I spent a sleepy week in Oosterhout, a tiny¹ municipality just north of Breda in the Netherlands. I’m working on a project with a friend² and thought since I’d be in the area we could meet face-to-face. They live in Oosterhout, I was going to be nearby, it all seemed to click. So there I was.

One of the luxuries of travel as a lifestyle is the ability to see parts of a country you would never see otherwise. Virtually everyone who visits the Netherlands spends time in Amsterdam.³ If you’ve got the luxury of a few weeks you might travel around a bit, spend a day or two in The Hague or Utrecht or Tilburg. Spending a week in Oosterhout is like taking time during your visit to the United States to spend a week in Muncie, Indiana or Battle Creek, Michigan.

Which is to say, I’m getting a much clearer idea of what it’s like to live in the Netherlands, rather than just dropping in on the pretty parts. Not that I’m engaging with the local culture all that much — I’ve been spending the week catching up on all the stuff I had to postpone while my computer was in the shop — but just walking around the center of town and seeing the kinds of shops and restaurants there are, watching how people walk around or hang out.

People inhabit towns differently in Europe. That’s a common observation, but it’s one thing to read about it and another to really see it happening in front of your eyes. I’m comparing it to the time in Santa Fe, New Mexico last year,⁴ and the time I spent about half a year living in Manchester, New Hampshire.⁵ And both of those places were bigger, certainly. But the town centers didn’t really feel lived in; there were some nice restaurants and bars and shops, but they seemed like the kind of places you visited. Nobody was staying there unless you were being put up in a hotel. In Oosterhout, the main drag feels similar to Grafton Street in Dublin, albeit a much shorter and narrower version.

The difference, obviously, is cars. I noticed the same thing when I was living in Paderborn, Germany. The city center here is pedestrianized — it can be, because enough people live nearby to walk in, and there’s decent public transit for those on the outskirts — and that changes everything. I may not be the only tourist here⁶ but the vast majority of the people filling those shops and restaurants are local, and by that I mean they would say they live here rather than living nearby.

It’s a subtle difference, but an important one. You use spaces differently when they belong to you in some sense of the word. When I first moved to New York I lived in White Plains and commuted into the city until I found an apartment. And just the knowledge that I lived elsewhere, that I was going to have to schlep to a train and leave the city to go home, means I felt differently about the place — even when that commute was faster than getting crosstown to my apartment. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but if towns and cities of all sizes in the United States were easier to get into and out of, better integrated into their suburbs, would the political divisions in the United States feel quite as deep?

There are two things I’ve found a little annoying, being in Oosterhout. The first is a little silly. The place just isn’t big, geographically. I’ve started using a fitness tracker to try and force myself to exercise more,⁷ and there’s just very few places to walk to. 90% of the restaurants are within six minutes of my hotel. There’s just not enough steps between where I am and where I’d like to go.⁸ And I’m not the sort to amble randomly.⁹

Since lockdown I’ve been trying to exercise more, which for me means going outside and walking around a lot. And that was trivial in Dublin and Amsterdam and Ghent. But it’s hard someplace like her, because the town is so compact there’s just not a lot to see. I’m kind of happy typing on my computer alone in a hotel room; I like the quiet and the lack of distractions. But I’ve been forcing myself to head out into the town for lunch or at least a break during the day.¹⁰ It’s enough to hit the relatively lax milestone the American Heart Association recommends.¹¹ But it’ll be a problem if and when I decide to up the intensity.

The other thing is endemic to the Netherlands. It’s sometimes hard to find places that accept credit cards. The Dutch have an almost pathological aversion to consumer credit, and it’s resulted in very low rates of adoption for Visa and Mastercard in the country. Like most of the EU it’s still largely cashless but if you’re not using a Dutch-approved card¹² there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself stranded at the checkout in a grocery store with a full basket of groceries being told you’ll need to pay cash.¹³ You might be clever enough to be traveling with a debit card as well; and in principle they should work when credit cards don’t. But it turns out they’re all on the same network, so none of them work.

This isn’t generally a problem in the more touristy cities — the more foreigners a place is likely to cater to, the more likely they’ll accept your card — but someplace as far off the beaten track as Oosterhout it becomes a real guessing game. The Italian restaurant I went to accepted Visa. The bubble tea place didn’t. The gelato place didn’t. The owner of the BBQ restaurant didn’t know if they did or not, but we tried it and it worked.¹⁴

I get the reluctance to run up a tab on a credit card; most Americans who went to college have a story about running up debt on the “starter” credit cards they’re practically throwing at you on campus. But credit cards have real advantages over debit cards, even beyond any reward programs they might offer.¹⁵ And I haven’t run a balance on a credit card in decades. So it’s particularly jolting to suddenly have my payment refused all over the place, because with one exception¹⁶ I’ve spent a grand total of 50€ in cash since April, 2020. Everything else has gone on my card: taxis, convenience store snacks, bar tabs, vending machines. I have a lot of problems with the way our aggressively interconnected global economy works; one of the consolations is supposed to be seamless international transactions. I don’t miss counting change or trying to locate an ATM at 3am. It’s disappointing to go back.

