Letter from Leiden

Friday 1 February 08

Hi everyone -

We've settled into our house and our street, Herenstraat. It's a crooked, narrow street because it used to be the main cow path to Leiden's butcher markets. It also figured prominently in the Eighty Years' War (around 1600), which marked the high point of Spanish and Catholic influence in northern Europe. Now, Herenstraat is a quiet, friendly street where bicycles and people dominate and where cars slowly do the best they can. The YouTube video below was made by Le Petit Port art gallery, with the frog. Once you get past the gallery window in the first minute of the video, you get good views of Herenstraat for the rest of it.

Portrait of Herenstraat

In the past month, we have traveled a little, Jennie and Linda to a museum in Brussels, me to a video conference in Amsterdam.

We have met some Dutch people and we applied to different organizations for language mentors. Linda has Barrie, a neighbor lady interested in learning more English in exchange for helping Linda with her Dutch. I'm working with a retired statistician and D66 politician, Constant Kool (is that a great pun of a name?). Jennie has to wait until February 5 to meet with her mentoring group from the University. In addition, every other Tuesday evening all three of us meet with a group of other ex-pats for beginners Dutch conversation. My reading is getting better, and my pronounciation is still wretched.

My mentor, Constant, was married to Joke Smit, who was the leading Dutch feminist of the 60's - 70's. (It's pronounced yo'-ke, like a yoke around your neck with the accent on the first syllable and an -eh at the end.) She has a bunch of stuff named after her:

the Joke Smit Instituut at the Univeristy of Leiden
the Joke Smit Vestiging (adult night school) at the University of Amsterdam
the Joke Smitplein, a public square in Utrecht
the Joke Smit-prijs, the Dutch government's biannual prize for women
the Joke Smit Stichting (Joke Smit Foundation), etc.

I learned all that from googling. Constant has never mentioned her, though he has mentioned their two children, and I'm not going to bring her up first.

Two Saturdays ago, we had dinner with John and Robin, who live only a few blocks from us. He's half Dutch, half British; she's American, a friend of a Medaille prof, and teaches at an English-language high school, the American School of the Hague.

They took us to the weekly street market along the Rhine where we bought fresh (as in caught the day before) oysters, scallops, squid, and a white fish I don't know the name of. Then we went back to their house and cooked it all and had a cake and Dutch birthday song to commemorate Jennie's 21st birthday. On the actual day, January 17, Linda and I took Jennie to Entrekoos, a local steak house.

Last week, I found Cronesteyn Polder Park, just a mile from our house, which is about the size of Delaware Park and will be my habitual bike ride from now on. It has a section of volkstuinen (people's gardens aka allotment gardens) and lots of birds, including a colony of large herons with nests high in the trees.

The park has a field with the Salix Slinger project, land art made with willows, that Linda found very interesting. She has visited all of Leiden's museums and most of the galleries.

Last Saturday, we went to Delft, about half an hour by train via den Haag, where we took a guided tour of Koninklijke Porceleyne Fles (Royal Delft), the last remaining Delftware factory from the 17th century. It still produces only handmade Delftware. They have five kilns but three of them are big enough to load with a forklift. The hand-painting means that each piece is unique; it also means that each piece is expensive. In the picture on the right, the far-left piece in the progession of five on the edge of the table shows the charcoal dusted through the tiny holes in a stencil. The charcoal, which will burn off during firing, guides the painter, who produces the second piece. The piece is then fired (middle example) and finally glazed and baked again. The second-from-right example shows a half-glazed piece so you can see what the glazing adds.

We were with Ilona, a friend of Renata, the lady we're renting from. Ilona then took us to the library at Delft Technical University. It has grass on the roof. Is this a good example of how the Dutch have learned not to waste space? Nope, it's not primarily a roof. It's not even an open space, though it's a popular sunning spot. In fact, all that grass is a cheap way to cool the building. The university's mission:

TU Delft develops technologies for future generations, focusing on sustainability, safety and economic vitality.

