Saturday, September 15, 2012

Henrike carved our names into a pumpkin the day we arrived.  Two weeks later, this is what it looked like.

I'm writing this in a smoky basement bar in Ungdomshuset, waiting for a punk show to start. "Holiday in Cambodia" just made its third run on the PA, followed quickly by the second round of "But After the Gig," probably Discharge's worst song, pre-1985. Jenna went out to a bar with our hosts, Sofie and Rikke, and their friends - we all came here for cheap eats, but they prefer reggae to crust punk. As always when I attend a show alone, I feel bored and self-conscious, although I'm told that this reads as tough and aloof to strangers. I don't feel tough. Being a non-drinker and a non-smoker, I don't have an activity with which to passively occupy myself and consequently my aloneness seems more conspicuous. I've already exhausted the ruse of rifling through the records at the merch table. I think I like shows better in theory than practice.

Ungdomshuset is inspiring, my social awkwardness aside. You may remember a minor news story a few years ago regarding enormous youth riots in Copenhagen, stemming from the forcible eviction of a "youth center." Police cars were torched, Molotov cocktails were thrown, and protestors were arrested by the droves. The youth center was Ungdomshuset (literally, "Youth House"), a building squatted for decades before the government determined that the space would be more beneficial as a parking lot. I'm in the new Ungdomshuset; the old one, despite the riots, is now a parking lot. Everyone seems to regard this space as a neutered replica. It may even be legal now, I'm not sure. Still, I just ate a bowl of vegan chili and a cup of coffee for the equivalent of $3.50, less than it costs to ride the bus, cooked in a communal, volunteer kitchen. In addition to community dinners, the house is a venue for workshops and radical political action.




Why can't the US support this kind of autonomous alternative youth community? It seems like the violence, authoritarian repression, and individualistic egoism that destroy cooperative ventures in America must be pervasive to our culture and way of life.

It was sad to leave our farm in the Netherlands, although as a memento, I got to keep the deep, seemingly indelible stain I developed on my hands from twisting the beet greens off of the roots. More materially, we also took a few pounds of striped and colored beets and a bouquet of exotic carrots to our hosts in Denmark.

The upside to leaving Henrike's farm is a definite improvement in my physical health. There is, as I mentioned previously, a great deal of life on the farm, both vegetable and animal. I am, unfortunately, asthmatic and severely allergic. Although it used to send me to the hospital every few months as a kid, my asthma isn't all that noticeable under ordinary circumstances, but working on the farm, with its myriad pollens, dusts, and danders, exacerbated my immune oversensitivities. I was sniffling constantly, despite daily doses of decongestants and anti-histamines, and I was so frequently asthmatic that I needed to start taking an inhaled steroid, which I haven't needed to do for several years. I'm just glad I had the foresight to bring it from the U.S.

Unfortunately, my daily medication didn't keep my asthma completely under control, and I was using my "rescue medication," an inhaled medication that acts quickly to open the airways during an asthmatic attack, multiple times a day. Consequently, I started running low on it. That's bad news, of course, because Jenna and I would be leaving the farm soon - too soon to have my mom send me another inhaler - and wouldn't be in any one place more than a few days until our farm in France. I decided to schedule an appointment with a doctor in the Netherlands. I didn't know if my crappy budget insurance would cover it or not, but I would rather eat the cost of a consultation and prescription than run out of medicine. On Tuesday, our last day in the Netherlands, I biked to Ens and had a brisk, businesslike consultation with a doctor, and ten minutes later, left with a fresh inhaler. It cost about $30 for everything; they didn't ask for my insurance information, and I didn't volunteer it. They probably wouldn't have covered an international prescription anyway. Perhaps because healthcare is a public business in the Netherlands, the doctor didn't do an unnecessary evaluation to determine if I was really asthmatic, which an American doctor would have almost definitely performed. Instead, he sensibly considered my mostly empty inhaler as sufficient evidence that I could be safely given a fresh one.

Henrike sent us off with an early dinner of waffles (she even made a batch of vegan waffles) with strawberry mush and creme fraiche, for those inclined that way. We took an overnight train to Copenhagen, which was uneventful.





