Festive Holland

So, it turns out that I am in Amsterdam for the Holland Festival, essentially the "Fringe" for the Dutch. Being the theater nut that I am, I decided I just HAD to check it out. So, after a day enjoying the visual art masters at the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museums (which were spectacular, if somewhat crowded), I hopped the #18 bus to the Westergasfabriek, an old converted clothing factory, to catch "One," a multimedia opera where a woman, in search of herself, sings a series of extended duets with a projected video of herself. That feels like an oversimplification. It was really, really, really edgy, and incredibly challenging, technically as well as artistically. However, it certainly wasn't the hightlight of the evening. My favorite part of the experience was meeting Joyce and Lenny, two Dutch journalism students from Utrecht who helped me find the bus, attended the show with me and then invited me to have coffee afterwards. They needed to interview a native English speaker for a class assignment, and I told them I'd be happy to be their subject. So, we hung around the festival cafe for two hours, chatting about movies, music, musicals (it turns out that Joyce is a musical theater fan as well) and comparing schools. They have decided they didn't get enough material for their story, and so they invited me to join them at tonight's production of The Scottish Play (in German and Dutch). This time, I told them, I get to help pay for the coffee.