Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Our hotel is an old Delft canal house, and our sunny room overlooks an old Delft canal, appropriately called the Oude Delft Canal. I strolled to the big town square called the Markt today, while Frank tried to replace some jet-lagged sleep. No actual rain fell on my mithril raincoat, but cloudy skies and a wet breeze made me glad I’d brought warm clothing for these few days. It is a lovely, classical Dutch civic space, with fake wooden shoes now on sale from every ground floor. Then, after seeing your dad off to his conference, I hopped on a train to Den Haag, to revisit the lovely Vermeers in the Mauritshuis (most notably Girl with Pearl Earring and View of Delft.)

To my delight, they also had Vermeer’s most ambitious painting on temporary loan from Vienna — “Allegory of Painting”, which he had on display in his own studio until his death. Allegedly, the chair in the foreground invites you to sit down in the artist’s studio so that Vermeer himself can (metaphorically) pull the curtain aside to reveal to you more of his art. Quite aside from the complex story the painting supposedly tells, it’s pretty spectacular in the sheer scope of what it imitates (glass, fabric, skin, wood, ripples of shadow, rays and twinkles of light, etc.) The museum was uncrowded except for a couple of surges of Japanese tourists, who seemed to be running some kind of endurance race. 30 tourists crowd together in front of one painting, 30 tourists listen to 2-minute spiel in Japanese, 30 tourists snap flash pictures of the painting, 30 tourists hasten away to another painting. Of course, much of the fun was also riding Dutch trains and trams again, not to mention wandering cheerfully over the bricks and cobbles of many small side streets. Also ordering a lunch of mixed appetizers and being very surprised that it included bits of raw hamburg(?)–which I did not eat, by the way. Now I’ll take a much-needed nap, but not before forcing this email into double duty as a traveler’s blogpost.

Love you a lot and xxx to all,
Mom

On page 32 of his new book,
Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, Richard Layard charts happiness versus per capita income of various countries. The country with the highest percent who are “Happy” or “Satisfied”?

The Netherlands, by a good bit.

Why? Dutch bicycles, if you want my opinion.

Holland has no monopoly on Layard’s big seven — family relationships, financial situation, work, community and friends, health, personal freedom, and personal values — factors he claims can account for much of happiness.

Here’s why the Dutch norm of bicycling everywhere creates more happiness:

• Exercise makes people’s bodies feel good.
• Exercise lifts people’s spirits.
• Bikers are not anonymous the way drivers are; hence their traffic interactions are much more civil.
• Riding a bike instead of a Hummer to work is just one example of the general Dutch aversion to flaunting wealth–the struggle to keep up with (or better) your neighbors creates much unhappiness in many cultures.
• Almost running over clueless American tourists who will go home and blog about you gets your pulses racing.

In that last area, Dutch bicycles have just made me happy as well.

That’s the forecast for the next three days in Amsterdam. It rains at least once 220 days a year there, if my memory serves me right. But I’m still thrilled to be on my way there this morning.

In 1998, our family spent springtime in the Netherlands, while Frank was Lorentz Professor at the University of Leiden. I’ll never forget the miraculous fields of red and yellow tulips from every window of every railroad train. This tiny country accounts for a huge fraction of the cut flowers florists sell all around the world.

One day, a neighbor re-digging an opulent garden was throwing away a huge lavender plant. I lugged it home, because our rented house’s garden had plenty of empty space.

In the garden shed, however, the only shovel was a square-nosed item that looked to me like a lightweight coal shovel. Growing up in New Hampshire, with soil full of clay and rocks, I had only seen garden shovels made of hard steel with a pointy nose and a flat top to the blade for you to jump up and down on. I mustered my scanty Dutch and asked the neighbors to lend me their garden shovel. Their shovel looked just like the one in my garden shed. And once I started digging, I understood why–the soil (at least in Leiden, where we were staying) was almost as soft as sand for digging in.

I also remember the many baby coots growing up in canals, the flotillas of racing bicycles that nearly killed me many a time, and the flowering chestnuts that offered some consolation after the tulips all disappeared.

I’m off to be rained on, but if I just see some more of their wonderful tulips I won’t mind at all.

Holy begorrah and a pile o’ shillelelaghs!

Only 7 minutes past midnight, and Noel Burke of Cork, Ireland, has got the Saint Patrick’s Day jump on the rest of us bloggers.