I spent the last 24 hours in Amsterdam, preparing to fly out in the morning.¹⁷ I had originally planned to stay in, but convinced myself to head out to visit one last museum and see a movie. The museum was Electric Ladyland, “the first museum of fluorescent art,” run by a somewhat eccentric artist who’s really into fluorescence. It’s tiny; the “museum” is a studio-sized space in the basement that’s got an art installation taking up half of the room. It’s groovy, but the owner really knows their stuff about the history of florescent art and the science behind it. And it’s worth the effort to see it when they turn off the lights and power on the short-wave ultraviolet lamps and all those dull grey rocks ignite in crazy patterns and colors.

After that I walked over to the movie theater.¹⁸ It’s the kickoff to Pride in Amsterdam, which I didn’t know¹⁹ but I twigged to pretty quickly when I passed the drag queen on stilts with butterfly wings on Reguliersdwarsstraat. I ducked out of the way and grabbed a socially-distanced dinner outside at one of the restaurants there, just watching the mobs of people starting the party early.

It’s probably not safe to be in crowds like that for very long, in the age of Corona. I don’t know what the vaccinations rates are, and nobody was masking. But safe is relative, I suppose. In the first two weeks of July the Netherlands went from reporting 800 new cases a day to 10,000. Now it’s dropped to 2,500. And deaths remain in single digits.

So it’s still the best of times and the worst of times. I’m sad to be leaving Amsterdam and miss out on the party, but I’m relieved to be heading to Copenhagen where they appear to be still be taking it more seriously. For all that, the case counts are similar²⁰ so I’m not going to claim to know what’s going on.

But if hot vax summer turned out to be something of a bust, we at least still appear to be in an uneasy détente. We’re not going to eradicate COVID-19 quickly, and probably never will. But we’re learning to live with it, make accommodations, hold it at a level where people can keep on with their lives. And so cautiously, carefully, I’m keeping on with mine.

Next: Copenhagen (CPH) to Reykjavík (KEF)
Prev: Ghent to Oosterhout

Footnotes

¹ I mean, it’s all relative. It’s 55,000 people. Compared to Amsterdam, or even Ghent, it’s small. It’s not directly on a train line. But even at that, these kind of towns feel integrated into the larger world than a lot of places do; less that you’re retreating from what’s going on as you’re finding a slightly miniaturized version of it.

² I’ve been kicking around my idea for a And Then There Were None-based larp for a while now, and finally launched with a codesigner. Sign-ups just closed.

³ Although, oddly, the first time I was in the Netherlands was for business, and I spent the weekend in Rotterdam.

⁴ Population ~80,000

⁵ Population ~110,000

⁶ If nothing else, other people were checking into the hotel

⁷ Obviously, the only way to stay relatively fit is to eat less or get more exercise. I’m trying to eat less, although it’s always a challenge if you’re relying on restaurants and take out food; I have no place to keep leftovers and feel massively guilty throwing away food. So, more exercise.

⁸ I’ve been using Google Fit, because it’s simple and free and built into my phone so I don’t have anything extra to charge or forget in a hotel. So technically I’m measuring “Heart Points” which are supposed to track intensity, I guess on the not-unreasonable theory that 2,500 steps at a crisp pace are better than 5,000 steps at a leisurely one.

⁹ Ambling randomly isn’t likely to raise my heartrate sufficiently to count as exercise, anyway. So it’d be more like briskly striding randomly.

¹⁰ I wrote some of this in a bubble tea café.

¹¹ 150 “Heart Points” a week is roughly 2.5 hours of exercise that raises your heart rate, or half that of strenuous exercise. It’s a start.

¹² Basically Maestro, a debit card network owned by Mastercard

¹³ Famously and annoyingly, one of the major grocery store chains in the Netherlands — Albert Heijn — does not accept Visa or Mastercard.

¹⁴ And yes, I was surprised to find a decent BBQ restaurant called Eastwood with pulled jackfruit and pulled mushrooms on the menu.

¹⁵ Namely, a debit card removes your money immediately and hands it to the merchant. Credit cards record the transaction and then settle it a few days later. It is far easier to dispute a charge on a credit card, since the credit card issuer isn’t out any money.

¹⁶ I paid cash for the week I stayed at a B&B in Kinsale, because it was cheaper than booking online.

¹⁷ I’ve learned to try and book in to hotels by the airport when I’ve a flight out before noon the next day. It’s easy to get to Schiphol from most places in Amsterdam, but it’s not 5-minute-walk easy. If a train’s going to break down, better it does it on my way to the hotel the night before than two hours before my flight leaves.

¹⁸ I saw Suicide Squad. It’s solid. Two thumbs up.

¹⁹ I am, per usual, terrible at tracking local holidays.

²⁰ About 1,000 cases/week for every million people for each country, but the death rate in Denmark is a third that of the Netherlands. I suspect that’s residual from the spike in cases three weeks ago in the Netherlands, or maybe Denmark’s better at testing so the case count in the Netherlands is artificially low, or maybe Denmark’s doing better at vaccinating and/or isolating the elderly. The stats are confusing.