Well It Must Be Thanksgiving

They don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in the Netherlands (no wonder the Pilgrims ditched this country...), but I took off a few days and had a very nice weekend nonetheless. On Thursday, my brother David became the first person to visit me in The Hague, and I took him around the neighborhood. Here are some of the things we covered:

In The Hague, we took a tour of the Ridderzaal, the 13^th century knights’ hall that was the first building in The Hague. Unfortunately, little of the original building remains; but the Queen still opens Parliament there every year, so it was an interesting place to see. We also saw the Mauritshuis, supposedly the best small art museum in the world. It’s best known for housing Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” That night, we had our Thanksgiving dinner at an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant in Scheveningen. Once we figured out how the ordering worked (which took us a while), it was great. The fish was good quality, too; it probably helps that the restaurant was a block from the North Sea.

On Saturday night, we returned to the center of town, where we had pizza at an Italian restaurant and mojitos at a Cuban bar. I felt that would be fairly representative of what Dutch cuisine had to offer.

In Amsterdam, we went to the Jewish Historical Museum, which had a lot of interesting things to see. (And its café was my first kosher restaurant in the Netherlands! It was dairy, but you have to start somewhere.) I always find it a little strange going through Jewish museums in Europe; it feels like I’m learning about some extinct culture (especially as they took a school group through the museum). This was thankfully mitigated by the knowledge that the Jewish community has rebounded, including at the Portuguese Synagogue next door. We also went to Anne Frank’s house, though I decided to wait in the café rather than go through the museum again.

That night, we went out for pannenkoeken (Dutch pancakes), which were delicious as usual. We also went to a concert of a couple alt-rock bands from Oregon. As happens surprisingly often, I liked the opening band better than the headliner, but they were both pretty good.

We also spent a day in Leiden, home to the most prestigious university in the Netherlands. It’s a nice place to walk around and has a medieval fortress at the center. It’s also where the Pilgrims lived before they left for the new world, so it was a little bit Thanksgiving-themed. We were there on the day of the “Arrival of Sinterklaas,” so we got to see a few “Black Petes” rappel down the side of the town hall. I’m just glad that I had someone with me to witness the little kids running around in blackface; it’s a sight...

On the way back from the train station this morning, after my brother departed, a police car pulled in front of me in the bike lane. Before I knew what was happening, a second squad car pulled up behind me. (That’s never a good sign.) They kept asking questions about my bike, and it took me a few minutes before they told me why they were detaining me. Apparently, they saw me on the security cameras at Central Station and thought that I picked the lock and stole my bike. I’m not sure how that happened – perhaps my forgetting where I parked my bike made it look like I was scanning for a bike to steal. At any rate, eventually they just took my information and let me go. They were very polite, and I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, but still a strange experience...