road are small and functional. They are many per block, and they run side by side for miles, a few chain names, but most small locals: antiques and Oxfam, coffee and clothes. Walk a few more feet and see another. Small's the theme. Graham has recommended the Coffee Plant, where I take the hangover for treatment this morning. The coffee is very good. So is the croissant, very light and flaky. The clientele has the same consistency. It's a true neighborhood place, where one learns to despise human nature all over again. The place is cramped and the people are too comfortable. They crowd and they shout, and my head rings. Children are screeching from their strollers.

The evening before, I am across town in the Borough with the boys. This is where Pete's office is, among the maze of single-story brick and raised railway tracks of the Borough. We have devoted most of the afternoon to our proceedings, and the boys have been very patient. So now I must pay the piper.

Tonight's pub is another small London space, two rooms not much bigger than the Coffee Plant, the Charles Dickens on Union Street. The bar makes a square in the corner of the first room. There are tables below the window. There is a black supporting pillar in the center of the room. It has a circular shelf fitted to it, where a lively group stands and tells stories to each other.

There is a table in the other corner in back, near the archway into the second room, and that is where we sit, below the TV screen, where Tottenham is struggling with a Moldovan team for advancement in the Europa League. Jonathan orders the ale that advertises American hops. He and I are the Americans on the UK board. Pete is game for the American hops. Thomas orders some very tall lager. 'Cheers.' There are a few more rounds. Tottenham wins, and the boys feel as though they have won, too. We are proud of ourselves, the meetings leading to genuine progress, an elusive quality in most strategic discussion. We happy few have missed each other, and we have a store of laughs to catch up on.

And so it goes. Merry times dissolve into night. It's morning and I walk delicately down Portobello Road, passing all the cute places, on my way to the Tube Station. I'll spend an hour on the metro, an hour on the plane, and an hour on the buses in Rotterdam. The town will seem small after London. I'll arrive home in time for a restorative dinner. My wife and I will spend a quiet night at home.

Travelogue 527 – October 24
The Astral

I've managed to lose my way, and in short order. It's only been twenty minutes or so since I took my leave of Mark on the south bank of the river, just under the Westminster Bridge. I've crossed the Thames, weaving among tourists, stopping to allow for a dozen photos, swinging well around the father snapping children, or the children snapping father.

I've stopped once or twice for my own moments with the bridge's prospect of London on a sunny and blustery fall day. The river sparkles below. South is the Eye, north is the gilded tower of Ben and the yellow cloisters of Parliament,

I've stopped at the Abbey, so much more modest than the Dom of Köln, but so inviting, and I've assessed the damage of the price of a ticket inside to pay my respects to Mr. Shakespeare. At eighteen pounds sterling, the damage is enough to dissuade me and send me back into the streets of Westminster.

I've returned to London to wrap up some strategy sessions with the board. The American organization has been all-consuming for the last few years. I've neglected our British colleagues, so my summer project this year has been to catch up with affairs on the island, meet with the UK organization, evaluate and update its role. We've had a few conferences with the American Fulbright scholars, who volunteered to sit in on strategic reviews. During this trip, the full board meets to wrap up the strategy work and set the agenda for 2014.

I have the morning free. I've met with Mark, who I saw only a few weeks ago in Ethiopia. He's back in England a few weeks to make some dosh. Today he's down to three pounds, and he's still waiting for work. I buy him a beverage, and we contemplate our view of the Thames, and we contemplate our view of gentle Time flowing by. Little Yig is thirteen now, and not so little. 'I knew that runt when he was four,' I say. A brisk breeze makes the fall leaves scuttle along the pavement, under the feet of the tourists.

Beyond the Abbey, I'm improvising. I know this part of city in broad strokes only. I'm passing into a district of Greats, Great Peter and Great Smith. I've passed the Home Office, a humble box dressed in colored panes of glass among buildings much older and more fun, Victorian beauties in red stone, curving beside the curving streets, red double-decker buses swinging by, looking like they should tip.

I'd like to make my way to Green Park, and I know it's north, but I've forgotten that the river twists toward the south here, and I'm delving deeper into old Westminster. I'm a few minutes from the highest offices of the land, and the neighborhoods are becoming quiet and quaint. I finally catch sight of the tower of Victoria Cathedral, and I correct course, arriving in due course at Horseferry Road, a harried avenue that careens through the district at a cocksure angle. Carefully I cross. I see a small dive called the Astral. It looks like a right greasy den. I'm hungry.

Inside, there's barely room to stand as you order. There is bustle; there are the heavy aromas of meat and sauces. People are lined up to the door. There are three cooks manning the kitchen, which takes up most of the space in the first room, and one woman with ample hips running among the tables and shouting . There are tables in a dark room in the back, but those are occupied, mostly by road workers.

I sit at a counter in front, looking out the window at an alleyway, where the occasional taxi parks while the driver comes in for a coffee. I order a full English. The ham is dry; the potatoes served in compact patties, but nonetheless the breakfast hits the spot. And I'm paying less than five pounds. A couple blokes cram in at the counter next to me, speaking in the broadest of working class London accents. And I'm happy. This close to the grandest London, the humblest, and I'm savoring my runny eggs.

Travelogue 526 – October 13
A Round in Köln

Köln is the fourth largest city in Germany. It's less than seventy years since the city was bombed to the edge of extinction – I'm reading that the bombing 'reduced' the population by 95%'. Reduced!

But Köln was always a major spot on the map, since its founding by a mass of humorless Romans in the middle of the century that saw Jesus walk the earth. It was given the pithy name Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium. It became capital of this bit of frontier, and the proud city never looked back.

For the Romans, the Rhine was the line in the sand, beyond which lived scary people with painted faces and strange fashions. After the dust had cleared on that half-millennium tug of war, the Germans firmly in charge of the fifth-century European Union, the Rhine began its life as an artery of trade. The Colonia, or Köln, became queen of this little stretch of river, jewel of the Rhineland.

Proud Kölners were the force behind one of the messiest battles of the Middle Ages, that of Worringen in 1288, in which the citizens of the city threw in with one side in a messy dynastic squabble, one in which they would normally have no interest, because it so happened that John of Brabant was fighting against the Archbishop of Köln. The archbishop was lord of those parts, and the city wanted independence. The rule of the archbishop dates back to the reign of great Otto I, who appointed his brother as archbishop and then created the Electorate of Cologne in the tenth century, as part of an ongoing effort to undermine the power of the landed aristocracy.

A few thousand left dead on the fields outside Worringen, the city of Köln was granted its independence. It was a free city, and would be until Napoleon came along.

And then the (American) planes came ...

In any case, Köln is back in the game, modern and crowded. My impression, strolling among the busy streets radiating out from the Dom and orienting themselves by the mighty Rhine, among the streets of shopping and the streets of business, buildings rising stolidly and with precious little reference to Romans or archbishops, Otto or Adolph, my impression is of Chicago. I've made the mistake of booking a hotel on the far side of the train station. That means at least twice a day pushing our way through the choking hallways of the station, and being pushed. Abandoning National Socialism does not mean the Germans have softened any of their edges.

Lodging beyond the station also means walking the gauntlet of the sleazy, narrow street leading to the hotel, past fast food and gambling and bars. Passers-by give us the big city stare, and we lower our heads to soldier on. The hotel lobby smells of cigarette smoke. The entire hotel, one dim and steep moaning staircase leading up to a few rooms per floor, stinks of cigarettes. A couple regulars sit in the dining room, papered in the colors of a post-apocalyptic sunset. They stare and they smoke.

These two grey men must be the ones who arrive back at the hotel at 1:30am, shouting as they slowly mount the stairs. One night, they are laughing at a story that mysteriously revolves around repeated shouts of 'Filippo!' The laughing dissolves into coughing. They stomp as they walk. Then suddenly they are quiet, as though they vanish. There is only the moon over the jumbled tile roofs of the neighborhood. The corner of one nearly penetrates our window.

Menna gets her first taste of winter in Köln. Her fingertips ache as we negotiate our way across the city center. Her brows contract in real anxiety, as she buries her cheeks into the collar of her new fleece coat. We stroll with Scottie by the river, among chill winds. We find Old Town, and stroll among the jolly high house fronts around the Heumarkt. We discover the Great Saint Martin church, with its dash of nineteenth century Romance in the high square tower, with its own dash of Rome underneath its floor, in piles of old brick that used to be a bath, used to be warehouses. And through it all Menna holds herself tightly inside the fleece, looking at the world through worried eyes.

I have come to Köln, inflicting this weather on Menna, in order to run a race. On Sunday morning, she and I have to throw back the bed covers and welcome the pre-dawn cold. We have to rush out of doors and down Sleazy Street to the station. We have to catch the Metro. This we rehearsed yesterday. This well-oiled German race has a start and finish on opposite sides of the river, and on Sunday morning there are no reliable trains directly across the river. We have to travel by means of two Metro lines, describing a lengthy U south and then back n the other side.

The first train sis at one station overlong. The second train is ten minutes coming. I have to start stripping off layers on the train. Just off the train we encounter the back of the long line of runners, a crowd stretching toward the river and out of sight. Menna jogs with me beside the crowds. Someone with a loudspeaker announces the start, and the crowd stirs, starts jogging in place, but it goes nowhere. It will be a few minutes until the start reaches this far. Menna and I kiss and part. I slip past one of the barriers and into the crowd. I join in the tribal dances, shaking my hands and shifting from foot to foot. This one is for the free city.

Travelogue 525 – October 12
A Clown in Köln

There are four clowns in front of the cathedral in Cologne. They stand on boxes at intervals in front of the facade of the great structure, some thirty meters from the doorway. It's early enough in the day that the plaza is not crowded, and there is an informal, cocky manner to the clowns. I'm judging they are French, as I try to listen in to their comments to each other. They are dressed and painted in white or in silver, hooded like ghosts or wigged like seventeenth-century burghers. When they are in role they wave to tourists, or they bend at the waist and beckon to them in inviting and in comical style.

