Wildrooster!

Exclamation point! 

wildrooster slipgevaar.

“uh...Really? Holland has wild turkeys?” Ok, so roosters aren’t exactly turkeys, but with a language as unintuitive as Dutch, fuzzy translation is appropriate. Plus, I’d been told there would be deer roaming the park, and maybe wild pigs – I had no trouble imagining wild turkeys haphazardly hopping across my unsuspecting bike path. I was ready.

Sadly, while I passed a few more signs for the roosters, I spied no wild turkeys that afternoon. Imagine my surprise later that night when Google Translate informed me that the “wildrooster” signage in fact indicated upcoming cattle grating. (You know, the strips of metal running across the road to deter stray cows from crossing. Cattle grating.) Apparently, while I was on the lookout for vagrant poultry, I neglected to notice the clunky metal grating that periodically crossed my fietspad.

That reaction – “huh, makes sense. Kinda.” – sums up my reaction to most everything in Holland. I suppose I should have been ready for the differences – I remembered quite vividly from studying abroad in New Zealand as an undergraduate that life outside of the United States, even in another English-speaking country, was likely to be full of unexpected differences. (What do you mean, they don’t refrigerate their eggs? What on earth is a courgette?) From the beginning of preparing for the Netherlands Exploration Semimnar, I knew to expect and prepare for this trip to bring experiences totally different from normal life in Seattle.

******

The Dutch, I was told, have a certain obsession with planning. Be prepared for efficiency, for systems and designs that just… make sense. Be prepared to see designs, information systems, and libraries like you’ve never seen or experienced. Be prepared to take it all in. I was prepared to – and convinced that I would – find my true people, my true path as an information professional.

  

But when we arrived in the Netherlands, I didn’t quite find my people, or my path. I found a language that, though eerily familiar, was just… unsettlingly different. Even once I began to get comfortable recognizing printed words, the pronunciation was completely foreign, different from anything I might expect from the print – and no phrase pronounced twice ever sounded the same. (In fact, by the end of the first week I demanded from Dutch friends that they pronounce every word I could point out – very slowly – so that I could try to get my ear around the crazy vowels. I'm still tempted to change my personal spelling so that all long "i" sounds are spelled "ij"like "Ijsland." But I'll never be able to pronounce the Hoge Veluwe.)

I may not have been prepared for that particular experience of the language barrier, but I should have been prepared for the landscape: everyone knows that the Netherlands is flat. But for the ex-East Coast girl still fairly new to Seattle, who has spent the last three years reveling in and exploring the nearby mountains – those horizons were really, really flat. It didn’t take long to realize just why all those Dutch landscapes are 75% sky.

(Incidentally, it did take most of the four weeks before I realized that “netherlands” could mean “low lands”… as in, below sea level. Flat as pannekoeken, as the Dutch might say.)

And then there were the signs. Growing up, I was always the kid who watched road signs. An only child with a dad who loves his road trips, I was well-trained to spot the still-distant sign for Ben & Jerry’s at the next service stop, giggle at the unusual town names like Westmoreland (West! More land!), or ponder the proclamation that this upcoming town was “thickly settled” – whatever that means.

The Dutch signs, though, offered a totally new symbolic experience. Situated in the midst of countries speaking a handful of different languages – not to mention the ten million tourists a year - it’s no wonder that Dutch signs generally have little to no printed language. Instead, the signs feature amazingly active and charismatic family of stick figure people, animals, even trees and vehicles. And don't forget the red circles; it took the better part of four weeks to understand that a sign with a red circle was pretty much the same as the more familiar circle with diagonal slash - in both cases, something was prohibited. We think.

 

 

At first, they were beyond charming - I was captivated by the images advising me safely through daily life. In the beginning, I was probably over-attached to the stick family; some of the signs required a bit of creativity in interpretation - that wild turkey fuzzy translation again - and I found myself creating stories to explain what the signs could be trying to share. That image of the adult and child figures that always seemed to show up at the entrance to dark alleys or abandoned construction zones? Clearly an instruction for parents to hold their child's hand when walking down streets in questionable neighborhoods. (In fact, these were just alerting motorists that the narrow streets were for pedestrians only.)