We arrived in the morning on Wednesday. Our first requirement was coffee, which we satisfied at a sort of generic-looking shop across the street from the train station. Here, we were introduced to the $4.00 cup of coffee, followed shortly by the $8.00 bus ride (for two of us, but the point stands), and the $6.00 loaf of bread. Perversely, beer is as cheap or cheaper than in the US.

I've identified two ways in which the United States beats the pants out of any European nation I've thus far encountered. The first is in the attentiveness of our restaurant staff. There's no two ways about it: the service sucks here. There's no division of labor: the person who greets and seats you will also serve you, clear your plates, and probably fix your americano. Wednesday night was my five-year anniversary with Jenna. We went out to a really fancy vegan restaurant, Firefly Garden. The nouveau-cuisine dishes were of the type that cooks hope food critics will describe with adjectives like "playful" and "deconstructed." There were reductions Jackson-Pollacked around everything, edible flowers, all the food stacked up in little piles in the center of the plate, polished river stones as decorative garnish, etc.


As nice as the place was, our waiter forgot to bring water (we ordered it; it almost invariably costs extra, we've learned), left dishes on the table long after we were done, and had to be signaled to bring a check. He was a perfectly nice guy, it's just that the overall benchmark is low.

The second, more important, advantage that America enjoys over Europe is its cheapness. Everything is more expensive here, more or less depending on where you are. The indulgence of a vegan doughnut or an extra appetizer is a matter of $3.00 in Philly. Either could set you back $8.00 here. Will I ever stop being amazed at how expensive things are in Europe? Probably not.

As a correlary to this point, I think Europe's reputation for culinary supremacy is overstated, or rather, is completely irrelevant to me. As a poor vegan, I couldn't care less about Michelin Starred French cuisine. The food available to me at my price range is on par with American food in quality, but more expensive.

We decided to split our CouchSurfing time between two hosts. We had contacted a couple who were unable to host us themselves, but went out of their way to ask their friends if they could host us. They put us in touch with Sofie and Rikke, who were really nice folks and great hosts. Jenna and I decided to stay with them two nights, and then stay the third night on the boat with a dude named Martin. We, unfortunately, couldn't stay in the housing co-op, having already committed ourselves for all three nights.

After coffee, we walked to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Originally a private collection of Carl Jacobsen, the heir to the Carlsberg Beer fortune, it houses a massive collection of ancient and classical Mediterranean statues and artifacts, along with a collection of 19th-century art. In 1882, Jacobsen opened his home to the public, but in 1888, he donated his collection to the state, on the condition that a suitable building would be erected. The museum is exquisite, prominently featuring a winter garden, enclosed in a vast glass dome. The workmanship displayed in the marble floors, stained glass windows, and carved wainscotting is probably unavailable at any price today.








Due to its proximity to Tivoli Gardens' roller coasters (how expensive must that tourist trap be! They're spendy in the US; one shudders to think what a park concessions corn dog costs in Denmark), the Glyptotek has the quirk of having the sound of screaming people echo the halls.

Kneeling Barbarian, Rome c. 20 BC


Melpomene, Monte Calvo 2nd Cent. CE


Cuirass Bust of Caligula, Rome 37-41  CE

King Amenemhat, Egypt c. 1800 BCE

The 19th-century art was biased towards sculptures, including a really large collection of Rodins, but there were also a few galleries of French and Danish paintings.

Toilette After the Bath, Degas

Reclining Tahitian Women, Gauguin

Ophelia, Agathon van Weydevelt Léonard

Resting Model, Constantin Hansen

View of Mont Blanc, Signac

Bronze study, Degas



Perseus Slaying Medusa, Laurent-Honoré Marqueste

Young Girl Braiding Her Hair, Berthe Morisot

Danaid, Rodin

We saw Christiania on Thursday (today, the 6th, as I write this). Christiania is one of the main reasons I wanted to get to Copenhagen, even though it's a detour far north of the rest of our European travel. It was a fascinating experience. Christiania was formerly a naval base, which, having laid vacant for some years, was occupied in 1971 by counter-cultural types and declared an autonomous zone. It's been continuously squatted since, and many new buildings have been built by residents. Its history is marked by conflict, both internal and with the municipal government. Christiania has a booming and very visible soft drug economy, in direct contravention of Danish law, which has been tolerated to greater and lesser extents by different local governments. Hard drugs were, for a time, a major problem for the community; additionally, Christiania residents were, for a while, in a state of war with a biker gang who sought to take over the drug distribution in the area. Drug conflicts have led to several murders since Christiania's inception. In short, Christiania has its problems. On the other hand, the residents have responded very effectively to these problems, fixing them without recourse to outside authorities. Now, it's a safe, even touristy, attraction. It was quite busy.