I watch the people invited, and they seem powerless before the attention. They look away, look down, or they decline the invitation with a shake of the head. The clowning has a chilling effect on the tourists at this hour. Afternoon and evening tourists are a different breed. If nothing else, they have the support of greater crowds around them.

We make movies about scary clowns. We have a word for fear of clowns: coulrophobia. Interestingly, since the ancient Greeks had no clowns, the coiners of terms, who so love Greek, had to borrow from a word for stilt-walkers.

These are no American sad-hobo clowns. These are mischief and mime clowns. Cologne has a reputation as the Karneval town in the Rhineland. These clowns have a pedigree. But face paint is still a mask, and there is a menace to masks, even if the menace is Fun. We mortals feel impotent in the face of rampant Fun, as much as we make of our fun-loving, wild-child personae.

The best satire is ambiguous. The jester cringes before the king even as he mocks. So are the clowns in their seventeenth-century wigs paying tribute to history or mocking it? Are we to be welcomed or jeered at, having come to admire this heritage site? Both.

Cologne's Cathedral, or the Kölner Dom, officially the Hohe Domkirche St. Petrus, is the largest Gothic church in Northern Europe. It has the second-tallest spires and the largest façade of any church in the world. Construction started in 1248, inspired by the acquisition in 1164 of the relics of the Three Kings, taken from a church in Milan as spoils of war by Frederick Barbarossa. Church leaders knew the relics were going to be a big pilgrim attraction, so the cathedral needed to be suitable, needed to be a monument to the city's greatness.

The foundation stone was laid the Archbishop, one Konrad von Hochstaden, and work continued on for over two hundred years. Why the work was halted I don't know, but the spires were left unfinished, and a massive crane left in place over the south tower as adornment for centuries.

Scottie says he learned on his city tour that Kölners passed along, generation to generation, the superstition that if ever the work on the cathedral were finished, the world would end. So I suppose the crane was a symbol of the city's tender-hearted compassion for mortals around the world.

Eventually the romantic nineteenth century rolled around, with its fetish for the Gothic and with its no-nonsense commitment to engineering, and work was initiated again, tempting fate and apocalypse. In 1880, the work was complete, and everyone held their breath. The sun still rose the next morning, and the next, illuminating two towers 157 meters tall.

In the front plaza, beyond the station of the clowns, there is a replica of the finial that caps each tower, set at ground level for the tourists to gape at, wondering how the laborers, in a horse-and-buggy age, managed to lift this mass of stone 157 meters into the air and plant it like the star on a Christmas tree, one on each height.

The clowns see this every day. They don't look to the heights. They don't show any regard for the works of man, the precision and the wonder thereof. They prefer the quirks of God, the two-legged measures of imprecision, and they mug and they smirk and they call us out. 'You!' they seem to shout, in their silent derision. 'You! You are in Köln. That's right, you are in my city. Kiss the ring. These are my times.'

Travelogue 524 – October 7
Fragile

I'm back in Holland. Scottie has come to visit. We have a few hours to tour one morning, so Menna lends him her bike, and we cycle around the city center. It's one of those indeterminate mornings that we come to call good weather in Holland, though in reality it's just an absence of rain and some spots of sunshine, temperatures that allow for the shedding of jackets.

We see the river and we see the Swan Bridge. We stop by some of the architectural quirks of the city, the cube houses and the Blaak, and nearby the old leaning cathedral with its seventeenth century statue of Erasmus, consulting his Latin grammar.

Scottie likes the city. There's a mellow pace to it. He likes the pink bike paths, separated from the motorways. I'm reminded how much I like all that, too.

The next day, once Scottie has departed for Germany, I have my first bike accident. Getting banged up on your bike is a sort of rite of passage in Holland. It's morning. I'm coasting down one of those generous pink pathways, and I've built up some speed on the old ten-speed. I'm going to pass a guy on his left. I'm at his shoulder, when suddenly he pulls to the left and into me. It turns out there was a broken bottle on the path, and he's swerving to avoid it. Either way, he pushes me into the kerb before I can brake, and I take a tumble. I take a few scrapes on the knuckles of one hand and the palm of the other. I tear a hole in one of my few remaining whole pairs of pants. I stand up and brush off. The guy doesn't know what to say. He retrieves my water bottle from the middle of the street. There's nothing else to be done. I shrug it off, and set off again.

A few nights later I take my wife out to the movies. We like big screens and big action. Even if it's Imax, we sit in the third row. Even if it's Imax with 3-D. Tonight it's Gravity: the story of a woman who has the spunk to make it home from being untethered in outer space. Those are some large odds that she beats. And somehow the winning of the contest only seems to underscore the odds against us all, rather than the strength of the human spirit. My wife and I have a dumb game, in which I whisper during action movies my promise to protect her, against zombies or gunfights or during the hurtling car chases, during any one of the prolific descriptions of danger that films unfold for us. But in this movie, I don't have the heart. Any one life is like an Alpine wildflower in the shadow of winter, the movie says. We file out of the theater with the somber crowd. There has been no spontaneous applause in the theater when she makes it to safety.

This week my aunt Verna died. She had known it was coming. She had written to all her family to say good-bye. She had made it into her eighties, and by and large seems to have made a happy life from a rough start. There's little better tribute to be paid. I remember her from two stages of my own life, from my teen years, when she seemed to be around often, supporting my mother through hard times. Verna was tough but always with a smile. She could try a teen's soul with her stories and her folksy Colorado accent, but she was cheerful and energetic, and completely authentic.

The second stage of Verna took place years later, when she and my mother had settled next door to each other near the coast of Oregon. I was in my thirties and still a mess, a nephew to shake her head over and embrace. She was ever the same, strong and opinionated and caring. She had a smile for every occasion. She was dear to us all.

One of her sons published a video of hers recently on Facebook, a home video from 1950 or so, clips from a road trip she and her husband took to Alaska. It was so charming and so alien, disjointed and silent and scratched. It might have been Bradbury's Mars, but it was us, us before we were born. There's is only one shot with Verna, thin and sassy, passing out of frame with a laugh. And then she's off screen, and the camera keeps rolling.

Travelogue 523 – September 29
Go Godino!
Ethiopia, Part Three

No one but Tesfahun and I has risen yet. The shadows are contracting as morning advances. I am sharing a comfortable silence with Lake Babogaya. Tesfahun and I have already put in our training.

This vantage at the top of a steep bluff overlooking the lake is where Tesfahun slept last night. The lodge management set up a tent here, carried up a mattress and sheets, and we paid half the price of a normal room for Tesfahu to have the best view of any of us.

At 7am I climb to his eyrie at 7am to rouse him for the morning training. Of course he is up already. Ethiopian athletes never sleep in. Together we climb further up the same hill, and then along one side of the summit, among dewy grasses, out of our compound, and then down the other side, descending to an open, communal space, where the boys play football, and to the dirt road there. We start our run.

There is construction. I'm told this is part of the new road linking Debre Zeit to Addis Ababa. Now it's a deserted stretch of asphalt crossing over a marshy little river. On the other side, the asphalt halts at a crossing with a dirt road. We take a left and head into a wide valley.

The prospect here is vivid evidence of Ethiopia's beauty, particularly right after rainy season. The whole valley glows with an almost neon green, the color of healthy young t'eff. In the distance is a line of mild hills. The fields are dotted sparingly with short acacias. I'm energized by the sight for a long run.

The distance melts away. The occasional bus passes, rocking among the ruts of the dirt road, the driver honking at us and raising a thumb. It passes slowly, raising a cloud of choking dust, and boys are leaning out several windows shouting. Coming the other way is a bajaj, one of the ubiquitous blue three-wheeled buggies that ferry people around the towns of Ethiopia. The back seat is crammed with people. They slow and invite us in laughingly. When they leave, the valley of t'eff is silent again.

We make it to the first line of hills. We climb up and over, and then the road tilts to the right. We gain a new prospect over the valley, from this angle looking across its expanse as it runs toward the east. Before the next line of hills, we pass a small quarry and cement factory, common sights in recent years among the highlands.

The road sets itself in a long incline, and we fearlessly lean into it. The way leads us into the outskirts of a town, a town which will occupy the hilltop ahead. There are fences lining the road, fences made of sticks, and behind them are mud-walled houses. Boys standing in the road yell and laugh. A few start running with us, giggling as they do. They are half our size. One or two carry on when the others drop away. Men we pass yell at the boys, and the boys ignore them. I'm encouraging. 'Gobez,' I say. 'Good job!'

Our audience grows as we enter the town proper. We get steady shouts of approval and mockery. I ask Tesfahun to find out what town this is. He asks someone as we pass. 'Godino.' The men are laughing. 'All right, Godino. Thank you, thank you. Yes! We're happy to be here!' I'm waving and giving thumbs-up to the good citizens of Godino. They're cheering. We make it to the town center, no more than the confluence of three dirt roads and a couple of one-window shops. We've made it to the summit of the long hill, so we turn around. We'll return between the lines of our fans again, sharing our triumph. We'll return through the fields of t'eff. No one will have risen by the time we're back. My rest will be the view over the sleeping lake.

Travelogue 522 – September 28
The Feast
Ethiopia, Part Two

Only Tesfahun and I have risen early. Everyone else is lying in.

The lake doesn't have much to say. It lies in a bland well of peace under the mid-morning sun, reflecting back the cresting light with indifference, turning the light into beauty without the need to herald its magic. I'm glad for the simple and uncelebrated fact of beauty. I'm happy for the silence. It is restful after the unrelenting human chatter of the week previous. And there is an imperiousness and vanity underlying even the most trivial human chatter. Nature doesn't tug on my sleeve.

