geachte vrienden,
I don't live in Scotland anymore. I lived in Pittsburgh, but I don't live there anymore either. I know. You're wondering, "Where does that leave? Where could he be now?" Clearly: Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The Netherlands also means Holland to some. This is a place that happens to be in Europe. It's not in Scandinavia, nor does it border the Mediterranean Sea. People from here are Dutch and they speak Dutch, but they call themselves Nederlanders and their language Nederlands. They are not Danish, but I'm told the Danish are a proud people from which I partially descend. Netherlands means "low-lands". In Spanish, that's, Países Bajos.
Because there was nowhere else to live in Europe, the Nederlanders had to build their country on the ocean. It doesn't float, though. Sometimes, it actually sinks. Water is not always the friend of the Nederlanders.
I live here now, so I was of necessity indoctrinated into the hydrophobic cult. Please. Let me tell you how.
When I first arrived at the airport here, 1 October, 2006, the airline had forgotten to put one of my bags in the plane with me. This bag had my clothing and my rain gear, which, I'm sure you can imagine, was a slight problem. Only a slight drizzle, hardly a mist, nothing I couldn't deal with. The rain wasn't the problem. I wandered around the city center, waiting to move into my brand new apartment. It turned out, when I moved in the next day, it was so brand new that they hadn't even finished building it yet. There was no refrigerator. But, there was a washing machine, lost and alone, in the middle of the entryway. I felt sorry for it and hooked it up. How hard could it be? Power in the outlet, drain in the drain. Simple. Not simple. A side story:
Johnny van de Livedherebefore was a simple young gent, eagerly attending the technical university of eindhoven to learn about physics. Classes were starting off much more difficult than he was used to in his prior education. He felt like an outcast from his more alert classmates. He stayed in his apartment most nights and, frustrated by his homework, concentrated on his macramé. No one appreciated his key chains, woven with delicate care. His relationship with his girlfriend was falling apart. His parents were concerned about him. Eventually, he failed his course and was asked to leave. Rather than face his parents, he collected a plastic bag, walked sullenly to the drain for the washing machine, and set about attempting a complex and obscure suicide. He awoke the next morning feeling, to his dismay, rather healthy. He removed the plastic bag from his head, unhooked his toes from the drain pipe, and stood up. In a fit of rage, he crammed the plastic bag as far down the drain pipe as he could. Feeling better, he turned over a new leaf and walked off to pursue his parents approval for a career as a macramé artisan.
Having hooked up my spiffy new washing machine, I decided to do a test load and sat reading while the little bastard whirled and spun and rinsed. Poor thing. After all that spinning, it must have felt a bit of the nausea that all the mindlessly subservient feel at one time or another. As I sat on my bed, I heard it barfing all over the floor. I darted over to the plug, and with a quick flick of my wrist, put it out of its misery. It stopped barfing. Not before covering the entire hallway with foamy, black ooze. Now what? Luckily, one of my first acquisitions from a Dutch store was a tiny dish sponge for cleaning my apartment. I dropped the yellow and green square into the murky lake, and after about 837 years, managed to soak up and deposit the water in the sink. Take that, Terrible Trivium.
Such was my Dutch induction. When I fished out the responsible bag, it still contained, damp but intact, a receipt for plastic cord.
Tot ziens,
walter