Then Ilona took us on a three-hour walking tour of the old part of Delft. Not quite as quaint as Leiden, but still packed full of interesting buildings from 1400 to 1700.

One of my sabbatical projects is video and a web about Antony van Leeuwenhoek. The pictures on the left were all views that he saw during his lifetime, though I doubt that the Oude Kerk (Old Church) was leaning as far as it is now. (Is "sagging" a better architectural term?) I'm not sure how well you can see the angle in the picture because the row of houses is leaning, too.

It gave me pause to walk the same streets Leeuwenhoek walked four hundred years ago. I'm going to work these streets, facades, and (I hope) interiors into my project, but unfortunately I don't have the budget for Oscar-nominated Eduardo Serra to make these streets look as good as he did in Girl with a Pearl Earring, the Hollywood film from a few years ago about Vermeer, starring Scarlett Johansson. Van Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer were born weeks apart in Delft, both lived in Delft throughout their lives, and van Leeuwenhoek was an executor of Vermeer's estate. Seeing that film was part of my impetus to do this project. The music from that era is terrific, too.

For the videos scripts, I have all the material I need, mostly van Leeuwenhoek's own words, and I have started to trim and sequence the excerpts. I have all the music I need, and I am gathering images. I am also looking for an old man who speaks English with a strong Dutch accent to be the "voice" of van Leeuwenhoek because much of the script will be drawn from his letters, for example:

My work was not pursued in order to gain the praise I now enjoy, but chiefly from a craving after knowledge, which I notice resides in me more than in most other men. And therewithal, whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof.

I expect to return to Delft often for more visual material.

After walking around the old city and stopping for coffee, we went back to Ilona's house for a "typical" Dutch dinner of stomppot. The green stuff in the picture, below right, is endive. The potatoes have cheese and bacon and lots of salt in them, too much for Linda. The dessert (no pic) was semolina pudding: boil Cream of Wheat with milk, let it set in a mold, add almonds and berry jam. Ilona did a great job, but you can see why Dutch cuisine hasn't exactly caught on world-wide.

Last Thursday, we went for our appointment with the local authorities at the town hall to register as temporary citizens. They checked our birth certificates and marriage license and passports and asked lots of personal questions. All went well.

The following day, we went by train to the regional IND (immigration and naturalization service) office to interview for our temporary residency permits. It's important enough that I got my hair cut just for the occasion. However, we were not as successful. They don't have a clear category for someone like me on sabbatical but not connected to a Dutch university. They don't want foreigners running around unsponsored / unsupervised, though I get the feeling that they aren't as worried about us as they might be about a single, 22-year-old guy from North Africa whose skin is a little darker than ours. Regardless, they told me to go to the CWI (Centrum voor Werk en Inkomen) in Leiden to apply for a work permit.

The next week, I went to the CWI, where the guy said that work permits are for companies to get, not individuals. I read an article in the University of Ledien student newspaper likening this process to a "jungle" and "following cookie crumbs through a Medieval forest", if my Dutch translation is correct. I figure as long as I do what they say, I won't get into too much trouble, so I'm just playing along. I note that the web site for the US embassy says, in a bold-faced paragraph:

The U.S. Consulate General has no authority to issue residence and/or work permits in The Netherlands. Neither can we assist you in the procedure of obtaining permission to stay and/or work in The Netherlands.

In other words, they can't figure it out, either.

Overall, we're doing great. The weather is mild and more sunny than rainy. The people are very friendly and helpful. The one downside of biking for me is that the city streets are almost all cobblestone. They take a toll on the bike after a while, but they really take a toll on my back. We're eating very well, even with the bad exchange rate. The meats are all trimmed, no fat, no bone. The bread and cheese are addictive. Turns out the Dutch don't export the best cheeses because they're made with unpasteurized milk, which can't be imported into the U.S. We have not found a soda pop that we all like, however.

Cheers,
Doug

Leiden Centrum

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