Christiania is a mixture of the stone barracks which were there when it was first occupied, and the houses and shops erected by subsequent residents. There are art galleries, bakeries, restaurants, grocery stores, vegetable stands, an indoor skate park, a hardware store, and a bike factory. All the buildings are cheerfully graffitied. The main street is Pusher Street, so named because it's the center of the "Green Light District," the drug marketplace. Several years ago, the government asked Christiania to make the drug trade "less visible." The dealers responded by covering their kiosks in camouflage netting. There are no photos allowed in the drug-dealing zone. Outside of this area, Christiania is mostly residences, customized in unique and whimsical ways. Happy, oblivious dogs run free. The atmosphere in Christiania is very different from the rest of Copenhagen: it seems to strive for a happy, sun-dappled hippie vibe, akin to a fine summer day in Vermont, but it falls short of this pleasant serenity. Behind the bold, primary-colored houses and dreadlocks and overalls, there's a hard edge of distrust and a willingness to fight. The day-to-day living of the residents is more interesting to me than the cafes and market stalls. I have a lot of questions. For instance, what kind of people choose this life? Do most community members work inside Christiania? Is Christiania's internal currency actually prevalent among the people who live there, or do they prefer the kroner? Are food and other goods free to residents? If not, is it really a commune?

I thought a lot about The Dispossessed when walking through Christiania. In that novel, LeGuin imagines a post-revolutionary society, where anarchism is orthodoxy. The story takes place seven generations after a group of settlers breaks away from their capitalistic home planet to form an agrarian libertarian-Communist society on a satellite moon. The various mechanisms of communal labor and resource-division have been reified in the fictional society.

Christiania is possibly Western society's longest-lasting example of an autonomous collective. It, too, has something of the inertia of orthodoxy behind it. What struck me was how normal everything seemed: the people of Copenhagen simply accepted that, within their city, there was a secessionist anarchist commune, and it's the place to go to buy hash and loiter. It did not seem revolutionary, or even different in any substantial way from the shops and houses around it.

Because of its status as a tourist destination, Christiania's anti-capitalism is muddied. It's true that there are no private vehicles or houses in Christiania, but so much of the economy is based on selling things - mostly drugs, really - to outsiders for profit. Even if that profit is reinvested into the community as a whole, it reflects the interdependence of Christiania on the capitalist economy outside its gates. I wonder to what extent the legalization of marijuana in Denmark would disrupt Christiania's economy.

Recently, the government has been trying to leverage Christiania residents into buying (at a very low price) the land that they've been inhabiting since 1971. Additionally, plans are in the works to build privately-owned condominiums in the area. These are bad signs for the integrity of Christiania's future. Still, it's also important to recognize that the government's desperation to introduce private enterprise and ownership into Christiania is a symbol of the commune's success. If it didn't represent dangerous ideas, the powers that be wouldn't be so eager to destroy them.

The show is over now. Being a wallflower paid off in one way: I somehow avoided being asked to pay. Three bands played; I enjoyed each of them to a degree. The second band - I think they were called Instincto - played melodic d-beat, with characteristic dramatic Tragedy-style chord progressions and goofy "epic" lead breaks. I was all, "Oh, what's up? Is it 2006 again?" And 2006 was all, "Yeah, it is. We're having a great time over here." Played out as that style is, I found myself grinning and bobbing my head like an idiot. They were from Barcelona, which makes sense, because both Ekkaia and Ictus, the bands I consider paradigmatic of melodicrust as a genre, also hail from Spain. The final band was local, kind of a UK '82 outfit, and got the crowd all stirred up. The circle pit got pretty violent, but everyone seemed to be going out of their way to take care of me - something people do frequently (but unnecessarily) when I'm the smallest guy in the pit.