The trip to Ethiopia is short. I have to pack dozens of meetings into three business days at our new office. We operate out of a compound of our own now, a three-story house overlooking a rocky curve in a narrow dirty road that one reaches by walking through a nearby gas station lot and out the back. The office is roomy. We have space for everyone, for a meeting room, and for a small children's library on the ground floor. We've called the library 'Gebeta', which means something like 'feast', with the implication that we sit together at the table of learning.

Opening day for the Gebeta library is madness. I've been forced to schedule a number of meetings that day, which all pile up in the afternoon, some appointments arriving late, some running over, some uncharacteristically prompt. On top of that, I'm required for a signature at an office of records in nearby Sidist Kilo.

I've written before about the ordeal and the ugliness of government offices in Ethiopia. This one is less horrible than others, more chaotic than cruel, more nonsensical than evil. They detain us for a series of incomprehensible corrections. Melaku is running from one counter to another, then to the typist, and back again. Finally, we are allowed to sign the contract. I run to the waiting taxi.

The teens are at the office. They are not so 'teenie' anymore, as much as they may look the same to me. If anyone has changed, it could be Hiwot, whose plump and doe-eyed countenance has been exchanged for one lean and fierce. She always speaks for the group, her words direct and sharp-edged. She demands, and then she listens. She nods and she stares with unnerving intensity. Then suddenly the smile emerges, all warmth. She is an accomplished negotiator. We are preparing this group to take over the team cafe.

Half a dozen women athletes are there. We are launching a pilot program that places some of them in school library settings to assist and to work with the children. The athletes are so diffident. They stand humbly along one wall of the hallway, quietly and patiently. One always recognizes an athlete, her poise and her health radiating from her. We invite them into the Gebeta library, where we have gathered kids of a variety of ages, from our kindergarten on up, and we watch to see who flinches. The room is roaring with the children's excitement. They intrepidly pick up picture books and gather children around themselves.

The HPL guys are at the office. That's HPL for Horse-Powered Literacy. And HPL is our revision of the Donkey Mobile Library program, the men on horses to replace clumsy carts with the range of a few miles at most. Teachers on horses reach deep into the countryside, where they can share books with children in remote villages among the hills, read aloud to children who have no schools. The men of HPL are few in number yet, an elite corps. They both bear the name Legesse. One is an older man, one younger. The elder Legesse has traveled from southern Ethiopia to be with us. He was the educator of his village before we built a school there, volunteering his house as a place where the little ones could learn the alphabet. The young Legesse is apprentice. He roams the grassy hills west of Chancho, among the small Oromo villages far from the market town, far from schools. He gathers the children under a tree, his horse tethered and standing nearby. He reads to them. He rides home again as the shadows get long.

Now I rest. The shadows are contracting as morning advances. No one but Tesfahun and I has risen yet. Tesfahun and I have put in our training. I am sharing a comfortable silence with the lake. Just the friend one needs sometimes, placid and indifferent.

Travelogue 521 – September 27
She Was Looking at Me
Ethiopia, Part One

Mimi won't sit at the table again until I take care of the frog that was under foot. I push the little guy onto the top of her notebook, and then I lean out the window to let him go in the garden there. He's very cooperative. He doesn't want to scare Mimi. But it's hard for a frog to control first impressions. He's not intimidating; he could fit snugly into one of our coffee cups. And he's not too lively, just hopping once a minute, looking for a quiet place. Mimi screams and jumps from her seat. 'She's looking at me!'

It's night. We're waiting to be served dinner in the restaurant of the Salayish Lodge in Debre Zeit. We're used to their cycles. You order and you wait. It may take an hour for the food to arrive, but it will be tasty. The waiting is calm. It rests in the dim lighting of the room; it takes on the tone of the night sounds, of the birds and the frogs.

Mark lives at the Salayish Lodge. The lodge is a collection of ageing circular mud huts made up in tourist fashion, meaning with large beds, with modern showers and hot water, with sit-down toilets, and with strips of bamboo lining the walls.

The huts are getting old. Mine has acquired a persistent aroma of urine. The bed's mattress has been beaten to the consistency of the wood beneath it. Nature wants to reclaiming the space. The mosquitoes circle with delight when I bed down. Mimi's frog has migrated into my shower basin.

But the charm is the compound, which is lovingly tended, with lush gardens lining the paths, gardens supplying ingredients for those leisurely dinners, including the coffee and the avocados and the guava. The fish is fresh from the lake.

And yes, there is the charm of the lake, Lake Babogaya. The Salayish doesn't front the lake, as the other half dozen or so resorts do. But the lake is just across the dirt road and down a steep hill. That hillside provides access to one of the only public beaches at the lake. Boys gather here every day to strip to their shorts and dive into the water and shout. Local shepherds also drive their animals big and small to the water side for a drink. And here the lodge's little blue rowboat is moored.

Mamush will lead us down to the water, like thirsty animals, and he will hold the boat steady as we board. We will be four guests, a nice balance in a small blue rowboat, with Mamush sitting up front to row. And row he will, steadily and without complaint for several hours as we make the circuit around the lake, looking up into the gardens of the resorts that climb up the steep sides of this crater lake. Mark will bring a picnic lunch. We'll eat avocado sandwiches, and the Ethiopian beer will inspire Mark and I to rock the boat in order to get frog screams from Mimi.

Today is Meskel, and it's also my birthday. The one occasion celebrates the discovery of the true cross, and the other the discovery of a third son in our celebrated family line. Today the commemoration is very mellow, a surrender to African sunshine. But last night, driving home from Menna's family's house, driving back up the hill toward Shiro Meda, the roads are illuminated here and there with the fires of Demera.

Demera takes place on the eve of Meskel, and it's the real holiday, if not in religious significance, then in the making of merry. It seems that the ritual celebrates the Empress Helena's perspicacity in following the smoke of her divining fire to the hiding place of the true cross. We reenact. We spend the day stacking wood into a high conical shape, and we spend the evening tracking the heavy smoke.

It's a new year in Ethiopia. We pass on in the taxi, counting the fires, and watching the shadows play. Today, it's the rowboat. There are no shadows whatsoever and just one fire in the sky, sending smoke off in pursuit of the true voyager.

Travelogue 520 – September 16
So This is Holland

We look at each other, and we say, 'So this is the real Holland.' We are walking toward old Delfshaven, toward our favorite place of an evening, the Ooievaar, which occupies the bottom floor of one of those buildings precariously narrow, leaning on its neighbors in rows that line the brick streets. The face of the building is a unique blend of the designs available to brick workers, each of them being unique, of course, and that being one of their preeminent charms. But the brick face of the Ooievaar has a special flair – eight steps to the high gable, parti-colored brick set in half-moons above each window, and a graceful bell in light red brick outlining all the windows.

But when Menna and I refer to the real Holland, we refer not to the earth, but to the sky. We had different plans, but even as we dressed for the evening, the weather changed. The rain started to fall. We reined in our plans, drawing them geographically closer, so we wouldn't have to get on the bikes. We walk to the Ooievaar, taking our evening rain in light doses.

The next morning, sunshine brightens the curtains of our place as I ready for the day. I note that with some relief. Even as it starts to cool with autumn, I like to hop on the cycle in jeans and short sleeves in the morning, feel the cool air pass over my skin as I gather speed on the bike, like I'm cooling the system after a night of dreams. It's refreshing.

I'm admiring the clouds, always a spectacle in northern Europe, broken across a panoramic sky, a sky spacious enough to allow for the dark and the light, wet clouds and daylight's heroic light, light making it all the way down the long leagues of oceanic sky, to the real waters lying impassively among their channels, the waters rippling only slightly among gentle breezes, reflecting back toward the dramatic sky its palette of morning colors.

This bike path leads away from old Delfshaven, away from the Ooievaar, toward business, toward work, toward the center of Rotterdam,, but not before a mellow mile beside the Schie canal, and then crossing it. My street traverses a narrow island of sorts, created by the Schie running close and parallel to the big Maas for a mile or two before emptying out into the larger river. At one end of the island is the Ooievaar, standing watch over the first small canal cutting from the Schie and creating one side of my island. At the other end, I'm passing over one of those Rotterdamse drawbridges – this one leading into a lock, – and I'm looking back over the little lagoon of sorts created by Schie here, and I'm taking in a long view of the sky. It's my first weather reading of the day, and at just about the moment I judge that I might be in for some precipitation, the drops start coming. I haven't gotten far before the rain begins in earnest. And I'm only in a T-shirt.

This crisis calls for a cool head. I make a dash for the bike path that leads to the park. Beside it is a hill that falls steeply toward a sunken road that will enter the Maas Tunnel and pass underneath the river. I'm not aiming for the tunnel, but for that hill, covered in healthy pines. I toss the bike down and against the trunk of one of the trees. I take shelter, swinging the pack off my back. I'm able, under cover of the pines, to open the backpack in relative dryness and dig around for my jacket, packed deeply therein, underneath my computer and books and snacks. I smartly yank the jacket free and start pushing my arms into the sleeves.

I'm covered. Crisis solved, I pause to reflect on the close call, sighing into the cool and humid air, exhaling a mist into the autumn chill. Never let anyone say that life in Holland lacks adventure. It's there in the clouds, those majestic visions of the Dutch masters, piling high into the firmament, and creating a kind of study of absurdity for the tiny denizens of the cities below, throwing sunshine down on one neighborhood and a torrent down on another, revealing patches of cheery blue in some near distance while the wee humans take shelter where they can, rows of them standing under a bus stop shelter and staring morbidly at their share of the patchwork sky, the one dark cloud that sullenly refuses the sea's invitation to go.

