Monday,
June 19, 2006 Utrecht, The Netherlands – Rienk’s home
Last year’s
travel-blog ~ http://neuage.org/05.htm
Photos from Photos from first
days (http://neuage.org/06trip/06trip-1/index.htm)
Previous thingy
Utrecht circularity (circularity = lostness
+ navigational miracles)
and other insights, observations, experiences, thoughts…
Back in
Round Lake we have our bikes in the shed. They are not the top of the range and
surely not worthy of a photograph; then there’s the rust that they have been
collecting; but they are bikes and as such were bought for the sole purpose of
exercise and exploration. We bought them at a garage sale years ago and in the
past twelve months we rode them once – around the village of Round Lake. We
surely were not anti-bike, nor lazy as we spent our days racing up and down the
Northway between home and work. We just never had time. After getting on the
freeway at 6.45 each morning and home too late in the evening we would work at
renovating our home. On weekends we rushed around – I think we were renovating
– we were too exhausted by the beginning of the next workweek to separate house
work from school work from whatever else it was we managed to overwork
ourselves with to think about the bikes in the shed.
The reason
they had rust was because of the time we took them out of the shed and had
intended to ride them but did not have the time and we did not put them back in
the shed and over the next months there was rain and sleet and snow and then
the rust came. When we rented out our home last week we leaned the bikes
against the car and put a cover over the car and bikes. So in actual fact they
really are not now in the shed but are once again outside though covered from
the sun and rain of upstate New York summer. I hope we will take them to
Brooklyn and ride them in New York City when we return. However, we cannot keep
them in our apartment, as there is not enough room. Whether we can rent a space
in the building’s basement remains part of our over all inquiry of how we will
keep even a portion of all our stuff with us. We just had a big purge as we
began our downsizing from a large four-bedroom home with a parlor and all the
rest an old Victorian home has to offer to prepare for the big squeeze into a
small one-bedroom apartment in New York City.
That was a
lot of verbiage to get to tell about our bike ride last night.
We had
already had a long bike ride into the centre of Utrecht when we used the
Internet Café yesterday. Shops are not open on Sunday in the Netherlands and
outside of a few cafes bike riding is what there is to do. We do not have a
house to renovate, we do not need to look for a home, we have no schoolwork to
prepare, we have nothing to do but bike ride and that makes this a real
holiday. In other years we went on a
boat ride with either Reink or Leen and Janny. This year Reink’s boat is in dry-dock
whilst getting a new coat of paint. We may try our hands or feet – at those
peddle boats and have a bit of a stroll down the canals at some point before we
leave. Because Reink, like most European males, likes to watch the football
(soccer) and because we are Australians (even with my New York accent I am an
Australian, by citizenship, though I would not fall into the ‘true-blue’
category) we watched the Australia and Brazil match. It was the first time
Australia had been in the World Cup in some thirty years and the first time
they had scored a goal in much longer than that was last week when they beat
Japan 3 – 0. They lost 2 – 0 to Brazil yesterday but for my lack of football
knowledge (American football is called gridiron outside of the States) it
seemed that Australia played well – they ran around and looked quite busy
though Brazil always looked like they had control – in other words they had the
ball most of the time.
Navigational
miracles
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It was after seven pm when we hopped on the bikes.
Rienk said that after the second bridge there was a bike path that went along
canals and rivers that we could follow. Perhaps we took the wrong path – there
are so many bike paths in Utrecht. The path followed a canal but of course this
is the country of canals – then we followed a river. We ended up in an
industrial section and then came to an end because it was blocked off with a
large fence so we turned about and followed another path. Then another path
until it was almost dark. It was ten to ten and being the summer this far north
the daylight is forever when we questioned whether we would ever find our way
back home. We ended up on a dead-end in a park at one point then when hunger
over took us we went to McDonalds looking for an elixir or magical healthy
morsels so we could continue with our lostness. I am not a big fan of any
fast-food place and the last time I was at a McDonalds was a year ago in
Adelaide for an ice cream. Narda was in
hopes of getting a Dutch croquette. I had no great hope for much of anything
eatable. Fortunately there were Dutch croquettes and I had a ‘reasonable’
vegetarian burger.
