The Netherlands has, basically, reopened. I don’t know if that’s smart, at the current stage of COVID, but it’s where they’re at. You have to wear masks on public transport¹ and they’re suggested for inside museums.² The museums require appointments. And there’s ample hand sanitizer and reminders to social distance everywhere.³ But the restaurants are open and at capacity, the streets are crowded with people out and enjoying the sun, and I’m stuck trying to balance my personal comfort level with that of everyone else’s.

On the one hand, it’s been nice. I’ve had more free time than I expected — more on that later — so it’s been great to be able to hang out in brewpubs before visiting museums or to relax in a sidewalk café surrounded by others. On the other hand, there’s still a deadly ongoing pandemic. I’ve generally been comfortable wearing masks indoors and not outdoors, but I’m trying to be pragmatic about it. Crowds, I’ll put it on, indoor or out. Big, drafty halls with few people around, I might take it off even though I’m inside. And my tolerance has shifted as I’ve neared the two-week post-second-jab mark; I wasn’t willing to walk through the hotel lobby without a mask at the start of my stay here, but now I’m not bothering to put it on for the sixty seconds I’m crossing the lobby unless there’s a scrum of people I need to get through to leave.

Because I’ve had time to myself I’ve been seeing a lot of tourist sites: The Rijksmuseum, the Moco Museum, The House of Bols, The Eise Eisinga Planetarium, Giethoorn,⁴ the Teylers Museum, This is Holland!,⁵ the Stedelijk Museum, Micropia,⁶ and the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden. I had seen some of the touristy side of the city the first time I visited, five years ago, but I was only here for three days then⁷ and the subsequent time I’ve been here I crashed with a friend and didn’t get out much. So this was a deep dive into that side of the city.

Amsterdam is famously welcoming to foreigners. There’s the well-known facility with English, of course.⁸ And the coffee shops⁹ and red-light district.¹⁰ And I’ll admit, wandering through Haarlem or Franeker, it’s easy to imagine finding a cute little home near a bustling little street with some shops and pubs and restaurants and settling into that kind of domestic life. But as welcoming as the Netherlands may be, I think that’s too simplistic a gloss on the place.

Welcoming is not quite the same as accepting. They might cater to visitors, but that’s not the same as approving of your behavior or your choices.¹¹ I’ve always felt there’s an odd disconnect between the hard-hearted middlebrow mercantile sensibilities that built a massive trading empire and the kind of relaxed, whatever, you-do-you ethos that’s rolled out for the tourists.

This isn’t a criticism, exactly. The Netherlands are genuinely progressive and tolerant, overall.¹² But the real country, the one underneath all the flocks of tourists, is a lot trickier to get in tune with. I’m still only getting a sense of it. And trying to understand the Netherlands without that feels like, well, gliding over the landscape from fifty meters up, getting distracted by the tulip fields and the windmills.

The reason I had so much time to myself is because my computer was in the repair shop for most of my time here. It’s a long and not all that interesting story¹³ but the take away is that I dropped off my computer on Wednesday, the day after I arrived, and I didn’t get it back in my hands and working until Friday, yesterday, ten days later.

If I were the placid, beatific travel blogger I’m sure I must occasionally seem like, I’d be telling you now about how I used the time to disconnect from the digital world, to reflect on the value of living in the moment, to get back in touch with what really matters in life. But really? I was furious. I still am. Unreasonably and incandescently outraged.

I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on that. It comes from someplace deeper than simply getting screwed over on a warranty. I have been able to do most of what I wanted to do from my phone¹⁴ over the past week, but I need my computer. It’s the most expensive thing I’m carrying, by far.¹⁵ And if it breaks, it’s incredibly challenging to arrange a way to get it fixed. That’s especially true for a MacBook, since they’re notoriously and aggressively unfriendly to do-it-yourself repairs. I was having my keyboard problems at the same time a friend was refurbishing an old Windows laptop and I watched them replace the whole keyboard assembly on theirs in under 30 minutes.

One of the design problems with the MacBook keyboard is that it isn’t a simple replacement. To get it infinitesimally thinner and infinitesimally lighter they’ve physically wedded it to the case. You have to replace the whole thing all together, which means you’re replacing a significant portion of the guts of the machine if you need to swap it out, like if a facelift required a corresponding lung transplant.

That’s not a brilliant engineering trade-off. And you’re already paying a premium for Apple products. I had kind of always thought that was the deal you were making: you pay the Apple tax and in exchange you get top-notch design, high-end components, and a commitment to customer service. But the designs look increasingly ill-conceived,¹⁶ the components aren’t world-beating, and now that the customer service has failed me I’m struggling to understand what the value proposition is. I was pretty much locked into whatever they wanted to charge me to reassemble my computer, and if they had dragged their feet for another couple days I was going to have to buy a new computer off the rack just to get back to all the things I let slide.

