Zuiderschevenigenlaan

First order of business: I have a new Photoblog. The picture will change everyday and archive as it ticks along. ENJOY!

So was deathly ill on Thursday/Friday, but seemed to snap out of it after a day of rest and a visit to the wonderful Zuiderpark farm. Amazing how the smell of hay and manure can make me feel better. 

The sun came out on Saturday so after a yummy french toast breakfast (something of a tradition now at 18 Volendamlaan) we strapped on our best biking gear and headed for Scheveningen.  I returned to the pier I went to on my first visit to Den Haag almost three years ago.  By the time Chiara, Greg, and I reached the shore, a cloud had settled over the entire beach and it was impossible to see more than a few feet in front of us. We walked out on the pier and it was a little like walking into a cloud.  Totally surreal feeling at times.  Add to that the fact that the beach town here is like any beach town anywhere with its sea salt aged facades, striped awnings, and the slight ring of a carnival about to start at any moment. It was like we biked through a time warp. 

To wait out the fog, I took Chiara and Greg to the cafe at the end of the pier I had been to before for some koffie and apel pie.  We watched as the clouds blew by overhead and the sun began to poke through.  The rest of the day at the beach was perfectly sunny and beautiful.  We frolicked over the dunes with the dogs and the kids in wellies.  Then back on our bikes for the scenic route home as the sun set.  

Sometimes this crap Holland weather does pass over and this place becomes really amazing.  

I went back to the park again today to say hullo to the animals.  I helped rescue a carrot for the beautiful white calf and chased a chicken. Greg and I got friendly with a one eyed turkey and spoke with the one black sheep.  I was sufficently covered in poo and mud and hay by the time we got back home and I smelled like farm for a good five hours later.  I love having this park so close, especially as it's filled with crazy animals! I wish more parks in the US had goats in them.  Maybe I'll export that idea along with the stroopwafel. 

Where I Save the World

So I promised a bit about work...here it is.  

Quite a bit of what I'm doing is considered 'sensitive' and so cannot be splashed on the web a la blog.  Another large bit of my work observations would simply be 'insensitive' to write about here.  For details of my daily crazy (including the red light street view from my desk) , inquire via email. 

Anywho, I'm at the Peace Palace Library today, soaking up as much human rights law as I can get my hands on.  I may have shifted my attention down a few notches on the Geneva Conventions from 'just don't neglect or make them run away' to 'don't beat, rape, and torture', but what I'm doing is essentially my thesis all over again.  That is, I'm studying human rights law in the U.S. as it relates to us generally ignoring the treaties we pushed to create, eventually signed, and currently use as a reason to invade.  So essentially, I read about torture for hours, which is inexplicably not fun (right?).  Generally trying to crack the crazy codes of legal jargon is fun for me and super beneficial in the long run, but I could have picked a happier topic...like tax evasion ;-/.  

But really, the major project I have now is very interesting:  I'm following the Wiwa v. Royal Dutch Shell case set to commence in NYC in April.  I'm taking a look back into the history of this case as it relates to the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a famous environmental activist in Ogoniland, Nigeria, and the overall struggle of the Ogoni people.  There are a number of legal layers to peel away at here, and it's been a huge challenge for me to try to make sense of most of it.  The Alien Tort Claims Act (ATS) and the Torture Victims Protection Act (TVPA) are the statutes being called here and they're insanely confusing.  Apart from the thesis research, I'm really not used to moving so slowly with reading, analyzing, and contextually applying theories, but man, this is taking me forever!  I have a draft due tomorrow and I'm handing in the most ridiculous hodgepodge of legal diarrhea, and kinda feel sorry for the people who have to read it.  I'll work on throwing in some more pretty pictures tonight in the effort towards readability.  *sigh

Another legal mess I'm tracking is the Guantanamo nonsense.  Really interesting stuff there.  Mostly looking at it from the angle of arbitrary and prolonged detention of the Uyghurs still being detained after being found innocent several years ago.  This is interesting to me particularly because there are a number of issues concerning my fave Geneva Conventions and non-refoulement. I've started reading some stuff on the side about Rumsfeld, Haynes, and the other czars of Gitmo which takes a look at the very dry, legal rationale for why this is a litigation sink hole for the U.S.  

I'll take a second to plug Phillipe Sands' Torture Team. ...Very good. 

Well, enough about that for now. I should get back to research.  Check out the new project's official webpage and keep an eye out for my hypothetical Southern Cameroons article.  

Finally Settled

Lots of apologizes for completely failing to keep up with the updates. I promise I'll be better with this from now on...

Well, I've finally gotten totally settled in here. My co-worker, and now roommate (Chiara), and I were on a very tiresome house hunt for over two weeks and luckily wound up with a fantastic place to call home for the next several months.  It's a very large apartment for just the two of us! Everything is brand new and we've settled in nicely.  The location isn't ideal, per se, it's a bit far from most things, but it's very close to the giant park and some shops for food and such.  

I spent the morning running along some canals and popped into the park to say hello to the

 goats and pigs and sheep that live there. I'm thinking about asking if I can help out with the animals on the weekends because I'm starting to grow attached to the sheep. 

I've done a little Holland exploring which has been fun.  Chiara, our friend Agnes, and I went to Delft a few weekends ago and loved it.  It's what you would imagine an old Dutch town to be like.  It was raining (big surprise) so we camped out in a cafe we were told had excellent apple pie.  We weren't disappointed and I think I might go back with some friends later today.  Hopefully, this time I go the tower will be open and I can check out the famous view of Delft. 

