WE TRAVEL NORTH

On Saturday we drove 10 hours. Katie, Sarah, me, and Katie's boyfriend Stephan. He drove, actually; the rest of us mostly slept.

It was a trip to Holland, north from Paris, through Belgium, and a lovely day. It's finally warm here. The countryside is covered in fields and clumps of forest and towns.
Have any of you seen Ever After? I assume you have. You should. We stopped in Ghent, as in the Baroness Rodmilla de Ghent, the wicked stepmother's hometown, and we wandered about looking at her old buildings covered in graffiti. What I have seen of Belgium looks more medieval than what I have seen of France, but also full of ugly industrial-looking apartment buildings.

Stephan was explaining to us in the car why French people always bash Belgians: They are in the European Union but have contributed nothing to the world except French fries. They speak Flemish. Their only famous landmark is the Pissing Statue (which unfortunately we didn't see).

The closer we drove to Amsterdam the more cars we saw loaded with people wearing orange. Friendly people, blowing horns out their windows and pumping their orange fists at us. The games are on, apparently, in Holland.

And Amsterdam is so beautiful:


The first thing I did when I woke up the next day was check if my school has an exchange program for Holland. They do. The houses are tall and skinny and surrounded by canals. The canals are overflowing with houseboats and smaller boats of happy weekenders getting sun and listening to music. I would not mind joining them someday. I could be a houseboater. What about the Mississippi?

Now, we did not count on staying in Amsterdam all afternoon, considering that it's rumored to be such a seedy city and has no major sights we had heard of. But it's actually quite nice. Sunny looking people on bicycles smoking free love.

Under the feet of a herd of tourists I found a map. I'm collecting trash here in Europe with some kind of art project in mind. It's a smelly endeavor, but probably worth it, especially nice when I find maps. On this particular one we found the ANNE FRANK HOUSE, which we didn't know was in Amsterdam but which gave us a decided purpose for the rest of the afternoon. I did a book report on Anne Frank when I was in seventh grade. (Who didn't, at some point, do a book report on her?) I remember trying very hard to make my poster look like a torn out and burned page of her diary, to make it seem authentic. Well the house was beyond authentic. They lived there. We in our very own living bodies crawled through the same space behind the bookshelf that they, the Franks, were taken through to Auschwitz. I saw her wall decorations. Then we drove all the long way home again across three countries and several decades to my own wall decorations. I have an explorer, a hot air balloon, my favorite people. She had the Dutch Royal family and girls holding puppies. She died in a concentration camp. And here I am. Who are we?

My only regrets about Holland are that 1) we didn't go to Corrie ten Boom's house, and 2) the tulips weren't blooming anymore. This only gives me reason to return.