We had
spent more than an hour getting to where we were and we imagined it would take
us another hour to find the right bike path back home. My bike riding is not
all that great at the best of times but at least where we were – in some
industrial type of area – there were no people to bang into. I had come close
to knocking folks over earlier in the day. There are so many bikes in town and
the streets are so narrow I do not know how people continue to keep from
crashing into one another. Several times I could hear words directed at me but
lucky for me I do not understand Dutch and I would frequently say ‘sorry’ which
I am sure is understandable in most languages.
Maybe it
was the McDonalds food but in some miraculous way we were home ten minutes
after eating. We could not believe it at first. We went a different direction
than we had gone so far – following yet again another canal on yet again another
footpath. We went from the industrial section, past a very large public school
and suddenly there were suburbia streets and after only a couple of blocks
there was our street.
We get lost
wherever we are and we just pretend that that is how we explore the world
instead of saying we always get lost we just say we are exploring or
investigating or some such thing. I should not speak for Narda so I will claim
sole-ownership for my lostness – even back in Albany, after living there for
four years I am constantly getting lost. I lived in Adelaide for twenty-two
years and it became a daily occurrence – getting lost. I have even developed my
own spiritual version of where I am (I am where I am and I am not where I’m not
and I am where I am because it is where I am to have the insights that I will
have where I am at within that particular space in time – it is a subsection
subset section of Terrellism). Nonetheless we were on our street and we even
discussed all this in detail and realized that we could not find our way back
to McDonalds the next day no matter how we tried to retrace our steps. Of
course it was not the re-finding of McDonalds that intrigued us but the
realization that we could not retrace our steps, period.
We even
discussed theories of lostness and how we found ourselves within our
lostness. ( LIT - lost in theories)
Theories
of lostness: Part 1 – the Utrecht phase (no doubt there will be the German
phase as well as the Istanbul and the Viet Nam and the Adelaide phase of
lostness to theorize in regards to.
- The bikes that we were
borrowing had homing devices and they brought us home with out our
intervention (this was Narda’s thought),
- In the holographic universe
that we live in everything is contained within a slice of the moment and
the path of the past is contained within the path of the future which is
really the path of this moment (my errant thought),
- I have lived here in another
life-time and naturally, sub-subconsciously, at a soul level, knew my way home
because I followed the Self’s within perfect direction and if I were
regressed (not that I have never regressed in my daily, momentarily lapses
of reality before) by one of those chanellers
one reads about in weird books and magazines it would be discovered that I
have lived here in another life time. (I suppose I should take credit for
number three),
- Alien abduction…We were whisked
away into a parallel universe of virtual reality (where several parts of
former mes clamor for attention) – actually I got a bit lost with this
concept so that is probably not the solution to the foundness of our
lostness,
- Now that I am experiencing my
second Saturn Return (in my tenth house at that; as transit Saturn has
slugged its way through Leo and passed over my Mercury, Mid Haven, Venus,
and now it sits on my Saturn/Pluto conjunction as it prepares for the
onslaught to my Sun square Jupiter – anyone needing some extra Leo – I
have always had too much to begin with and I will be auctioning off
planets in Leo later this year… at my first Saturn return I went through
the alleged spiritual Self Realization initiation; brought into that
ancient concept by the cult pseudo religious order, the Holy Order of
MANS, in 1976) it is time for something significant to happen in my life
such as finding my way for once,
- We were lucky…
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It is
raining this morning so whether we go bike riding today remains to be seen.
There is little I can add. Except to say that the
guy we swerved and wobbled to miss asked us rather rudely in Dutch if we were
awake yet. I suppose he could have said much worse! Last night I visited Tante
Nel at their place and we had a glass of advocaat. Today’s a bit rainy, but who
cares. We have no schedule; that is
such a lovely state to be in. The one scoop ice cream for 1Euro is something
you can’t buy in the USA. The serving sizes and 3 times larger there. Same for
coffee.