Oh yes, you should be jealous.

I was away. I was working, but I was not here. I was in another place. A wondrous place. A place that had a pillow menu. Aromatherapeutic scents were pumped into the air. I was there with two writers I love more than I loved the many many pillows. I laughed so hard I pulled heretofore unfelt abdominal muscles. I never wanted to leave.

Now I am back in this place, and there is no pillow menu here. I am expected to place my head on whatever damn pillow I can find! The aromatherapy in this place tends toward the meat-tinged and/or uriney. I've asked to change my room, but the concierge isn't answering. This is not acceptable.

But then, there are these two boys who live in this place. I love one of them enough that I plucked him from the typing pool at work and I married him, before he knew what had happened. Now he scratches my back whenever I scooch toward him on the couch and lean forward ever so slightly. He finds it more tedious than Simonizing, but he obeys the long-standing ritual of the scooch-lean-scratch. The other one, the smaller one, threw himself into my arms last night and pressed his nose against my cheek while his wet lips smashed into me and he said, "I gave you a smell-kiss. I gave you a smiss."

I am sorry, paradisical-pillow-menu-place, but these are services you cannot provide. This place totally wins.

(p.s.: call me.)

Yogurt-dipped mornings, alcohol-soaked evenings

Here are two excerpts from emails I sent to Scott. In the first one, I reveal my true dorkiness:

“Today, as in the next few days to come, Melissa and I had the incredible hotel breakfast of meats and cheeses and pastries and cereals and eggs and other meats and yoghurts (with an h!). I enjoyed a small yoghurt beverage, just to see how the natives liquefy their yogurt. I thought it was unflavored, but then I tasted it and realized it was a berry-flavored delight; after inspection I saw a tiny image of a strawberry on the label. Melissa and I discussed how if this were American packaging there would be an enormous anthropomorphized strawberry wearing shades and skateboarding across the label, and it would be called EXTREME STRAWBERRY BLAST, and this was so funny to me at that moment that yoghurt drink almost came out of my nose.

Look how much has happened, and it’s still breakfast.”

And then I try to redeem myself with more adult-style beverage choices:

“Well, here's the email you knew would show up eventually: the one where I'm completely drunk. Hi, sweetheart! Baby had some drinks! We went out with a reader of our blogs, a gorgeous Swede named Monica, who took us to a tiny bar crammed with locals and proceeded to charm the pants right off of all of us. And I really liked those pants. We enjoyed much jenever (pronounced ye-NAV-er--these Dutch say everything all funny), which is sweet and many-flavored (I had applecake, blackberry, prune, and maybe more but everything gets fuzzy after that), and because it’s so sweet you really have to have it with beer. So I had many of them! With beer! And then on to another pub, where I had more beer. The jenever is actually not particularly strong, but the thing is, it fools you into thinking, hmm, it's like cider! Or a lovely medicine of some sort! And then you can't stand upright.”

Not surprisingly, I ended that last email with “I love you so much I'm crying.” This is why I don’t drink more. Melissa.

Warning, Dutch people: the American idiots are here.

Melissa and I were sitting on a bench at the Rijksmuseum when a kind-faced elderly woman approached us, a guard guiding her by the elbow toward the bench. We immediately rose to give her our seats, but instead of, say, sitting down, she began chittering at us with some sort of urgency in Dutch. It seemed like time stopped while her mouth continued to open and close, open and close, while she squawked and clicked and yooped and eccched. We stared at her, frozen in terror, finally managing to summon enough strength to back away. And as we did, Melissa murmured, “I don’t speak what you’re talking.”

Then we hid around the corner, which was about five inches from where the old woman was sitting, and we snorted with laughter until my father came to take us away. I'm sure the poor woman is still wondering why they let the feeble-minded wander unescorted through a museum.

Craving for a tan.

.

Strangely enough, I am also craving for a tan, or better yet, a sunburn, and the rise in body temperature that would accompany it. It is cold here, nipple-invertingly cold; I'm no stranger to the cold but with the wind whipping off the canals HOLY CRAP it's cold.

My first-day impressions, clouded as they were by a thick haze of sleep deprivation, were recorded in an email to my husband:

"Getting to the train? And then the tram? From the airport? Not an easy experience for someone who probably right now can't tie her own shoes. There's no way to figure out which tram goes where and you need a special ticket to take the tram and how do you pay for the ticket? No way to know! Everything's in Dutch! We finally figured out that we had to buy the ticket at the bookstore in the train station, where we lamely were all American and like "GIVE US TICKET PLEASE" and they were all "Thank you for not learning a single word of Dutch."

I don't even know how to say thank you.

Then we got to the hotel, which is an amazing place--I may spend the rest of my time here in the bathtub, and if Melissa wants to hang out with me, well, she'll just have to climb in--but they wanted me to fill out forms, and seriously I couldn't do it. If someone had handed me an IQ test right then and there I would have pulled out a brown crayon and scrawled I LIKE NAPS across it. I thought I had lost my passport and proceeded to have a full-scale panic attack, which was nipped in the bud .5 seconds later when I found my passport. Melissa gazed down upon me in pity. "

Then before I could hit "send" I passed out on my keyboard.

If anyone in Amsterdam wants to get drinks with us, email me. Melissa needs company in her quest to drink more than a single beer, and I'm not up to the task. Yet.