 |
Space is always an issue here. The Netherlands is
a small country. (The Netherlands ARE a small country? The
Netherlands are small countries? Plural nouns and singular verbs are
an issue, too, but for another time.) The population here is more
than 16 million people and the land area is about 13,000 square
miles. By way of comparison, New Jersey’s population is about 8.6
million and its area is about 8,700 square miles if you count water
area, and about 7,400 square miles if you don’t. Since there are
almost twice as many people here as in New Jersey, and the area is
almost twice as large, the densities are about the same. New Jersey
is the most densely populated of the United States, so you can see
that we’re really packed in here. The part of the country where we
live, roughly bounded by, Den Haag, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Rotterdam
is called Randstad. It’s only 20% of the land area but it contains
45% of the population. So before, when I said we’re really packed
in, what I meant was, we’re REALLY packed in.
Being packed in on a macro level directly relates
to being packed in on a micro level. Take our bathroom, for example.
The Dutch, overall, are tall people. It’s not uncommon to see men of
6 feet 6 inches and women of six feet. This isn’t to say everyone is
tall because everyone isn’t, but there are lots of tall people here.
I am not tall by any stretch of the imagination. By American
standards, I am Mr. Average at 5 feet 9 and a half inches. Yet our
Dutch bathroom comfortably holds three quarters of a person of my
size. When I stand at the sink to shave, one foot is almost in the
tub and the toilet bowl is rubbing the back of my knees. There’s a
small shelf above the sink to hold things like razor, shaving cream,
after shave, toothbrushes, dental floss, and some of Lynn’s make-up
goodies. But when one lifts something to use it, the inanimate items
that remain, unobserved by the naked human eye, scramble to claim
the newly freed up space. This becomes apparent when one goes to
replace the item and there is no longer any room where it once was
so that putting the item back on the shelf causes an avalanche as
one tries to squeeze it in.
But it’s not just our bathroom that’s tight on
space. The other night we went to the local movie theater. You may
remember from a previous dispatch that I described central Delft as
being very old. The new church is from around 1520 or so making it
much newer than the old church from around 1390. Our apartment was
built in 1536. Not every building here is that old, but it’s clearly
a very old town. You can imagine, then, that this movie theater is
not going to be a 2,000 seat multiplex with stadium seating, and you
would be correct. We bought our tickets and were told that our
theater was to the left but we should go upstairs because, although
we were there at the appointed time, the theater was not yet ready
and there was no more room to stand in front of our theater.
After about ten minutes, the doors opened, and the people from the
previous show left. Then, the kids who sold popcorn and soda shut
down the concession stand, grabbed some trash cans and brooms and
set off to clean the theater. Finally we could enter. We noticed
that we had assigned seats on row eight and wondered if that might
be too close to the screen. Seats seemed to be assigned in some
order, not at random. The first thing we noticed was that the screen
was about 20 feet wide and I thought that there are some people who
have screens in their living rooms that big. We moved to row eight.
If it was too close to the screen, we didn’t have much room to play
around with; there are ten rows in this theater with about ten seats
per row. The order of seating seemed to be from back to front
because it was packed in the back where we were but pretty empty
toward the front. We went to a 5 p.m. show and it wasn’t too crowded
so we moved to seats where there was mercifully more room.
After about an hour, in the middle of a scene,
the film seemed come out of the projector. I thought there was a
problem and that was it for the night. The lights came up but nobody
behaved as though anything was wrong and some of the people in the
theater got up to get popcorn and soda. Or maybe wine or beer as
they sell that, too. This was a scheduled "technically required
intermission." We realized that the projection rooms at the old AMC
and Regal theaters at home were probably as big as this theater. The
projection room here was, I’ll bet, smaller than our bathroom and
the projector itself couldn’t handle film of more than an hour in
duration. Now it made sense why we had to wait to get in the
theater. The place was so small that it could only handle four
employees who did multiple jobs from concession stands, to cleaning
crew, to projectionist. Then there is the unaccounted for time that
it takes to move these people around and to mount multiple reels of
film. See? If you stop to think, things can start to make sense. And
it’s all because space is always an issue. |