And that’s ultimately why I was so angry about the whole thing. I was trapped in a relationship with Apple, wholly dependent on a corporate entity whose notoriously oversensitive “water intrusion strips” would decide how much I would pay to replace their defective keyboard. And if that’s going to take ten days to do, well, what’s my alternative?

Living in the modern world, you have to make your peace with being at the mercy of multinational corporations. That’s hard to accept. And in an era of deregulation and “too big to fail” it’s getting harder and harder to imagine them as neutral engines of progress. Apple can fill its stores with Geniuses wearing sneakers who are super friendly and super sympathetic and genuinely want to help you, but it’s the legions of accountants and engineers and managers who lock down their machines so you can’t fix them yourself and design interlocking systems that all fail together who have the power. And if it’ll save them a buck to make it a royal pain in the ass to fix your computer, they’ll do it in a heartbeat.

I’m on the train to Ghent for the weekend. I would have arrived sooner and stayed longer, but I needed to wait two weeks after my second vaccination¹⁷ and there are additional rules if you’re staying longer than 48 hours in the country that I didn’t really understand and didn’t feel like I needed to figure out. I’m dropping in on friends, continuing that slow process of reestablishing the connections which have frayed over the last 18 months.

Being without a computer means I was largely without the latest COVID news over the past couple weeks, which honestly is probably for the best. Tuning back in it’s remarkable how samey it is from a month ago. There’s lots of doom and hand-wringing about the Delta variant, the US is inching back towards mask mandates in some situations,¹⁸ but it’s still not clear whether the US or UK or EU is going to see hospitalizations reach a point that’ll necessitate more lockdowns.¹⁹

For me, I remain paranoid that every sniffle or sore throat is the onset of plague.²⁰ But between being fully vaccinated and continuing to wear a mask and avoid crowds, I’m hopeful I can stay safe and keep on keeping on. I’m still monitoring the situation — I haven’t planned travel beyond the end of next week — and I can adjust if the situation changes. And if this does turn out to be a false spring, at least I’m taking advantage of the thaw.

Next: Ghent to Oosterhout
Prev: Dublin (DUB) to Amsterdam (AMS)

Footnotes

¹ With very good compliance, at least 95%.

² With much worse compliance. Less than 20%, maybe?

³ Although the only place I saw it rigorously enforced, perhaps not surprisingly, was the Apple Store. Which, global work force, corporate risk-aversion, concerns about PR, I can understand their viewpoint.

⁴ I booked a day trip with a tour company — Cherry Tours — which turned out to be a fantastic idea. Geithoorn is this gorgeous small town in Overijssel which is only accessible by foot or canal. There are 176 bridges for a town of about 2,500. And the houses are pretty and by and large use traditional thatched roofs and there’s a ton of flowers. It’s all very lovely.

It’s also a pain to get to from Amsterdam if you don’t have a car. So I looked around at my options and joined a group tour. So I found myself tagging along with six US flight attendants in their 50s. They were friendly and raucous and sneaking sips of liquor from Starbucks cups all day.

I ended up chatting a lot to the tour owner, Cherry Heung, and she’s got an interesting story. She grew up in Hong Kong, ended up going to Australia for college, then kind of bounced around the world for a good, long while. She landed in Europe fifteen years ago and eventually started a tour company out of Amsterdam, which had reached the point where she was employing a bunch of tour guides and hiring out buses for tourists.

The pandemic obviously hit her business pretty hard, along with everyone else in hospitality. Things are getting better, slowly. But there’s a shortage of employees — the Dutch government offered to retrain anyone out of work during the pandemic, so a lot of hospitality workers left the industry and haven’t returned — so she was running this tour personally. She was organized and knowledgeable and friendly and nice, and I highly recommend you look her up if you’re thinking of a day trip in or around the Netherlands. Or anywhere, really; she’ll gladly run tours to Germany or the wine region of France or fly off to meet your group in Iceland.

⁵ Recommended to me by Cherry. If you know Disney’s Soarin’ (or Vancouver’s FlyOver Canada, or any of the other half-dozen similar attractions open across the globe) you know the drill.

⁶ A smallish museum attached to the zoo featuring microbes. Lots of stinky stuff and rotting stuff and icky stuff. Great for kids!

⁷ On my way to my first College of Wizardry, back in 2015.