After the show, I met up with Jenna, Sofie, and company at the bar. It was fun. Sofie's friend Katrine, who's a bartender there, insisted on getting me a soda. Everyone was pretty drunk. I talked politics with this really nice skinhead guy, Matt, for a while before heading home. His friend Peter was comically drunk - at the stage of mental devastation in which the will to speak is active, but the physical mechanisms of communication are just out of reach. He broke a glass, lost his hat, and spilled beer across his crotch within minutes of my arrival at the bar.


Copenhagen is a windy, serious city. A Gothic, stentorian atmosphere rules the dark Scandinavian streets and minimalist buildings in this city, where Kierkegaard appropriately rests his bones. It also brings to mind another famous Dane, Hamlet. Copenhagen seems exhausted, cynical about its own prospects, vaguely in decline. Because it is our second urban stop on the Continent, Copenhagen invites comparison to the first, Amsterdam. While Amsterdam flaunts its beauty and narcissistically courts the tourist trade, Copenhagen goes about its business, playing its cards closer to the chest. The less buttoned-up parts of Copenhagen don't quite match Amsterdam for revelry; Christiania is full of sensual pleasures, like the Red Light District, but could hardly be described as "carefree." Both cities are characterized by extreme affluence, but while Amsterdam's moneyed elite live ostentatiously in 16th-century canal houses, Copenhagen's wealthy remove themselves to distant, blemish-free cubes of modernism. Copenhagen lacks Amsterdam's gloss, but is perhaps more profound; I wouldn't say I liked Copenhagen better.

Posted by Aram

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Cabbages

This post is about cabbages. There are pictures of non-cabbage things at the end.
Cutting cabbages, as Aram mentioned in our previous post, is not nearly as easy as it sounds. These cabbages are giants, easily weighing 20 pounds, and are not willing to let go of their stalks without a fight. To cut a cabbage, one employs a stab-and-twist method, first cutting into the base of the cabbage, then twisting the knife while leveraging one's body weight to release the head from its base. When done correctly, each cabbage should take about 15 seconds from start to finish. 

One morning, as I stood in the hallway putting on my boots, I overheard a conversation Digni was having with Aram which I know I was not intended to hear. Digni asked Aram if I would be joining him in helping the cabbage workers that afternoon. Aram replied that I would, and Digni then said plainly that he didn't think I could do it and that Aram had better come on his own. He said, "It is very hard work, very hard. I do not mean anything bad by this, but I have never seen a female person do it correctly."

In the hallway, I was fuming. The feminist in me was very angry. I felt that I had been personally attacked, though this was clearly not the case. Digni had not said, "Jenna can't do it because she's a woman and women are weak." The Dutch are known for their straightforwardness; children are raised to be assertive and to say what they think. Digni was merely repeating an observation; as the owner of this farm and having observed many men and women at work cutting the cabbages, his experience was that women often did not do it correctly. This, however, was not what my brain heard. What I heard was, "You're a girl, and that means you're not strong enough, and so you will not be given a chance to try."

That afternoon I weeded instead of cutting cabbages. Afterwards, Aram told me the work was difficult and he had struggled to get the technique, but he thought I could do it. I talked to him about overhearing Digni and how it made me feel: I was angry that I had to prove myself as a woman, I was angry that I was being challenged to prove that I could succeed at a task that women apparently fail at. Aram commiserated, and for his part explained that he, as the only newcomer of the cabbage cutters, had felt similarly self conscious about his performance. He said he felt like he had to prove his manliness by being strong and keeping up with the other male cabbage cutters. I understood where he was coming from, and even the pressure that he must have felt was put upon him. Because he was a man, it was assumed that he must be able to cut the cabbages, but because I was a woman, I must not be able to. I guess we both felt uncomfortable, but I felt like I had a right to be angrier, since I had been denied the presumption of capability. That really, really bothered me, and I went to bed still pissed about it.
In any case, the next morning they needed more hands to help with the cabbages and Digni did send me out to help with everyone else. As we were riding out to the field, I felt a lot of pressure. This was my "chance" to prove that I could do this, despite my apparent handicap of having a vagina.
Ostensibly the most frustrating thing about the cabbage cutting was that my struggle with it had very little to do with lack of strength. The difficulty that I was having was with the knifing technique, not the strength required to push the cabbage off. However, I felt it must have appeared to everyone else that I lacked the strength to push the cabbages off. I desperately wanted to stand up and yell to everyone "I'm strong enough! I just can't get this goddamn knife to do what I want it to do!"
A few minutes into the work, my emotional reaction to the situation began to get out of control. I was covered in mud, on my knees in wet cabbage, desperately trying to get the hang of this stab-and-twist thing. Everyone had been given their own row, so it was easy to see how fast each person was moving and it was clear that I was the slowest. With each cabbage I struggled to release from its slimy hold, I grew more and more angry, hearing Digni's challenge in my head.

