The African Inn

I am living in the African Inn, which is a large apartment building full of mostly foreign exchange students.

 There is a restaurant on the first floor of the building--I don't know if it is any good or not but apparently they do a lot of catering because you see a lot of "Meram" catering vans around.  The other picture above is a picture from the roof of the building (there are eight floors of apartments in this building so this is quite high).

I am on the 5th floor (6th floor American) and so have a pretty good view of a bunch of roof tops. There is a chestnut tree just outside, though, which is even taller than my window.

I am on Christiaan de Wetstraat and the back of the building looks out on the Afrikaanderplein, which is a large park area with playgrounds, bike parks, and lots of benches and things. It is very pretty.  They are filling the outside edges of the park with booths so I expect there should be a market or festival of some kind there sometime this week.  The cross street, which is about 50 feet north of my room, is "Paul Kreugerstraas."

I have a room, a kitchenette with two heating units and a refrigerator, and my own bathroom, which is pretty nifty, actually as a lot of the other apartments that Stadswonen has do not.

This is my apartment as you come in from the hall.  You can't really see it because of the light but the door is a really bright purple.

This is my room.  It is quite easy to be tidy when all you have is what fit in two and a half suitcases.





My kitchen is little-bitty and my bathroom is kind of industrial feeling but at least I don't have to share them with anyone and I have a place to cook for myself.  I think that I miss having a microwave way more than I miss having an oven.

 

There is a Bibliotheek (a library) at the end of the street too, which could be fun--they have English language books as well as Dutch language books and reading books in Dutch would probably be good for my language skills anyways--but it would cost €36 for a year's membership, so I will have to think about whether it is worth it or not--maybe I will just slip in and read the books there, in their comfy chairs, instead.

This is a very Muslim part of town as well as having a lot of immigrants.  Many of the shops have Arabic signage and you can hear people speaking Arabic when you walk through the streets.  I have been to one of the Arabic groceries because they had good looking oranges fairly cheap and because they also seem to stay open a lot later than the Dutch stores.  (It takes a little while to get used to everything closing by 6pm.)  It advertised itself as "100% Halal".  I hope that that is a lot closer to eating kosher dill pickles than to eating meat offered to idols.  They were really good oranges, though.  

Sometimes America is Just Better.

There are many things that are nice about the Netherlands. Their bread is pretty good and their groceries are pretty cheap (so are their cigarettes—you can buy 200 cigarettes (I didn’t recognize the brand) for only €1.47—it is almost enough to make you wish you smoked, or at least knew someone who did, because you could save so much money). Moreover, they have pretty, flat country with loads of pretty canals. However, and at the moment it seems like a pretty big however, the Dutch do not know what real peanut butter is. The Dutch version of peanut butter, or at least the version of "pindakaas" produced by Panda, does not taste like real peanut butter. It kind of tastes like Mom’s “healthy” peanut butter: the kind that doesn’t have any salt or any flavor and which is inefficiently blended and oddly dry and weirdly oily at the same time.

"Pindakaas", by the way, translates literally as "peanut cheese."  'Nuf said.

 I am not sure that the chocolate and vanilla sprinkles which they sell specifically to put on peanut butter sandwiches makes up for this short coming, but I am willing to give it a chance.

This is the version for the little kids (see the monkey?) the more grown-up versions were dark-chocolate or milk-chocolate sprinkles but had boring boxes, were also more expensive, and did not have vanilla sprinkles in them.

Scottish Seaman's Church and Hope International Baptist Church (31 juli 2011)

Well, here's the thing.  While I was still in the States, I checked the time in the Netherlands.  Then I set my travel clock to that time.  Then I came to the Netherlands.  Now, after nine hours in an airplane and almost no sleep, my internal clock was a lot wonky.  Also, since I hadn't realized that I had internet before bedtime and since my cell-phone doesn't even get enough reception to display the time, I just took the time as read from my little travel alarm clock.  


Unfortunately, APPARENTLY the clock I looked at did not take into account daylight savings time or some such and, as I was riding the tram, I noticed that the "tijd" display said 11:11 and not 10:11.  So, since it seemed like bad form to show up at church an hour late, I figured out where the church was (Google maps hasn't been as accurate as one might hope) and then went home.


This, though, is the building where the Scots Church meets.  It is immediately in front of the "Gay Palace."  I do not know the purpose of the "Gay Palace" but it did have a gigantic pink and purple flag out front.


This building was built in 1951 because the original church, or at least the former one, was destroyed during the war.  The church institution itself is about 400 years old.  By the '50s, however, the church had lost its strict protestant roots.  The five large stained-glass windows at the front of the church feature portraits: Christ (not quite a "Marvin" picture but pretty near) flanked by St. Peter and St. Paul and St. James and St. John.  I wanted to take a picture of the window and of the plate which shows the name and tenure of every pastor since the founding of the church but it seemed kind of sacrilegious in a functioning church, on the way to a service.

It took me a little while to figure out why the whole interior of the church was decorated in x's before I remembered the St. Andrew's Cross.  There was also a ship on the cloth over the pulpit (which was one of those little raised, enclosed pulpits dealies).


In the afternoon, Hope International Baptist Church meets in the Scots International Church building so I attended that service, instead.  It is an English language church which is pastored by an immigrant from Ghana.  There were 17 people attending, including the pastor's daughter and three grandchildren.  There was a guy from Dallas there, who has been in Rotterdam for two months.  There was also a Nigerian grad student who is studying at Erasmus, although at a different campus from the one where I will be studying, her two children, and her mother.  She gave me a ride home after church since she also lives in Zuid Rotterdam.  


The service was about what I expect a typical, lively Baptist service might be anywhere.  Some of the songs were songs which I remember singing (or not) in Convo.  The sermon was rather ad hoc, based on Titus 3:1-11, and part of a series on the book of Titus.  The pastor's main point was that sanctification ought to lead to doing good.  He did, though, however, bring in some commentary on the ongoing financial situation in Europe. And apparently, this is something that he has mentioned before:


"Who is Paul writing to here?" asked the Pastor.
"To the Cretans!" said the Congregation
"And" queries the Pastor, "Who are the Cretans?"
"Greeks!" replies the Congregation.
"And the Cretans are as they ever were" (or words to that effect) says the pastor, "and Paul tells us exactly what they are: 'Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.' (Titus 1:12)."


They had good pound cake after the service, too.