And there's one poor soul trapped under the shadow of a grove of pines, like a hobo shivering in his makeshift home. He waits not for surcease, but only for an allaying of the rain, carefully watching the drops as they hit the wet pavement, measuring them like the rhythm of an atmospheric snare or a high-hat, waiting for his cue, cue to a running solo.

Travelogue 519 – September 12
The Year is 2006

Last night I dreamed about Ethiopia. At least, it was identified as Ethiopia in my dreaming mind. I'm looking up into a spectacular blue sky. I'm marveling at it, thinking that I must enjoy this beauty while I have it, though I can't say now whether the awareness that will pass is the awareness that I am in a dream or the awareness that I am due back in Holland, where, by the way, the unshielded sun has been a rare presence. Clouds and light rain have moved in for a long stay. Menna had has her first test at cycling in the rain, and she has passed with flying colors, as she has every test of expat living. I'm really impressed at her strength and resilience.

The Ethiopia in my dream begins to diverge in odd ways from the real thing. There are sand dunes, and men are riding away on camels. Well, arguably that is a scene one could find in Ethiopia, though it bears little resemblance to my Ethiopia, centered in the rocky and verdant highlands. Then there is a huge bobcat dashing by, chasing an antelope or something. I'm thinking, 'Really?' and the big cat might have heard me, because he stops and turns to look at me. I stand between it and Menna, and make sure she backs into the house that's suddenly behind us. But the cat just seems curious. He might have had the same thought: 'Really? This isn't MY Ethiopia.'

Yesterday was Ethiopian New Year. Menna and I celebrate with Ato Moges, taking him to Getu's house, where we treat him to Ethiopian food. There are a number of relative quantities in that sentence. The Ethiopian food is a qualified version of it, made with European ingredients. And this is Getu's house, but it's also a restaurant. I should explain that Ethiopian restaurants in Rotterdam are informal institutions, meals prepared in the homes of Ethiopians like Getu. Cooking is his 'hobby', Ato Moges says. At the end of the meal, you pay, as an act of courtesy. Ethiopians are masters of the blurred line; that I can testify to in a hundred ways. And this scenario is but one example. Getu is host and waiter and friend. At the end of the meal it becomes clear, if one reads the signals of this culture, that I am expected to stump up for a few rounds of New Year's toasts, and stick around for lots of holiday chatter. But I'm finding my euros and my time too valuable for all that, and I make ready to leave. Menna is annoyed with the lot of us. She repeats, and she is emphatic: she wants nothing to do with the Ethiopian community here. Too may rules, all the time, she says. Too much pressure.

And so the place haunts us, as places will. I find places to be the most potent hauntings. The bobcat and I stare at each other, 'Is this MY Ethiopia?' Moges and Getu sit in their dim Dutch salons, leaning back into the cushions, hands across their ample bellies, and they discuss Haile Selassie. They play a 'did you know' game with Menna, acting the parts of village elders and teachers. They could do this for hours. 'Even his torturers could not look him in the eye. They bowed as they entered, without even knowing they were doing it. That was the power this man had about him.'

The year is now 2006 in Ethiopia, and I enjoy a moment of multiple resonances as I consider it. I think of my own 2006, when it really was MY Ethiopia. I was a few years into the experience, and I was making it my own. A few years into a place is the height of ownership. I find it only slides backward after that. One's knowledge is challenged.

I think of what it means that it's 2006 in Ethiopia. I was there for the Millennium, their millennium. The place enters its new year without me. I herald it from afar, from Europe. I raise a glass in Ato Getu's hired salon, and I propose a toast to the Inkutatash, to the Addis Amat, to the new year, the new time already rolling forward, already spending itself with the fervor of new life, and I only feel the weight of the aged, whose job it is to admit that this isn't mine and this isn't mine. And whose Ethiopia is it, anyway, the bobcat pauses to say aloud, exhibiting the wisdom of an imaginary animal. He has the whiskers and ears of a bobcat, but he has the body of a panther or mountain lion, the tremendous muscle of a creature built to prowl the crushing boulders of high mountains.

Travelogue 518 – September 7
World Port

And so in Holland, we awake every day to the world of waters, the precise and right-angled channels, large and small, some cutting the fields into fine strips, some making for pretty networks among the towns, offering themselves as roadways, conjuring cute arching bridges, and drawing the lovers out for lingering strolls.

In Rotterdam the royal waters would be the Maas River, majestic swath of water passing through the center of town and emptying into the sea, providing the city with centuries of lucre and its reason for being. 'We are Europe's port.'

There's a fair share of worship that the river merits, and this weekend witnesses the city's ritual adoration, 'Wereldhavendagen', or World Port Days. For four days, the port's business makes way for events and tours. I appreciate the educational angle, not only showcasing the port facilities but taking the good citizens by the hand and explaining to them how the business and the technology work. The Dutch are famous for their mastery of everything water and the technology can be astounding. This is the opportunity to be wowed.

I don't make it out on any tours this year, but I have undertaken several sacred vows to do it all next year. We do make certain to attend the main event, which is Saturday night's river parade. We cycle down to the river early, parking the bikes a mile or so from the action, which will be centered around the Erasmus Bridge. We stroll by the waters, looking like lovers, watching the procession of the final colors of the evening in the sky, and those forming the backdrop for the color of downtown, buildings alight with celebration.

The show begins promptly, and it begins with the circling of two boats shooting sprays of water high into the air, almost as high as some of the buildings fronting the river, while spotlights play among the plumes of water, making them glow. There's a band on a ship that's outfitted with a big plastic dome, complete with stadium stage and lighting. The music is schlocky, the song list determined by reference to rivers and seas, but the voices and the sound are surprisingly strong.

I come from a flying family, air force vets and private pilots, but I was the oddball attracted to ships and the sea. So when the ships start parading by, I'm excited. I'm totally suckered into the mood when they interject bits of the solemn and the grand among the schlocky pop, playing the Star Wars theme and some old classical master dreaming of Napoleon. Some of the ships are rather magnificent, awing with size or sinister capability, military ships bristling with comms and readiness, cranes on the water as tall as buildings, freighters that take nearly the whole width of the river to turn around before their momentum would tear a hole into the high Erasmus Bridge.

More fun are the sailing ships, even though none of them is powering under sail. The parade requires the reliability of engines. The highlight is the three-masted 'Eendracht'. It isn't historical itself, but models itself on history. It harks back to the time of tall ships – perhaps not the era of Holland's height, when Dutch frigates engaged with mighty Brittania – but not an inconsequential time, a time when Dutch ports in Indonesia or the Caribbean might have harbored a ship like this.

After every class of ship has floated by; after the band has drained the pool of water songs, including 'Sitting by the Dock of the Bay', and 'Sailing' by Christopher Cross; after we've seen all the monstrosities of human invention, including a triangular tower made of iron beams meters thick, from which swings a set of iron jaws that can pick up and throw a roomful of river water; after all the nautical pageantry, then come the fireworks. They are shot into the sky from the deck of a barge, rockets and spinning lights and raining lights and balls of lights, lights that change color and lights that make you crane your neck back they go so high. And Menna is happy; this is the first close-up fireworks show she's ever seen. It's not often that I'm disappointed when a parade finishes, or for that matter a fireworks show, so rarely are they worth the crowds and the hours on foot. This time, I could stand for another hour if only there were more.

Next year.

Travelogue 517 – September 4
Still Summer After All
Part Twee

The big canal might be a river. I haven't quite figured out the legal status of this body of water, or of any spot of water in this country, a nation that has made water so complicated and wondrous. I think this might have once been the Schie River, or one of three branches of it dug out of the soggy earth even before the Golden Age. It seems that even the name of nearby Delft might derive from digging, a Dutch preoccupation, digging land from the bogs and from the sea itself. Delfshaven – my neighbofhood, once a separate village, once home to the English Pilgrims – has a crackling, dusty charter on record to dig its own waterway connecting the Schie to the Maas, more than five hundred years ago. This might be the waterway I'm cycling beside right now.

These days, if this is indeed the Schie, then it has been tamed, channeled, and regulated into the manner of a domestic canal, calm, phlegmatic, sardonic as a good Dutch burger. At the point that my road intersects the river-canal, the bridge is one of those wondrous Dutch drawbridges, found all over Rotterdam. The bells go off, the candy-striped arms come down to stop the cars, and the bridge rises on its monstrous hinge, projecting asphalt and the neatly painted lines for lanes into the air, making the mundane beneath our feet into an abstract to study while the boat passes. Below, a long barge motors past, the cabin slipping by at about the height of the waiting pedestrians. The bells sound again and the bridge lowers into place, reuniting with the road with a small, echoing boom.

On the other side, I take a left and start down the bike path on the north side of the canal or river. It's a pleasantly long and uninterrupted bike path, allowing me to cruise alongside the water and watch the gulls and coots, and sometimes the swans, at their daily nonsense, wheeling whimsically above the water, or crying over crusts of bread, or simply turning in the water and preening.

Dutch cities are just the right size. One can embrace a Dutch city. City boundaries are reined in tightly. One can cycle to any edge of Rotterdam within a half hour. Traveling northwest on the Schie, or the Delfshavense Schie, one arrives at the first open fields within fifteen minutes. The once-river Ts into another rather large canal that travels from or toward the town of Delft and from there probably to the sea, along straight-edged channels through Den Haag.

Where the three diversions of the original Schie meet stands the original nucleus of the town of Overschie, now a suburb of Rotterdam. There's a cute little village church there, something remaining from the digging days, standing tall with two small onion domes in the spire, the kind of sight that might have made young Piotr's heart go pitty-pat, homesick prince in a foreign land.