Some other Dutch adventure highlights have been a trip to Gouda for a southern Holland homebrew beer tasting festival.  Sounds quite festive and Dutch, no?  Well, it was a bit strange, as the side of the Gouda tracks we were on gave a less than spectacular view of the city and the festival was actually just a bunch of weird old Dutch men in a high school cafeteria.  At least the beer was good...  Chiara and I also went to the beach at Schevening for some mini pancakes by the dunes and a walk along the old, grass covered ruins.  A typical Dutch day, it started out miserable and our hopes of a day at the beach were shattered at first, but the sun came out full force and we hopped on the first bus up to take a glimpse at the sea. Apparently, our new place is about 3 miles away from the famous Kijkduin beaches, so I think that's on the docket for next weekend's explorations.  

I'll take the time to sit down a jot a bit about work, but I'm actually taking a few hours today and tomorrow to do work so I can take Friday off to pick someone up a the airport and maybe putt about Amsterdam for a few hours.  I have a few interesting projects starting to come together in the next two weeks or so, so I'll have some updates on that, sure enough.  In the meantime, here are two articles I wrote for the website.

Till next time...

Paprika

Upon rising from my bed (at 3pm) I showered off all my Americanness and set out for my first Dutch adventure! Thea pointed me in the direction of the grocery store and off I went, braving tiny cars, bikes, and vespas alike to reach the Voorburg marketplace. I was told to look for a supermarket, but assuming all European cities are set out like what I’ve learned from French textbooks, I wound up paying an arm and a leg for petit magasin produce and bread. My oneness with the ease and joy of the jetsetter was revved up when I taught the cute, fauxhawked Dutchman at the produce shop that the English word ‘pepper’ refers to both the spice and the vegetable. Voila! Le meme! Onward to the bakery where I tried to order some sliced cheesy (I think that’s cheese) topped bread and got laughed at for reasons I still don’t understand by the beautiful bakery girl. Confidence down, I wandered about till finding the actual supermarket where panic officially set in.

I am a picky eater. In the past few years, I’ve become decidedly less so, and mark that as a personal achievement. Still, there are a number of foods, which quite honestly scare me. Thus, the plastic container of some sort of soup was an obvious NO. As was all other unrecognizable soups which came in everything but tin cans. Milk products in general were also stayed away from. I took a shot with some sliced cheese I didn’t recognize, but since it had no spots and no distinguishable smell, it went into the basket. My French actually came in handy one or two times, such as when I had to determine what jam was strawberry (frazenboen or something is the one I went with) and not yucky raspberry, and in staying away from anything champignon that wasn’t an actual champignon (re: mushroom). I came away with some things that I hope will together constitute an actual meal at some point, but we’ll see.

Dan and Thea informed me they were planning on eating out tonight, so I thought to find something easy to eat while I was out. There was an adorable and IKEA looking restaurant in the square called Noody’s that looked promising. However, while pretending to understand what was written on the chalkboard sign outside and actually staring at everyone’s food inside, I realized that every plate was adorned with something like a shiny ball of meat and some gravy and quickly ran away. I came home to D & T ordering pizza and I learned the Dutch word for pepper—‘paprika’, just like the spice!

Lessons learned: What goes around comes around. And everybody loves pizza.

Bon Voyage!

I recall growing up, Papa Bear Flynn spent most of the year traveling. I don’t remember at what point, but somewhere in our brattish history my siblings and I began requesting tokens of affection from Dad from these far flung places. After each long trip, we would each receive a tee-shirt memento of the duty-free gift shop type, which would eventually grow into an embroidered flamingo, dogs in sunglasses, national treasures heap of cotton, entombed in Rubbermaid in our attic.
This will come to no surprise to my immediate family, but for whatever reason, I have only one recollection of any of my separate gifts—a hand-held drum on a stick from Osaka, Japan—but can recall, in detail, almost every gift my sister received from these travels. Years of fighting over space in a shared room most likely has something to do with it, but more likely it’s a result of my sister’s memorable mini obsessions with seemingly random icons. For a long while, it was Big Ben that captivated her and a drawer full of watches and several paperweights from London soon followed.
There was one fixation, however, which always seemed to puzzle me the most. M. went through several years in love with wooden clogs, windmills, and dolls with flaxen braids and porcelain water pitchers. Amongst the clutter and disorder of my sister’s designated half of our room’s surface space, these trinkets held a special place of honor and were often admired by both of us. A tiny red sweatshirt exclaiming “IT’S HOLLAND”, embroidered next to a happy tulip toting, wooden shoed, psychedelic bunny got repeated wear and continues to be a favorite wintertime bedshirt for me even now.
What’s funny to me now is that neither my sister nor I had any real concept of the cultural importance of these typically Dutch symbols, and until college, I never even dreamed of traveling to the land of windmills to live and work. But here I am, days away from a semi-indefinite stay in this amazing country, and I’m finding I’m not the only one who knowledge of one of the most historically prosperous European nations is a bit sparse.
I think if you really dig deep, though, you probably know more about Holland than you think! Tulips and canals and wooden shoes, oh my! If nothing else, images of spring breaks in Amsterdam and all that entails should at least ring a bell. But my stay in this beautiful country will be dotted more with foreign diplomats than strippers as I tag along with the Dutch traditions of justice and tolerance. I’ll be able to relay how so more once I start work next week, but for now, feel free to check out the organization’s website at www.unpo.org.
As I'm finishing packing I'm just thinking: Holland hier kom ik!