The Inevitable Resident

The thing about being sent to live/work in a foreign country is that, inevitably.... well... you end up living/working in a foreign country. After a while, the novelty of a new place wears off. The quaintness of a morning rush hour filled with nothing but bicycles becomes just another commute. The throngs of people standing on a train platform shift from interesting character studies to just another group of joe-schmoes like yourself making the trek to work. Even the canals, at their most engaging, become another bit of landscape to walk around. That's not to say that you've become unhappy, or not as taken in by the unfamiliar as you once were. You just .... live.

One minute you're passing fields filled with windmills on the train and the next minute you're home. Where there's laundry to do (exhibit A), and the coffee cup you left half-full on the counter top that morning to wash (exhibit B), and the mosquito netting around the bed to rearrange (exhibit C). Well, maybe the mere existence of the mosquito net adds a little of that good old fashioned "exotic" to the equation, but the presence of the mosquitoes themselves certainly don't.

Why a mosquito net, you might ask? After all, I'm a good southern girl, born and raised in the land of giant pterodactyl skeeters that sit down to have dinner with you (on you?) like they're a part of the family. All in all, there's nothing worse than spending the night half in and out of sleep, lulled by the most annoying buzz of skeeters in your ear. Thus - the mosquito net. (I know - I can hear the sound of a million of my southern compatriots, shouting in chorus about what a wimp I've become. But I'm the kind of person whose mosquito bites take on lives of their own. They blow up and camp out. They call their friends over and order pizza. They become the most annoying of couch potato house guests, just sitting there - taking up space and grating on your last ever-loving nerve. So I'll be a wimp ... I can live with that.) There were two massive mosquitoes leading a big parade of smaller but equally terrifying skeeters flying around my apartment last night. I introduced the grand poobah of the group to the bottom of my flip flop, resulting in a "THWACK!" loud enough to wake the dead, but the others proved to be elusive little buggers. So I retreated my own little slice of Wimp Heaven to snooze in un-bitten peace.

But I digress .... Back to the Inevitability of Residency. Actually, there's not much else to it, really. I spend a good two hours on the train each day, commuting to the office in a little town called Hilversum. The only interesting bit there is my newly-developed addiction to playing Brickbreaker on my Black Berry and occasionally over-hearing the hilariously out-of-place conversations of all the Brits, Aussies and Americans who work at the Nike call center located in the same town.

The biggest reason that this sort of Residency is inevitable in Amsterdam is because of all the American tourists and expats here. English is the national 2nd language, and everywhere you go, you hear the strains of "dude" and "no way" and "like" inserted at the incomparable pace of every 3rd word. Even if I were to learn to speak flawless, un-accented Dutch, I think I might still be considered a tourist by the public at large.

There's goo gobs of American television programming as well. Living in a foreign country creates the oddest of creatures, oddly devoted to items from home that you'd never think twice about back in the states. Take "Friends," for example. Perhaps I was an oddity because I never really watched the show, but it comes on here every night at 8:30 and I seem to land on it automatically. And try as I might, I can't seem to change the channel. I'm not hooked so much as compelled. Dude - did you know that Rachel and Ross have a baby together?!?!

[insert gigantic *WINK* here]

But enough about me ... what about YOU? Hello? Hellllllo-lo-lo-lo?

Off to the Great Smoke, otherwise known as London, this weekend. It seems as if everyone I've ever gone to high school with either lives there or will be visiting this weekend. It'll be like Down Home Day, except with lots of thick, room-temperature beer and people with funny accents. Oh... wait .... *laff'n*

Oh! Speaking of growing up in the South .... I've started picking up little sayings that are the Dutch equivalents of English sayings. My favorite, by far, is the Nederlander version of "Were you born in a barn?" - spoken most often by my father when anyone walked into the house and left the door open. The Dutch, indebted as they are to their canals, say something that translates into "Were you born in a canoe?" Which, depending on the type of person your parents might have been ..... well, I'll just leave that right on the side of the canal where I found it.

G'nite y'all!