On the other side of the intersecting canal from the steeple, there the fields begin. I have to take a detour to cross this new canal, but I circle back to a path that follows the fields. These fields wheel in a partial arc inside the curve of the new canal, and toward the highway that crosses overhead a kilometer farther on. The grazing sheep don't mind the varieties of human artifice fencing them in. They don't mind my starting and laughing at them. I always think of their cousins in Ethiopia, scrawny and beat, pushed around and whipped by boys with sticks, tossed on top of taxis when necessary, roped down and legs tied together. These guys have little to worry about. I'm the nearest human, and while it can't be nice to be laughed at for their laziness and their plump figures, I am soon pedaling away again.

Past the highway is a long, idyllic stretch beside the river-canal. When I part ways with the Schie, or the remnant of the Schie, or the canal that became a river, I turn west and cruise through wide-open land, the green and always been green of Holland's fields, underneath the big skies of the purely flat.
Now it's the cows I have to laugh at, so perfect the image of cows, brown spots on white and blinking their long lashes. I won't laugh at the horses, grazing and romping inside their little pastures, bordered by what else but stagnant water, water with lily pads, water that feeds lines of wild flowers. The horses are bred for beauty and strength. Athletic high school girls ride them along woodland paths, and they tower above the frivolous passing cyclists.

There's a park of sorts south of Delft, a tract of land preserved from the greedy teeth of livestock and from developers and farmers. Among small shimmering copses and untamed grasses there are gravel paths, and I pedal slowly down one of these until I find a solitary bench facing into the late afternoon sun. I lean the bike against the back of the bench, and I pull out a book. This is where I will sit, with the sun on my face, laboring through a sentence or two before I stop to breath in the late summer and to watch the occasional family on a walk, trailing groups of silly dogs behind them, dogs intent on their sniffing. A few dash up to me for a sniff, but won't stay for a pat on the head. They must be about their business. These walks come with demanding agendas, and they could wish for more sympathy from the humans, who are content with their unattended and random steps, and the noises they make to each other, and the carelessness with their odors and the odors around them.

Careless, I tell them, is my highest aspiration. The dogs don't have time to listen to that. I'll sit by myself among the grasses and the last heat of the day, misunderstood by every passing dog, and I'll practice carelessness until my mobile sounds in its pocket in my backpack, calling me home.

Travelogue 516 – September 3
Still Summer After All
Part One

When I'm overwhelmed by work, my tonic is work. I unload my trusty Target backpack – this model of backpack has been discontinued, precisely because it is so heavy-duty, so durable; daily, for years, this thing has carried absurd amounts of stuff, and across three continents – I unload the pack, cutting down to the basics, basics that will include a book and one or two of my notebooks, my phone and long sleeves. Long sleeves because it's September now. I'm preoccupied and haven't noticed what the weather is like outside. The computer is most definitely jettisoned. I leave it charging on the desk.

I keep the cycle indoors these days. I forget whether I've reported in this space that Jan's clunker has been stolen. Yes, the grey beast was spirited away one night while Menna and I were inside the Cinerama downtown. I will never be sure how to interpret the act, and the discernment of the thief. Could he really have seen how cool Jan's clunker was, below the bruised exterior? Or was the action as random as all that? I comfort myself at nights thinking that the thief has special sight, and now cherishes the clunker.

My replacement is an old-fashioned ten-speed I found advertised online by a man whose life is crumbling. It's a very large and well-built man who answers opens the door to his apartment block and introduces himself in a strangely meek manner. He says he has been sick, and I examine the bursting pecs skeptically. It's been years since he's been able to work, he says. He's selling everything. I decide I can detect something around his wide and sad eyes, signs of decay, some unhealthy pallor to the skin. Or can I? Either way, I discover it's awkward to buy a sick man's last possessions. He senses that and takes charge. 'Come this way,' and he leads to the building's parking ramp, where storage lockers are located.

The bicycle has a frame for a large man. Standing with the bike, the frame's bar is positioned very snugly, I might say precariously, in the groin. But lifting myself up on the pedals, onto the seat, I'm instantly happy. I grew up on ten-speeds. My dear machine left behind in Minneapolis, sorely missed, is a ten-speed. The sickly owner eagerly digs up a wrench in his car – also for sale – and adjusts the seat. I test it again. It rides so smoothly. For a moment we look at the cycle, leaned against a supporting concrete column, examining it with doubting eyes, and yet knowing the sale is made. We take our leave from the ailing man at the door of his apartment block, and the forlorn look he leaves us with could be loneliness or it could be accusation. We are the fortunate; we are the healthy.

Today, I set aside the extra weight, pulled from the backpack, lining it up on my table beside the charging computer, the trusty work machine that I fondly nickname 'Plague'. The little netbook is very reliable. Too reliable. It delivers all too promptly every day's pile of work and correspondence. I pause for a moment in nostalgia for Ethiopia's inconstant internet and spotty electricity.

Outside, I discover that I have no need for the long sleeves. The sun is providing a summer day's wattage, even as it slides toward the day's last hours. I set out, relishing the smooth turning of the pedals on the sick man's cycle, the lightness of its tread, the healthy ease with which it accelerates. I ride among the brick streets of old Delfshaven, toward the bridge over the canal behind our building.

Travelogue 515 – August 28
Clackety-Clack

And another one is coming. It announces itself with the same sounds as the last, the whir, the rush like wind, and the characteristic clackety-clack of the train. These are the noises of reliability. They come every few minutes, all day long.

The view out Patrick's window is of this, the curving alley of reliability, like a city canyon lined with brick. It's a river of transit, laid with four sets of tracks, and the trains that pass belong to two lines of the Tube system, the District line and the Piccadilly line.

Across the little valley, brick of sun-bleached red rises high, surmounted by ivy, like healthy green carpets flung over the walls to dry, and above the walls, rows of modest row housing in brick turning tawny yellow, surmounted themselves by the chimneys so English, long blocks made of brick and hosting a row of pipes. They look like thin legos.

This is Baron's Court, Hammersmith in West London. The high street is fifty meters to the right, outside Patrick's front door, and it looks like a village, a country stop for the train, the Tube station looking like a quaint and sleepy old station.

Close by the station is the Margravine Cemetery, a sudden peace of grass and statuary. It's been closed for business since 1951, and been designated by the council as a 'Garden of Rest'. It's main utility now seems to be providing a quiet shortcut between neighborhoods. People bow their heads in preoccupation as they stride forward, heading for the Tube Station.

I'm in London only for a day. It will be a day of meetings. The meetings will take place in South London, in the shadow of London's most talked-about new building, called the Shard. I saw it from the plane, casting its shadow over the borough of Southwark, the neighborhood on the south bank of the city, the borough that hosts the Globe and the Tate Modern, Borough Market and the ancient, flint-faced cathedral, one of my favorites. And I shouldn't forget the Golden Hinde, a replica of Drake's ship – very fun.

The Shard, as one might predict from the name, looks like a sharp bit of glass, like a spike, driven from below through the surface of the city, thrusting its acute angles high into the sky. From the plane, one sees just how high, challenging the skyscrapers of the City, the financial district of London just across the river, seeming to stand in particular contrast to the plummy Gherkin there. One nice touch to the Shard's design is the unfinished, skeletal touch at the top, tugging perhaps at our cinematic imagination, our obsession with post-apocalyptic stories, to suggest the end of civilization, even as it stands tall as a testament to our sophistication, perhaps as memento mori.

The several blocks around Pete's office, though, seem to have taken a pass on any of the romance of the district, preferring to keep their heads down, among the modest and the small, the tired brick in low-roofed structures, like warrens built in and around the elevated railway lines that traverse the borough, century-old viaducts, like sooty Victorian walls against the barbarians.

Clickety-clack, the train runs overhead. One looks up from one's reveries, catches a glimpse of the severe, Babel-like silhouette of the Shard before turning the corner. One returns to the dream. It was a dream of sleeping on the District line, exhausted body abandoned to the rhythm of the tracks, passing by one village after another of London.

Travelogue 514 – August 22
Still Waters

There are worse places to spend an hour waiting. This is a wide hall placed at a back corner of Rotterdam's Stadhuis, or City Hall. It's where one must 'register', a distinctly European ritual. One must attest to one's existence. One must have an address. Behind the address must be a real person, the landlord, with identification numbers and documents. Once one has accepted the imprint of the state's identifiers, he or she suddenly has substance, is seen and recognized on the sidewalks and shops of Holland. I say shops because without an address, one has no right to a bank account, and without a bank account, one has a hard time paying bills. One cannot have a social security number, and one cannot work. And so all is wound together in a tight net.

If the kind reader thinks finding an address is an easy solution to non-existence, I gently advise him to think again. The formula for an address is Europe is alchemy. How does one, for example, pay a deposit on a flat should one not have earned the right to a bank account. Et cetera. These are the mundane challenges of people like us, the ghosts of Europe. One must know people. The ghost must join hands with flesh and blood. One must ask for help from the living and the identified. It's a sweet lesson in life.

But one does have the consolation of the quiet hall at the back of the Stadhuis, where one approaches the gatekeepers at the archives of citizenship. The pillars in this hall are granite. The arches and walls are brick, and much of the ceiling is an atrium of tinted and stained glass, arching overhead and admitting light for the filling in of forms. There is a border of terra cotta tiles running the perimeter of the room just above the height of the arches. Each tile articulates some analogy or theme. They also are dotted with glossy little daisies. The one I keep staring at during the wait depicts Cupid squeezing two big hearts, one in each arm.

We are called. We approach the window. We are met by the bland and round face of a functionary, his gaze inside the thick glasses directed away toward nowhere. We present our papers. Fortunately, we have a representative from Menna's school behind us, ready to translate when the paperwork does not meet exacting standards. We were presented only a week ago with forms that needed to be signed by our landlord. Our landlord is on vacation. It's August. Who is left in town to sign forms in August? Our landlord is a nice guy. He arranges to take pictures of the documents, of his signature, of hs own ID. The functionary will pause over these. The school official will step up, and lead with gentle words.