⁸ When I was touring the Eise Eisinga Planetarium, I reached the part where a guide talks you through how the planetarium works and, after confirming I didn’t speak Dutch, they turned to the other six people there — all locals, one about nine years old — and checked it if was okay to do this part in English. The group agreed. And so the guide carried on the whole ten-minute explanation in English.

⁹ Not actually coffee

¹⁰ Apparently at least half-open, still, during COVID. I didn’t visit; I did the mandatory stroll through the first time I was here and once was enough.

¹¹ Compare, maybe, to New York City, which might be described as accepting but not welcoming.

¹² I was impressed by one of the explanatory panels they put up in the Rijksmuseum explaining why there weren’t any black people in the Night Watch — indeed, in most of the art in the Rijksmuseum, despite flourishing minority communities in Amsterdam at the time. It’s one thing to explain what you see. It’s another to explain what’s been excised, and why.

¹³ The keys were falling off my MacBook. It started back in January, with the Command key, which was bad enough but manageable, but got worse and worse until finally the “T” key fell off in May. You can compose essays missing a Command key; more challenging by far is doing so sans one of your ABCs.

The butterfly keyboard Apple used on MacBooks released from 2015 to 2020 are notoriously defective; they revised the design four times before giving up on them entirely and still have three class-action lawsuits against them because of how badly botched the design was. They’ve never really acknowledged how flawed they were, although they rolled out a free “extended warranty” period for them. I took my machine to the Apple Store in London and the tech took one look at it, agreed it was totally their fault, and said they could repair it in six to ten days.

This is kind of an ongoing problem for me; I’m rarely in one place for six to ten days, and certainly not when I could give up my computer for that long. The tech understood, and issued a work authorization; just make an appointment the next time you go somewhere and have time, they said, and we’ll get it fixed.

Well, it so happened I was going to be in the Netherlands for ten days, so I thought I’d make a repair appointment for the day after I arrived and see if I couldn’t get it fixed. This was a major mistake. The Apple Store was closed in Amsterdam. Instead, going through the Apple website and requesting support sends you an “Apple Authorized Repair Provider.”

I got a bad vibe from them when I walked in the door, but I explained the problem and they nodded and assured me that it might take ten days but would more likely be done by Monday or Tuesday, maybe even Friday. I was sick of having to constantly reset the keys in the keyboard, so I agreed.

Late Thursday they sent me an email informing me the keyboard was broken, the battery was swollen, and due to water damage my computer was not covered by the warranty. They wanted 650€ to fix it. I spent a long and fruitless afternoon on the phone with Apple Support, where they basically insisted they, a global multibillion company, had no control or influence over a small, locally-owned repair shop that was beholden to them for 100% of their business. Apple’s advice was to get the computer back and get a second opinion. At this point the local repair shop told me it was 60€ to get my computer back and it wouldn’t be ready to return until Tuesday.

So I waited through the weekend, and went back almost a week after I dropped it off. And they returned my machine to me in two pieces. They refused to reassemble it because the battery was swollen, so they just wrapped it in bubble wrap and handed it over.

By some miracle of scheduling there was an appointment available that afternoon at the Apple Store, newly reopened. So I was able to walk in after a couple hours and have them look at it. They were horrified at the condition it was in — apparently you’re not supposed to transport disassembled computer parts in bubble wrap — and ran some quick diagnostics.

So after another three days, they finally returned my computer to me, reassembled, with a new keyboard and a new battery. I ended up paying Apple 210€ for the battery replacement and they covered the cost of the keyboard replacement. On the plus side, with the new battery and keyboard the computer’s probably good for at least another year or two. But I don’t really completely trust it anymore, and I’m likely to replace it when I return to the United States later this year.

¹⁴ Mostly book slots for museums

¹⁵ I once calculated that my cell phone and computer cost more together than everything else I’m carrying with me.

¹⁶ I’ve still got a touch bar on this laptop, and that’s another flop of a design choice, despite Apple’s best efforts. I’ve actually remapped my Caps Lock key to handle the not-unknown experience of having the touch bar crash and take away my ability to hit Esc.

¹⁷ Which I am, as of 11:45 this morning.

¹⁸ Just like the first go-around, way too late and hesitatingly, but at least it’s something.

¹⁹ And it’s important to keep in mind as talk turns to booster shots that much of the world is still suffering through shortages of the vaccine in the first place. And there are enough entrenched communities where low vaccine uptake is causing localized surges and spikes and overwhelming the medical community.

²⁰ I’ve been outdoors enough that my mild hay fever keeps acting up, which keeps freaking me out.