Hello.
As you can tell from the incredibly creative title of this entry, my name is Rachel Shukert.
I’ll be your guest blogger for this week of August 17, and I’m writing to you from Amsterdam, where I am currently situated for the next few weeks, in a large and lovely apartment on the Kerkstraat,(which is not pronounced the logical way, i.e. Kerk as in Captain Kirk, but rather with a strange stretching of this lips impossible to perform without extensive coaching) and can settle down to the business of embarrassing myself in front of various bemused Europeans. I’ve been here for two days and the humiliations are already coming thick and fast. Last night, whilst standing en queue for a sort of swing-based carnival ride operated by pair of bald, silent Vikings with identical red noses and meaty forearms (they might have been brothers, but everyone looks related here, due to the limited mitochrondrial DNA pool), I was animatedly recounting a story to a friend, about how I had been added as a Facebook friend by a guy I had had a huge crush on in high school. I described the thrill I felt at realizing he apparently had known I was alive all this time, followed quickly by the crushing disappointment that in the 14 or so years since I had last seen him, he had grown morbidly obese. As I had been drinking for several hours at this point (something the Dutch can understand) and am of the Jewish persuasion (something they have a little more trouble with), I was speaking fairly loudly and gesticulating wildly.
I would like to stress that I was outside at the time, in a carnival atmosphere, at night. Surrounding by hundreds of drunk people, many of whom were dressed in costumes, smearing their bodies with mustard, etc. It wasn’t like I was doing this at a museum or something.
A woman tapped me on the shoulder. "Excuse me," she said. "I was just wondering what story you are telling that it is so necessary for you to talk so excitedly and…(here she mimicked my hand gestures.)" If I was home in New York, I would have given the proper response to this question, a hearty "Go Fuck Yourself," but as I am a guest in Brave Little Holland, I actually tried to explain the story. She looked at me with utter disgust, before dissolving into giggles and the patter of rapid glottal diphthongs that is the Dutch language with her equally disgusted girlfriends, as my cheeks burned with shame. My discomfort was alleviated somewhat when a large blond man on line in front of my leaned toward me, nodded in the girls direction, and muttered: "What a foul cunt."
Other humiliations are bicycle related. I am an excellent cyclist, but due to the rather lacksidasical professionalism of certain vegan bicycle repairmen in this city, am currently forced to get around on an enormous men’s bike that I can barely swing my leg over, let alone steer. This fas provided no end of mirth to squat Serbian tourists who love to chuckle when my inability to brake effectively sends me careening into mailboxes, rubbish bins, hippies; and the uncomfortable height of the seat has abrased and pentrated my personal areas so fully that I am fairly sure I am pregnant with my bicycle’s babies. All I can do is hope that these problems will soon be remedied. Hope, hope all we can do is hope.
So, welcome! To my week! I’ll be posting more soon, just as soon as I can figure out a few basic things, like how to embed links in the post, how to add videos, how to…blog, basically. If any of you has the answers to these things, please let me know, either in the comments, or email me at [email protected].