Chapter 4 - Northern Europe - culture

The Rijksmuseum was wonderful. And the Van Gogh museum. Wow. I should really try to learn more about art. Every time I see something powerful, my breath leaves me and I can only stare at it in awe. It’s the same when I hear wonderful music or read some wonderful poem.

I didn’t get to spend nearly as much time as I’d like at the museums as Niki made me promise to leave by one o’clock. She parked herself on a bench after only about half an hour and looked at me with mournful eyes every time I passed by. “Ye gods and little fishes! How much longer are you going to be?” she’d say as if she was in real pain. I suggest splitting up but she says she has no way of knowing where anything is without me. Oh well, it’s nice to feel needed.

I’d forgotten how old everything is in Europe. Niki says she prefers the idea of newly discovering someplace like being the first person to land in Tahiti. I'm surprised to find I like the opposite feeling, thinking of the millions of people who may have trodden the same path we followed today, or sat on the same place by the canal, or looked at the same spires. It gives me goose bumps on my insides. I wonder about those people’s lives, who they loved and what they did, how long they lived and what they feared and fantasized about. I wonder about what kind of life is up ahead for me, where I will go and what I will do, whether I will ever fall in love.

Niki surprised me by actually saying she wanted to go with me to the Anne Frank museum, located in the house the diarist hid inside during the Second World War. It's a powerful thought that one little girl’s diary became a definitive work of that period of history. I wonder if she would have been proud or embarrassed to have people from all over the world read her intimate thoughts. I would be embarrassed. Niki said it was really interesting and she would never have known about it but for me and that made me feel good. I like to think I might be a positive influence on someone else.

Everyone speaks really good English here. As well as other languages too. We heard someone our age talking in Dutch, then English, then French and then German all in the same conversation. I feel a bit inferior. I never thought about it before but it is kind of unfair that we English speakers seem to expect everyone else to know English. Travel is really opening my eyes to lots of things. I feel like a flower bud that’s starting to open out and realizing it is a flower after all and not just some useless bud.

In the evening we took a canal boat cruise. It took us an hour and a half to get dressed up because we thought it would be really sophisticated and there might be guys but it was kind of cheesy and full of old tourists and couples. The boat had a glass top so we sipped wine and looked up at the lights and the stars and tried to imagine we were older and more experienced. Niki has given up on having sex in Holland. She said it’s a cliche anyway and will wait until Belgium.