I had muddled feelings about this. On one hand, I knew logically that what I had overheard was not intended as an insult or as a challenge of my personal abilities. On the other hand, knowing this did not stop me from feeling hurt. I felt that every man on that field was watching me and thinking "God, why did Digni send a woman out here, she's so slow, she can't even cut it right because she's too weak."

I wish I was exaggerating these thoughts but there they were. Mostly I was swinging this mini machete around feeling resentful. I resented Digni for challenging me (although he had done no such thing), I resented the men on the field for perpetuating that challenge (even though they were doing no such thing), and most of all I resented myself for not being able to magically whisk those goddamn cabbages off of their stalks with my pinkie finger of steel and blow everyone else cutting cabbages out of the water. I felt like I had a responsibility to women to be the strongest, most amazing cabbage cutter the world had ever seen, and I was utterly failing at it. This made me the angriest of all. I was disappointed in myself for proving Digni right.

Even though Digni did not intend to challenge me, what he had done was bring gender into a situation where I felt it didn't belong. If I hadn't overheard him, I never would have thought about being the only girl on that field, and I never would have put my performance cutting cabbages into the context of proving the general strength and abilities of women in general.
 
Anyway, while all this was happening I finished my cabbage row not really that far behind everyone else, but only because someone came and started cutting my row from the other side, which caused me to probably mutter like a nutcase out of resentment for his help. Then came the time when we had to lift all the cabbages and throw them into the bins on the tractor. Aram has explained this, but please imagine doing squats with a 20 to 25 pound weighted basketball, then lifting them up over your head and throwing them into a moving bin. Now bend down and do it again forty times or so, and make sure not to go too slow or you'll fall behind the moving tractor.

After loading the first round of cabbages we had a coffee break where I sourly contemplated my failure as a strong woman to defend the honor of strong women everywhere by blasting the cabbages away with one glance from my Kryptonite gaze. Afterwards, we went back out for round two.

Here I tried a different technique with the knife and surprisingly I was moving faster. The cabbages started coming off like they were supposed to. By the end of the third round I was keeping pace with everyone else. I felt awesome, but I still resented feeling as though I had to prove something that nobody else had to prove.

I talked with Aram a long while about this afterwards, as we rode our loaner bikes to a nearby town and beach. I was having trouble figuring out where my resentment had come from, and if anything wrong had even been said in the first place.

The thing is, I have always had uncomfortable feelings about what kind of girl I should be. I have always felt that there are stereotypes that I don't want associated with me. For years when I was a teenager and even for the first year or two of college, I felt very strongly that I must be cool, relaxed, not admit to liking "girly" things, that I should be strong and sarcastic.

In recent years I have finally come to realize how silly and even damaging my feelings about being a girl are. There is a tendency among young women to disavow and denegrate certain characteristics that are considered stereotypical of women.  They insist that "girly" characteristics are something to be ashamed of. This is damaging mainly because it creates a divide among women: girly-girls and not-girly-girls... as in, more like men. This plays into a male dominant system, because of course the underlying message being communicated, whether one is conscious of it or not, is that being a girl is somehow undesirable, while being more male is desireable. The things that we have come to associate with women are also things we have come to look down on as frivolous and weak.
It is frustrating and unfortunate to feel like there is no middle ground between being a super-productive wonderwoman of incredible strength and capability, and being a failure. I feel as though as a woman you would have a hard time being a strong capable woman without it being put in the terms of proving that women in general are strong, intelligent, and capable, and defining it against the stereotype of women as being weak, frivolous, and inept. In other words, it's impossible to take gender out of the equation. This was what I was struggling with while working in the cabbage fields. I could not simply attempt to cut the cabbages, and either succeed or fail and have that be the end of it. I could either be the strongest, fastest female cabbage cutter in the universe, faster than all the men, or I could be slower, and thus have acquiesed to the judgment of my gender, rendering me an utter failure and letdown to women in general.

