Leaving Holland Going To Belgium

I departed from Rotterdam this morning. I’m riding the train down to Brussels now. What can I say about Holland? It’s like walking into your room at a five star hotel: you’re immediately smacked by its sparkling cleanliness, its perfect folds and placements, its masterful order and ambiance — it seems like a place that should have a “Do not touch” sign hanging before it, a place that gives the impression that you were the first to ever defiled it. More like a showroom than a country.

“This place is perfect,” I found myself saying without the full positive emphasis of my choice adjective. I found myself really wanting to leave.

It was the same anxiety that hits when you’re almost out of a horrible/dangerous/difficult place and you pay very close attention to every detail of your actions on the fear that you’ll screw something up and get trapped there.

Why would I feel like this in what is probably the nicest country on earth? A place where people — even randoms in the streets and in the shops — were nothing but engaging, accommodating, and, contrary to how the Dutch seem to like to think of themselves, polite.

I’m not sure.

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I’m also not sure why I’m going to Brussels. My meeting there was cancelled. I really don’t have anything to do there. Although I have the better part of a week before my next meetings in Germany. I suppose I will keep going to Luxembourg, finish a couple articles, make some videos for my daughter (she likes to watch me on YouTube), and, yes, maybe even a take a few moments to actually…yes, be a real tourist.