To celebrate the day's triumph – admittedly an abstract sort of victory, the submission of papers – Menna and I cycle into town after dinner. Menna has been making a serious study of the bicycle, and doing very well at it. Only a month or so ago, I was holding her up on the cycle, and running alongside her as she gets a feeling for the launch, for the tricky balance on two wheels. In the next stage, she took a number of spills, banging up her shins. We took pictures of the multiple bruises. She wants to show family. Now she coasts along on her white bicycle with the basket in front, and the town is her own.

At the Wester Paviljoen, we find Ato Moges. Ato Moges is often at the Wester. He has been coming to the Wester since his days as a university student some thirty years ago. We invite our new friend to play some cards and he agrees, though with reservations. He feels a fatherly duty toward Menna, and reminds her that card games are a distraction. She won't be able to do this once school starts. But once we have acknowledged the moral peril, the game unfolds genially. He takes an early leading the score, laughing and teasing us about our poor card skills. We order Ato Moges another biertje.

On the ride home, we remark on the quietness over the water of the canal near home. The Dutch winds have been so calm, the evenings so peaceful. Coasting without pedaling, watching the still water, it feels like I'm not moving at all. And I'm wondering if this still moment isn't an arrival of sorts. I've lived off of the thin gruel of goals for so long, always working toward something, always pedaling, I may have forgotten what it feels like to be somewhere. We just wanted a home.

Its a simple snapshot, isn't it, the water and the city and the night sky, the water so peaceful and the sky so quiet, like the elements are all in acceptance. The water takes the sky. The sky takes the city. This will be a mess for the paper men at the Stadhuis.

Travelogue 513 – August 8
The Seine at Night

Now we're going to walk. We've had dinner, and not just any dinner. It's Menna's golden birthday, and we have dined at a restaurant that served the Obamas in 2009, a restaurant a short walk from the Eiffel Tower in the San Germain district of Paris. We have taken our sweet time at our outdoor table, savoring every bit of the food and the place, and of the red and redolent Brouilly. Regarding the food, I would need Carolyn's commentary. I can barely pronounce the names of it – there was a terrine and a foie gras, I know – but the flavors were magnifique.

The place was humble in its furnishings. One's only clue to its status in the world of restaurants would be the insolence of the waiters – we are giggling and apologetic. The setting is not at all dramatic. The restaurant occupies one corner of a very small square. The square has an odd, sculpted centerpiece that must have once been a fountain. Our table is underneath one arch of the little peristyle that runs around the pretty little piazza. Across the street are buildings not unusual, but beautiful, in the Parisian style, with ironwork balconies, gold and cream stone turned out in layer upon layer of neo-Classical ornamentation, and up high the green Mansard roofs.

We have shared a bottle of the Brouilly, and have entered the silly part of the evening. Menna is making videos of our crumbs, of the wine glasses, and of me paying the bill, with grim determination on my face. The sun has begun to set.

Now we're going to walk. Our days in Paris are long walks. Our hotel is within sight of the Moulin Rouge. Once we get going in the morning, we walk across the boulevard and up the hill, looking for good pastries. We like climbing the heights. The up keeps going up past the Moulin Rouge, well past the beautiful cafes and the beautiful people along the Rue des Abbesses, until we see the moulin that presumably inspired the satire of the Rouge, the Moulin de la Galette, site of one of my favorite Renoirs, which we see in the Musee d'Orsay. And still there is some up, until one reaches the steep white dome of Sacre Coeur, calmly overlooking its stunning prospect of the city. Menna tests the panorama function on her new camera.

We've climbed the Eiffel Tower, at least to the second floor, climbing the stairs inside one of its legs, following the crowds in single file, sweating and wishing we had gotten here early enough to find a sane line waiting for the elevators. We settle for the stairs line, which is only 45 minutes. The view from the second level is amazing. We walk around to each corner. Menna has the camera pasted to her face. We wonder what the view from the top could be like. Would we see Rotterdam?

We will climb to the Pantheon, on a day that could be the hottest of all. We'll have to stop in a series of cafes to regroup, to wipe the sweat from our brows and rehydrate. We will have set out from the left bank of the Seine, reluctant to leave the grand Musee d'Orsay, pausing to admire Notre Dame again, and then heading south. Even as the afternoon wanes, the heat will not relent. The Pantheon stands silently on its hilltop, surrounded in its circle of broad streets by solemn university halls, scarred by scaffolding but maintaining its dignity despite the rude restoration, and despite the dearth of tourists in this exhausting heat.

But tonight, the heat has abated. Tonight it's the valley we follow, the ease of the river banks. The City of Light has been ignited. Across the Seine, some building is awash in twinkling lights, and we stand at the wall above the bank mystified. Maybe it's the wine, but the lights seem somehow impossible. What is that? We turn back to our promenade, swaying and laughing and stopping to overlook the river and its doings. People are gathering along the banks, sitting by the water with bottles of wine, having picnics, making little parties. We make it to the Pont Alexandre III, turn-of-the-century beaux-arts beauty, and Menna pauses to have a heart-to-heart with one of the enormous cherubs there, whose smiling mouth is a little agape, as though he is absorbed in Menna's confidences. She tells him to remember her, and he nods in that way that statues have. His blank eyes glint in a sly way. You'll be back, he's saying without words. We'll talk again.

We stop in the middle of the span, dazzled again by the sight of the Eiffel Tower. It has begin to sparkle with a light show of its own. I hadn't known there were lights that powerful. It twinkles with Christmas-like cheer and color. And it stops. We look at each other in wonder. We ask the cherub at the other end of the bridge, 'Does that happen every night?' This little angel is going to keep his counsel.

By the time we reach the Grand Palais, my stomach is roiling. Tonight's rich cuisine has triggered some sympathetic residue of Addis Ababa in my gut. I sit in the shadow of the great edifice, built to celebrate Paris's grandeur at the end of a dramatic century, a century that had begun under the reign of the first Napoleon; a fortuitous moment before France is forced to leave behind the concept of grandeur forever, before being forced to steer between the treacherous pillars of fascism and existentialism. The cherubs still frolic.

I sit in the shadow of empire, on a cold step leading into the palais, leaning over the pain in my stomach. I sit in the shadow of Paris in heat, wrestling with the chilling legacies of travel. In time, the tremors in my gut relent, and the night becomes quiet again. We rest; we wait. We look into the stars above the sand castles.

Travelogue 512 – August 7
The Case for Hands
Part Three

' … and after all, you're my wonderwall.'

What is a wonderwall, I wonder yet again. Our pub singer pitches it out to us with such confidence, because someone else wrote it, and because the song is an anthem. There are a couple of Americans sitting at a table underneath the stage, and they're singing along as they raise their beers. Their smiles say, 'I'm in Antwerp, and I'm singing Wonderwall.' Maybe it's relief. Maybe it is wonder. The American singer is relieved to have a few fans for the night. 'Thank you, everyone!' He waves his right hand, as though to a stadium crowd, his left hand preserving a chord on the guitar.

'I've been proud,' Chuchu says. He is telling of his first year in Belgium. He has taken a certification course with some major computer company. A recruiter comes around, looking to fill a job that many in the class feel beneath their skills. Chuchu and another student decide to apply, a bird in the hand and all. The white student gets the job, and Chuchu doesn't. His instructor explains why. 'This job is for a field technician. You're going to people's homes.' Yes? 'Well, if they don't let you in, the company loses money.' Ah, I see. Chuchu throws it over, gets a job in a restaurant. 'I've been proud,' he laments.

Pride and some steady hands build many things. In the sixteenth century, the proud hands of the butcher's union erected a structure very near to the Steen and near to the Scheldt, a sturdy, and my brother thinks rather gloomy hall for their guild. To me, it looks like a Romanesque church from Pisa or Florence, layered brick and sandstone rising in towers in the colors of bacon. The Flemish cities are hotbeds of guild activity back in the Middle Ages. The guilds are rich, and they can build towers in the colors of bacon. I like the name of the building, the Vleeshuis.

Our first tour of the city ends back in the square underneath the grand Stadhuis. The square is not a square at all, but a kind of lopsided trapezoid, surrounded by tall, gilt guild houses and houses of the rich merchants topped with ships turning in the wind. At ground level, we are offered a rich choice of venues for beer and mussels. We take an outdoor table, and we partake of a bucket of the shellfish, marveling at the city and the warm evening.

Behind us is the city's cathedral, the Cathedral of Our Lady, the largest Gothic church in the Benelux countries, representative of two centuries of construction, begun in the mid-fourteenth century. It lends some height, some drama to the scene, which hardly needs any. We have tried to enter to pay respects to Peter Paul Rubens, but it was closed for tourism.

...Maybe … you're gonna be the one that saves me …

A short history of the city: Silvius Brabo saves the hands of Antwerp by slaying the giant Antigoon. With an industry born of gratitude, the merchants and craftsmen trade and build and build, until Antwerp is one of the biggest and most sophisticated cities in Europe. They build a port and ship, making it an international business center for the centuries. The merchants and the craftsmen build their guild halls, and they teach the generations what to do with their hands. Once they are rich, they raise gilded statues to stand atop their rich homes. They lay the central square with cobblestones, and they adorn it with two huge monuments to the life secular and the life religious, asking us never to forget them. Their descendants build a fine train station to welcome strangers. They boil mussels in the square. They tell stories about their ancestors' hands. And on the sixth day, as the culmination of centuries of achievement, they build a zoo.

The zoo is located next to the train station. Right next to it: strolling among the gardens of the zoo, one sees the arches of the train sheds above, forming one wall of the expansive complex. This is one of the biggest zoos of Europe, so they say. And it does take us half a day to tour it. But then again, we are moving very slowly. So are the animals. The summer sun is beating down on the earth mercilessly, driving most mammals indoors, bipedal or quad.