Thinking about all this has made me feel very ashamed that I am still struggling to put those judgmental, negative feelings about what being a woman means away. I think I got very caught up in this particular episode on the farm because it brought up all these feelings again, and forced me to look at them straight on.

I bet nobody has ever written this much inspired by cabbage before. Somebody should give me a medal.

The rest of our time on the farm was less emotionally eventful and very enjoyable. We biked to a small forest which was originally a laboratory for hydrodynamic research. Scattered throughout the trees are remnants of the models of dykes and dams used by the researchers. There is also a lot of interesting art along the walking and biking paths, mostly sculpture. 

Onion field



This had pieces cut out inside such that you could see reflections of the sky. The rest of it was pitch black.



On our way back, we rode past a lighthouse that used to overlook the ocean before the polder was reclaimed, but now is just a lighthouse in the middle of a field.




 In our last week, another WWOOFer came from Amsterdam named Daniel. He had worked with Henrike before and had some time off from work, so he came to volunteer for a few days. It speaks well of Henrike and Digni that someone would want to return on their few precious days off.

It was nice to have another WWOOFer around. Aram, Daniel and I biked to Emmelord, which is about an hour's ride away, to visit Henrike at the farm-stand she runs there.


She bought us all ice cream and afterwards the three of us rode to Nettle Beach to take a swim. Daniel is intelligent and soft-spoken; he was good company. We also cooked a lot, making use of the beautiful beets and potatoes available to us.



We also took a field trip with Digni to Groningen for an afternoon.  The north of the Netherlands tends to be less developed and urban than the south.  As a result, the government invested heavily in Groningen's cultural sector.  The city boasts a major university and shiny, new contemporary art museum.  We only got a quick impression while Digni was doing business; the architecture was remarkably beautiful.  



Automat machine for various fried foodstuffs.
Awesome antique store.

On Sunday, after Daniel left, Aram and I made a bike trip through the polder.  We visited Schokland, a former island which became part of the land when the Zuider Zee was drained and the polder "reclaimed." Schokland has a museum, and numerous ruins.  It's a UNESCO World Heritage site, although, really, there's not much left to see.  Schokland was never much of an island; its residents fought a losing battle to keep above sea level, as the ocean pushed inward.  Eventually, the only inhabitable areas were three small hills, connected by narrow wooden walkways.  The rest of the island was useless marsh.  It was abandoned in the 19th century.  After the Noordoostpolder was drained, in 1942, many of the buildings were demolished, although I'm not sure why.  It's especially puzzling considering that at the time the Netherlands were occupied by the Nazis, and with the strong Nazi interest in history it's a mystery why they would destroy most of the historical buildings in Schokland. In any case, the small museum displays archaeological pieces, from prehistory through the island's abandonment.






After seeing Schokland, we biked to the Nordoostpolder's other former island, Urk, which is situated on the outside of the polder, such that it still presents one side to the open water. Urk is supposedly much more conservative and Christian than the rest of the area.  It was Sunday when we arrived, and nothing - absolutely nothing - was open.  We ended up at the memorial to fishermen lost at sea, which was depressing, and then left.  We noticed that a lot of the men were wearing identical gold rings through both ears. The internet provided us with their meaning-- they are apparently worn to identify fishermen as coming from Urk.




The last few days at the farm we continued our work preparing garlic for the market and harvesting beetroot, among other things. I unfortunately caught a cold or something and felt pretty sick with a small fever on our second-to-last day, so I just took it easy. Henrike ordered me to rest and then spent the day occasionally checking in on me and bringing me various sweet things which she insisted were my "medicine": warm cherries cooked with sugar and cream, homemade strawberry ice cream. 

Our time at the farm was drawing to a close and neither Aram nor I wanted to leave. We had an incredible time getting to know Henrike and Digni. I especially enjoyed seeing Digni open up a bit- he was very gruff when we first arrived, but by our last day he was joking with us that he would hide all our things and sell his car so he couldn't drive us to the train station.

  

 And of course, it was difficult to leave the kittens behind.



Obviously.

Posted by Jenna