I had plenty of practice creating stories or explanations behind signs that didn’t quite make sense. Signs with any text generally had only one or two words; even in context, the obvious stories that explain those one or two words hardly match the sign’s original (Dutch) intent -- but the English interpretation is irresistible. The trap doors at the library, for instance, couldn’t possibly be real trap doors to secret attics or basements or other dimensions – could they? The “DNA-SPRAY” raining toward the figure running for his life: a warning of rogue geneticists in the neighborhood?

   

Who wouldn't feel empathy for the man purposefully pressing the button while patiently waiting at the crosswalk? Or his cyclist friend?

*****

But the wildrooster surprised me with its utter unexpectedness, and the memory stuck. I was unsettled, uncomfortable at just how wrong my interpretation – which had seemed so plausible! – was from reality. (I’ll also admit that I was a bit miffed and embarrassed that I’d spent the rest of the afternoon searching for non-existent turkeys.) Still, I couldn’t quite shake this sense of unease that I was unable to interpret my surroundings, that what was almost familiar was suddenly so very different.

It reminded me of how I had wanted so much to experience life in the Netherlands, to discover their secrets of design, of taking a complex system and creating a uniquely beautiful and functional solution. I wanted this class to help me identify the function, form, and beauty of my own complex system, my own life plan. I saw plenty of signs, but these particular signs were nowhere to be seen.

While using our new research-methodical minds to explore the little Dutch towns, their museums and canals, trains and fietspads, I kept looking for signs that would tell me what to do with my life. The guest lectures and site visits gave us a view of amazing research projects in digital humanities in the Netherlands, but those were not my projects.

I was fascinated by the innovation, the passion for his or her topic that each of the researchers seemed to emanate and passed along to us. I was intimidated by this passion - and the range of ideas that passion fueled. From creating ways of digitally displaying politicians' records and government archives and examining the cultural generation of iconic images, to citation chains, cooperative cultural archival projects, digitizing oral histories, and visualizing the history of science. Innovation is something that we use as a buzzword - especially in a research institution like UW and the iSchool - but it's always been a sort of abstract concept, something that I'm supposed to be able to do but I don't really know what it means. These projects from the guest lectures, these were real innovation and creation at work.

My mind was full of information, of research questions and methods and possibilities - but they were others' possibilities, others' questions, others' projects. None of them called to me, at least the way I expected.

My project, the things I couldn't help but return to time and again, were those confounding signs.

******

And then the signs spoke to me.

Seriously, the sign pointed toward Erica, with a bike.

(Ok, so 'erica' also happens to be the latin for 'heather' - my sign intended to direct the biking tourists to nearby fields of heather.)

As luck would have it, my sign happened to be pointing in the direction of the train station that also happened to be my destination – but I choose to think that the sign was calling to me. Like my search for the wildrooster, the Erica sign was a wake-up call. I’d spent so much of my trip fascinated by these Dutch signs, trying to find and read and interpret my own signs leading me to my perfect future – I had ridden right over the cattle grating along the way. I'd missed the things and people that made this country, this experience - my experience - so unique and wonderful.

Buying a bike.
(and neighborcat!)

Incredible cloudscapes. 

Molen by day.

Molen by sunset. 

Hagelslag on peanutbutter toast

Pilaarbijter. yup.

Twilight canals.

Unexpected new friends.

The most lovely picnic spot in Holland.

Miracles.

Three meals a day, seven days a week, four weeks x 28 new friends =  Family.

Amidst my frustration that I didn’t know what I wanted to study, that I don’t know my life’s goals and I don’t have a plan to reach those goals – I missed the very fact that life had brought me to the Netherlands. I was there to experience a different culture, to re-gain some of the confidence and independence that I had felt lacking in what was before this trip a fairly stressful summer. Even though I was frustrated that the Netherlands didn’t quite feel like home, and I felt like I couldn’t get settled – I came to realize that at the root of this frustration is a home that I love, and many wonderful things and people in my life at home that I missed, that I was looking forward to returning home to Seattle.

And while I didn’t find my answers, I didn’t find my information path or system or beautiful design – I found the path with my name on it. I’m still working on telling that story, still looking for my wildrooster. But now I’m also on the lookout for the cattle grating.