The lions are panting among the grasses of their enclosure. They are the highlight for Menna. This is her first zoo, and the most important animals for her are the big cats. The lions are obliging, gazing regally over the sparse human life among the asphalt zoo pathways. It's the Bengal tigers, though, that provide some entertainment, playing in the waters of their pen, pawing at some bits of plastic floating there, tearing them with their teeth. They wish for the utile, grasping hands of the monkeys.

The zoo is my last surprise for Menna. On this trip, celebrating her golden birthday, I've managed to line up a series of fun surprises, like … Paris. Like my brother sitting in the lobby of an Antwerp hotel. His is a face she knew only from Facebook.

There's a moment in the zoo, when the heat has forced us to stop, a moment as we sit under an umbrella in the zoo cafe courtyard, when there's a sudden chill in the breeze. We look west to see that a bank of clouds has formed. We have been talking about my family, their homes, their children, their sicknesses, the passings. Now we sit quietly and anticipate the shower.

The barometers inside our heads translate into a variety of languages, including that of calendars, the language of time. They want to alert us to change. I'm confident that each of us in our silence is peering into time, gazing with the calm of lions into the future, thinking thoughts of fall and thoughts of return, perhaps imagining again that we might raise a hand against time, one of these powerful, planet-shaping hands, that we might smite the pirate, that we might consign the hand of the enemy to the waters of the river.

The rain does come, a few fat drops splashing against the pavement around us. Then there is a pause We wait. The pause continues. We check the skies. The clouds are already passing. The rain has past, left us with only the barest relief. We are back in summer. We gather hats and cameras, and we return to our tour. Autumn has been turned away.

I'm back at the Coffee Company in humble Rotterdam. The baristas are busy spinning atmosphere, their own, singing & joking for each other, fingers dancing over the tinkling cups & glasses & plates, serving, serving, and their mouths setting an entirely different rhythm. They are singing. They are whistling. This is a merry crew. The mouths of clients are the same, making the room buzz. Outside the windows of the cafe, Holland's sea clouds keep up their steady procession, harmless in the blue sky of summer, reminding some of us of the generations moving through history. Have we made our heroes proud, I wonder, with our frivolous ways? It kind of seems like it, actually. What would Silvius Brabo say to us? Maybe he would call us his wonderwall. Maybe he would order an iced coffee, and maybe he would peer out the windows at the neat rows of brick and the girls in jeans.

Travelogue 511 – August 6
The Case for Hands
Part Two

The Scheldt River seeks its course, neither pushing nor dallying too, too much in its easy progress toward the sea. The clean remains of Roman hands roll lazily in the currents at the bottom. They will also reach the sea in their day, sad digits of the sailors who dared to stand up to the giant of the river, the greedy giant armed with threats and the menacing cleaver.

The Scheldt River is peaceful now. We have paced its shores, or rather the high concrete banks of its shores. The broad waters wink at us, glancing wistfully at our hands set on the promenade's railings. It has seen no piracy in centuries.

Standing as a symbol of the stern vigilance that defeated the pirates, the 'Steen', or 'Stone', stands also as a symbol of Antwerp itself, placed solidly in the center of its city flag. The Steen was first built as a fortress on the shore of the life-giving river. The stones of its first walls were set in the thirteenth century, while the prettier heights belong to the era of the Stadhuis, to the prosperous Renaissance years. As the centuries passed, the fortress became a prison. Facing each other across a picturesque little raised porch inside are a heavy set of wooden doors and an elaborate stone crucifix. This is no accident, the cross being arranged for most expeditious prayers for those sentenced to death, a stop on the way to their appointment with the executioner.

We're feeling as lazy as the grey man, Scheldt. I'm more or less playing tour guide for this city I don't know, and trying to herd this afternoon's group of cats, which today includes my wife and my brother and my brother's friend. Each has a camera, and each camera has its own whispering siren call. Each of my tour group leans in toward his or her machine, receives instruction, wanders further afield, one toward the street, one toward the river, one along the base of the fortress, peeking in its windows, eyeballing its wall, as though to scale it.

Myself, I want to stand at the side of the historical waterway, historical and living, reflecting the fresh complexion of the summer sky, winking, always ready with a laughing wink at the irony.

… all the roads we have to walk are winding,

The entertainer soldiers on, commanding the tiny stage so like a pulpit in the hallowed halls of the Irish pub, describing a curious three-quarters balustraded circle around the corner at the meeting of three long chambers. It's an odd pub, laid out in what might be a crippled cruciform, only three legs to the cross, and none providing a line of sight down any of the others. We sit in what might be the nave, quaffing our 'pintjes', chatting in three languages inexpertly.

'I'm losing my English,' Chuchu is joking. He manages a restaurant, and because most of the staff are immigrants, English is the language of the work place. But it's a primitve sort of English. He demonstrates how he has to talk: 'Now sleep. Tomorrow, early, school, I go. After, work, come. Meet you, kitchen.' Each pause is dramatic, and almost every word is painted with his hands, the pillow, the watch, walking away, pointing, gathering. “I'm forgetting how to make a sentence.'

I see Chuchu as he was in 2004. He was finishing at the university. He was idealistic, sure he was going to make it in big business. And he longed to do some charity work, help children. He approached me then with a proposal for an orphanage project, ten pages of earnest language, and his manner was so deferential. He was hopeful; he was strong. It was his work more than anyone's that led to the opening of the first school.

Chuchu is in a good mood tonight, energetic though he's put in a long shift. It's the same smile as he had ten years ago, still as generous. He is laughing at himself. He doesn't drink often, so when he does, he says, the beer has a quick effect. His friends tease him about it. His wife wants a taste. Chuchu is reluctant, since she is pregnant, but he gives in. She rolls her big Ethiopian eyes.

The singer will sing 'Wonderwall' now. We all turn to watch him, feeling the awkward mix of guilt and regard one always feels for the lone, live musician. He's talented, and he has a flair to him. Without being a virtuoso, he knows his guitar. He knows how to be playful with it, strong hand playing the neck.

… and all the lights that lead us there are blinding

The place seems empty suddenly, and dim. It seems as though nobody here is Belgian. We feel the miles. Turning back to each other, and have nothing to say for a few minutes.

Travelogue 510 – August 5
The Case for Hands
Part One

I think this music was written for baristas. Their hands are busy, their minds only half busy. The music is busy, but underlying it is a kind of kindergarten refrain. Two baristas are on duty today, the brawny and personable boy with buck teeth and pale blue eyes, and the chunky young lady with multi-colored and curly hair, whose bellowing laughter registers on the wrong side of infectious. The boy is whistling to the song, to the silly piece, like a spring in a cartoon engine that keeps the whole thing running.

The barista didn't miss me. But I'm happy to say I missed my Rotterdam. It was an intense little trip we took.

'Put all those hands together, people. Please,' cries the mock-miserable performer. He's along on a tiny semi-circle of a wooden stage inside a long wooden interior. He's American; he's an African-American on a stage far from home. He's a lanky African-American in a Gatsby hat, a black man with a multi-racial repertoire: Beatles, Marley, Hendrix, Oasis. He's playing in an Irish pub in Belgium. It's Friday night, but the crowd is all outside, enjoying the long summer evening. They're sitting at tables set in rows that extend far into the brick-laid pedestrian avenue that leads on the left to Antwerp's grand central train station, built between 1895 and 1905, one of Europe's finest stations, tall and domed and inside layered with twenty kinds of marble and stone, in back the vast, arching trainshed of iron and glass

Was it paid for from King Leopold's riches? By 1905, the king has owned the Congo for decades, as citizen-imperialist, employing armies and extracting diamonds and rubber from the colony by the shipload. He brings Christianity; he brings discipline. Villages have to meet rubber quotas. If they don't meet the quotas, then villagers start losing their hands, soldiers meting out the king's justice.

Inside the pub, there are just a few of us. After each song, we clap our hands, but we aren't enough. 'This feels like a coffeehouse gig,' the performer says. We're four at our long table. One of us is Chuchu, who was one of the original Tesfa crew in Addis Ababa. He helped put together the first two schools. Then he fled Ethiopia. He has been here five years. He manages a restaurant. He joins Menna and I and his pregnant wife after work. It's already almost midnight. 'Een pintje,' Chuchu says to the waiter. The man on stage has been noodling on his guitar. Now he breaks into 'Wonder Wall'.

Today is going to be the day ...

Earlier in the week, Chuchu has taken us on a tour of downtown. We stand in front of the Stadhuis, or City Hall, built in 1564. It's a lovely bit of Flemish architecture. Flemish and Italian, I should say, all Renaissance in grey stone, all symmetry with lines of rectangular windows, while still Flemish in its gabled centerpiece. That there is a building almost five hundred years old, commanding a square lined with undeniably Flemish constructions, standing side by side, many of them old guild halls, some set with gilded statues at the top.

In front of the Stadhuis is a fountain, in the center of which stands a handsome young lad in bronze. He is holding up a giant hand, throwing it. The statue is a sentimental rendering of the legend behind the town's name. Apparently the awkward name of Antwerp has confounded more than tourists. So why not make it fun?

The naked lad in the fountain is Silvius Brabo, a Roman centurion. They say that at some time among the shadows of ancient history, there was a giant prowling the waters of the Scheldt River, demanding tolls from the sailors and merchants. If they refused to pay, the giant would take a hand and toss it into the river. The giant had the interesting name of Droun Antigoon, probably the source of some childhood trauma that forced him to act out in this cruel way. In any case, his fetish with men's hands inspired traders to call the town 'Hand Throw'. It just trips off the tongue. And the brave act of the naked lad, Brabo, led people to call the region Brabant. Need I say that scholars don't ratify this version of events?

