This time 7 years ago

7:40 am in LA is a strange time and place to wake up with nostalgia for Europe, but that is precisely what happened this morning. I must have been dreaming about that page in my past, because when I finally managed to open my eyelids, in my mind, I was not in California, but in an unidentified, but definitively European city, cathedral bells, bicycles and drizzle and all.

Once again, my mind was racing on a decrepit ladies’ bicycle through the cobbled streets of Loenen aan de Vecht, a village near Amsterdam, which happened to be my home base during my 3 years in Europe. I was rushing to buy cheese and smoked fish at the street market underneath the tall church tower, which was leaning not quite so slightly, much like its infinitely more famous counterpart in Pisa…

It was chilly and drizzly outside – a normal Dutch weather, but the geese and seagulls at the numerous nearby canals were feeling quite comfortably. During the rare days of sunshine, I would take a half-hour bus journey to Amsterdam, just to walk around, or visit a museum, eat some Indonesian sate and have a glass or two of Hoegaarden at the Three Sisters bar on Rembrandtplein.

Or, if I felt as if Loenen was not pastoral enough, I would drive an hour and a half in any direction, across the ever pancake-flat Dutch terrain, either north to Alkmaar with its cheese fairs, or even further north to the North Sea islands of Texel or Terschelling, or east to Hoge Weluwe, a patch of forest and sand dunes in the middle of the country, or south to Utrecht, or west to Leiden and Delft, beautiful old towns.

Later on, I briefly moved to Rotterdam, a bustling industrial city with vast expanses of its port, which I never particularly liked, but that was towards the end of my European tenure and I didn’t care as much, especially after my beaten up bike was stolen (and no doubt resold to another sucker). Holland was a strange country for me – I liked it for its coziness and solidity and liberalism, yet it never felt like home to me. I never learned Dutch, I hated the sound of it and I never made any real Dutch friends. But that was OK, as I was traveling so frequently around Europe I hardly had time to be lonely.

And once again, as I was waking up this morning, the ring of bicycle bells from Amsterdam transformed in my ears into the cacophony of honking of scooters in Paris, the smell of croissants and Nutella in Basel morphed into the pungent aroma of vindaloo in London, taste of Leffe beer in Luxembourg faded into flavour of Chianti in Venice, and feel of frigid drizzle on my skin in Glasgow mercifully changed into sweaty relaxation of a steam sauna in Rotterdam as I tucked myself into the blanket many thousand miles away and so many summers later.

My 3 years in Europe seem like a kaleidoscope of first impressions now – a long, pleasurable yet undoubtedly transient time in my life. I do not think about it as much as I used to, as it is so much harder to relate to Europe in San Francisco, a city that is dominated by its strange, alien Asian culture, which I will never understand. As I am failing to integrate, I am steadily losing my connections to my roots, and as I discover other parts of the world, I am missing behind what I used to love and where I used to live, perhaps where I will never return to.

My snoozer alarm went off once again. I turned on the TV, where a chirpy newswoman was reporting, with much excitement, about a DIY arrest of Nicole Richie. Behind the window, a traffic jam of SUVs was steadily forming and enlarging all the way to Hollywood and Highland. Overweight tourists in shorts with digital cameras were already flocking this barely walkable patch of Los Angeles. I had a meeting to go to, and had not even ironed my short yet. It was time to get up.