Growing up in NH, I always wanted to travel. OK, maybe I never
specifically longed to go driving to Bridgeport, CT, hop on a ferry to
Port Jefferson, NY, and end up at a wedding in Ronkonkoma–but I’m
looking forward to it now, as today’s destination.

After a two-month break from Nobel traveling, Frank and I are headed
back out the door for the next few months. Among the places I’ve been
organizing our plans for:

• Washington, DC
• Tampa, FL,
• Philadelphia, PA
• Princeton, NJ
• Delft
• Riyadh
• Barcelona
• Madrid
• Oxford

And that’s just from now through mid-May. So I’m hoping your payback
for my recent sparse blogging will be lots of exciting stories from the
road.

On December 10, the beautiful country of Sweden threw a wonderful party to celebrate, once again, the annual award of Nobel Prizes. Now Sweden is engulfed by national mourning.

As many as 3,500 Swedes may have died in the December 26 tsunami. For reference, Sweden is a nation of only 9 million people–about 1/32 of the US population–while the number of Swedes dead or missing is larger than the number killed in the US on September 11, 2001.

I know that the international aid effort is being targeted to the Asian countries hit–some of the poorest nations in the world. The point of my blogpost is just to say, once again, that the tsunami’s harmful effects extended far beyond the Indian Ocean and in particular, into a country that will always have a special place in my heart.

Other tsunami links of major interest:

• Young Swedish woman blogging in English the tragedy as seen from Stockholm
• People are turning their New Year’s Eve parties into fundraisers (via Jeff Jarvis)
• Real-Life Preacher suggests that Bush donate $40 million raised for inaugural party to help tsunami survivors (The President’s inauguration party is planned to cost $5 million more than the $35 million the US has pledged to help survivors.)
• Blog of first-hand stories from survivors
• Google lists options for sending tsunami relief aid

I spent seven hours of Christmas-Eve-Eve-day (today) trying to find our lost suitcase in Logan Airport. I hadn’t been waiting long when three men appeared–not Magi on camels, but young men in silly red hats who carried a trumpet, a trombone, and a big golden French horn. They sat down on folding chairs, rustled sheet music, and started to play, rather softly, “Joy to the World.” They gave it an oompah bass line that was somehow funny and touching at the same time.

The music transformed the way I experienced all the people around me–and the airport was packed with holiday travelers. I saw them as people who wanted to be with their families.

I remembered my brother Mark’s great delight in driving children around to see Christmas lights. I remembered my mother’s pride in her Yorkshire pudding.

Looking for my suitcase today meant I had to bother a whole bunch of busy, tired people. Every one of them treated me with kindness and concern.

Some of the time one of us said “Merry Christmas” to the other and some of the time one we didn’t, and some people say “Happy holidays”
instead, and it amazes me that people who think of themselves as Christian can get angry about “Happy holidays” or because you can’t see baby Jesus in the White House crèche.

Anyway, I didn’t find my suitcase (drat!) but I did find the spirit of Christmas in the kind and caring way people were treating each other, all over that crowded airport.

And also, of course, in the oompah backbeat to “Silent Night.”

Five million people showed up in Boston for the Red Sox parade–I saw
just a tiny fraction of the whole, but check out the Boston Globe’s message board for a wonderful kaleidoscope effect. Tiny sample:

Suzzle81 from NH:

Rfejstar of Jamaica Plain:

I’ll give the last word to RedOctober from Somerville:

Santa Fe, NM reacted to the challenge of outlying malls by turning its downtown into a tourist mecca.

This works in a basically honest kind of way here–Santa Fe has been a marketplace/meetingplace almost since its founding in 1610. Spanish and Moorish and Mexican and Native American and Anglo architectural history get all mixed together here under dramatic sky-fuls of hot sunshine, huge white clouds, enormous black thunderstorms.

The downside, for an incidental visitor like me (I’m here because Frank is here giving some physics lectures) is that walking downtown requires huge self-control. So I invented and now keep repeating a Santa Fe mantra:

• I don’t need any silver-and-turquoise jewelry.
• I don’t have a museum in my house for Indian pottery.
• I don’t wear broomstick skirts or cowboy boots.
• My religious beliefs do not require Mexican holy wood carvings.

This mantra is working quite well, although I did give in to buying a red straw hat. Wow, sunrises and sunsets are gorgeous here, and the wide desert sky has room for so much of them. So maybe I should add one more line to my mantra:

• I do not plan to become an oil painter dedicating a lifetime to magnificent sky scapes.

Whew! Wish me luck, I’m off to climb a mountain.