The Scheldt River is peaceful now. We have paced its shores, or rather the high concrete banks of it shores. The broad waters wink at us, coveting our hands. It has seen no piracy in centuries. It has even had to endure the exodus of its commercial activity, as the port moved north to deeper waters, the port that made Antwerp Europe's second busiest commercial center, behind our home, old Rotterdam. Sometimes those waters long for more than domestic peace and quiet. They dream of Druon Antigoon. They miss the excitement.

Travelogue 509 – July 28
We Marvel

The grizzly is poisoned by an unethical hunter. It will not survive. There must be consequences. Innocent men will die.

It's silly how much joy I get being out on the bicycle. Especially on a summer evening, while the sun is still up, and the shadows are getting long. Menna is riding on the bike of the bike, sitting gracefully on the luggage rack. The temperatures are perfect, cooled by a few rain fronts that have traveled through. At the moment, the skies are simple blue.

We have left for the movie early so we could do some lazy pedaling around town. We coast through the Museum Park, by the lawns, where friends are laughing together, past the rose garden. In the plaza where Menna practices riding her cycle, there is suddenly a fountain, jets of water in rows, rising from the surface of the plaza. I steer the cycle between them.

He only wants to be left alone. He is weary of life, plagued by nightmares, visited by the wife he himself killed. But they have come looking for him. That's how it is to be a Marvel hero. The wolverine is one of their most attractive entertainments, grouchy, morose, honorable. He has what moderns want, like Batman does, a shadow on his soul. They've tried with Superman, but it isn't working. They continue to project him further out into space.

The movie theater faces onto the Schouwburgplein, a spacious piazza central to the city, a favorite of teens, who set up boom boxes and break dance, who lounge on benches lining the sides of the square, who gather for impromptu music jams. They have skateboards. They turn tight circles on their compact little bicycles. The theater watches over them, a blank paternal presence, its monumental posters like eyes, but turning sight inward. See me in here, a hero. I am the Wolverine. I am breaking my bonds with a shout. I am wrathful. My claws are out.

Travelogue 508 – July 18
Today the Sun Rises

'Could I borrow your Tyler?' he's asking me. 'Pardon?' “Do you think I could use your Tyler?' He's gesturing now with an open hand down by his groin area. “Sorry, I don't know what that is.' 'Are you taking the piss?' he asks, growling, stepping back and sizing me up.

He's a small guy, small and slender. He has a shaved head, and tobacco-shaded knobs for teeth. His eyes are wide and surrounded by the clammy and tired skin of someone who has enjoyed many a pint in his day. His accent is nearly impenetrable.

I'm standing near the counter of my cafe, glancing through a local paper, waiting for my coffee to be served. In walks this diminutive Brit pointing at his loins.

I'm not taking the piss, I say. I'm just not sure what it is he wants. 'The Tyler, the loo. Is there a Tyler I can barra? A place I can take a poo.' Aha! I get it. 'Sorry, mate, I don't work here.' I can't help laughing now. He looks at me in wonder. 'What is wrong with ya?'' I would have lost a few teeth if I were in his town.

He asks the Dutch woman behind the counter, and somehow she knows exactly what a Tyler is. I'm still laughing.

The jokes started early today. The first is at 5am, when the neighbor slams a door, and I'm startled awake. I stare at the windows, already lit with sun's first light, and I know well that I won't get back to sleep. I have an opportunity here.

I haven't seen the sun rise in a long time. I am out and on the bike well before the event. It is in the nature of these extreme latitudes that light and darkness linger and they mix, hours before and hours after the sun's stage cues. The sky at 5:19am, as I cruise alongside the canal toward Overschie, is bright with dawn's buoyant blues. I must get beyond the city limits before Helios makes his appearance.

Past the Spaanse Polder, there is one last development bolted together, like itinerant warehouses, warehousing commercial enterprises with big mission statements. It is the last stand of twenty-first century Rotterdam, and you can see the fields beyond.

The bike path stretches true a straight-edged canal, true as a tractor furrow, west across the plain green field. The orange edge of the sun has just broken the rim of the earth behind me. The cows glance with a twitch of the ear. The proud horses stand attentively behind their wire fences. There is a light, curling mist over the field, like the vestiges of night's candles, suspended just at the height of my handlebars. It's already evaporating.

I jump off the cycle, and turn down a dirt path into the luxuriant growth of the summer. I'm going to ditch the bike for a jog, and I'm going to face directly into the new day.

I turn. I watch the advancing fire. And I wonder, could there be a Tyler nearby that I could barra?

Travelogue 507 – July 11
The Years

There is something so quiet about this year's anniversary. I have to say something, but it doesn't mean there is anything to say.

The clouds are on again, off again, in a quiet way. I remember this day ten years ago, remember clearly the blustery Midwestern weather, and the big, racing clouds, building toward something. I do my work, though it doesn't mean there is anything to do.

Menna and I have seen something new at the theater across the Maas River. The story is about passion and disappointment, about love. (She gazes up at him with profound devotion, with surrender.) There isn't much dialogue in the film. The camera wanders from faces, settles on coupled torsos, as though it might be sensitive to heat, sensitive to mass and motion. And then one's eye is drawn past the human into open spaces, city plazas or nature's plains. Stone and mud and light absorb all narrative, re-assemble it to look like blown seeds.

It's after 11pm, but there is still a residue of light in the western sky. The clouds have cleared, and the sky is an unobscured continuum of color, from dusk to night, from sea's hope of blue to the color of deep sleep.

Menna and I walk hand in hand along the line of cycles on the pavement, looking for Jan's old machine. She is riding on the back of the bike. Silently, we swerve along the empty road toward Wilhelminaplein. It's only a few blocks to the Erasmus Bridge, rising inside its aureole of reverent city lighting, arcing over the Maas River, its wheel spokes suspended in mid-turn. We will essay its span; I'll be pedaling slowly, with exertion.

This happens summer to summer, now, this anniversary, shot through with sunlight, the kind of sunlight still ablaze with the purity of the solstice, but in decline. The sun-shot sky cannot help but rejoice, and we know – anyone who can speak of ten years of anything – how rejoicing can and must look like satire, suggest something like malice.

When we're closest to the sky, I don't have to pedal so hard. I lean back, and we coast. There's so much to look at from here, the lights of the city center ahead of us, the long barges plying the waters below, and of course the profound gradient of deepening blue above. The sky is so like a perfect surface, while constituting something like the opposite of surface, the perfect illusion. It just goes on and on. And its colors change in every instant. I want to remember that one shade ….

The cycle picks up speed, and I have to reel my attention back in, tighten the grip on the handle bars, make sure we don't flip over some bump in the bike path. The old bike rattles, and Menna squeezes an arm tighter around my waist. We're headed back toward solid ground, toward the streets.

Travelogue 506 – July 9
The Beach

A Netherlands sky without a trace of cloud in it is a shock. It's unnatural, and it triggers a kind of hysteria on the ground. We're into our second day of dazzling blue and cloudless skies. People are in an uproar. Here at my morning cafe, the baristas are playing the Beach Boys. One of them, a young woman with the most innocent of faces, is shouting along to a song: 'Bermuda, Bahamas, Come on pretty mama …' I'm not sure what to do for her.

Yesterday, Menna and I took our second trip to the beach. Our first trip suffered a more common Dutch fate, the skies having become overcast by the time we arrived, the wind having kicked up and cast a spell of chill on us. We had a good time nonetheless, dipping our toes into the sea, picking up shells, running away from the wind.

We try again on this brilliant morning. It takes us a while to get to the sea using public transport. The first stage is getting into the center of Rotterdam. Until Menna learns how to cycle, that means taking either the tram or the Metro. The advantage to the Metro is that you can change lines downtown and ride all the way to Den Haag Centraal, and do it for cheaper than the ticket price of a train, though the Metro does take longer. And one enjoys the peace of the air shocks, the peace of the midday suburbs, and the peace of the fields outside Rotterdam, glowing with the green of all those rains.

Once you're in Den Haag, you take the tram or bus toward the sea. Yesterday, we found a crowd of tourists and university students in shorts and shades and tank tops standing on the tram platform, waiting for the ol' Number Nine. We couldn't even get near the door of the first tram that came. Knowing Den Haag just a little, I maneuvered Menna onto the next Number Fifteen, riding in that venerable machine until the first stop, where we were able to jump onto the red-sided Nummer Een (#1) that carried us on to Scheveningen. To Scheveningen, where we alight at the site of the famous Kurhaus, hotel and restaurant built in 1886.

Scheveningen has been a resort town since 1818, when a man named Pronk thought to build a little bath house among the dunes. Now the lovely old Kurhaus is flanked by malls and the beach is lined with glassed-in bistros where one can sit with a drink in hand and regard the unceasing waves. Or one can take one's drink outside and sit among the sands, behind aerodynamic little wind shelters that look like kites.

We skip along merrily to the strand, which is littered with the bodies of young and old, verily strewn about as though abandoned by their owners in sun-dazed trances. There are those cavorting, kicking soccer balls, whacking ping-pong balls with colorful paddles, or running among the waves. Most are content to expose themselves to the rays of solar visible and ultraviolet and heat, lying in the sand, just below the level of the persistent breezes northern that carry a slight edge of chill.

We join in this display of indolence. And I make the unforgivable amateur's mistake of dozing before I've applied sun screen. It will be hours before I feel the pinch of that error, well after I've woken and run after Menna into the sea.

One of the pleasures of the beach trip is the evening stop in Den Haag before heading home. There, we retreat into the Centrum, where we can stroll down old brick alleyways, stroll in the shadow of the sixteenth-century Grote Kerk, making our way to the Fiddler, where we can sit in the last of the sun and taste British-style ale. From the vantage of their outdoor tables, the sun sets behind the tower of the Grote Kerk.