13 Little Blue Envelopes

It is raining when Ginny arrives in Amsterdam. The rain, combined with the many small bridges and canals that make up the city, makes her associate Amsterdam with dampness.

With the help of a map, she finds Charlie’s address easily. When Ginny arrives, however, Charlie is no longer living at the address.

Ginny is frustrated by this set-back and struggles with a feeling of defeat. Not knowing where else to go, Ginny looks for a hostel to stay the night. The first few that she tries are full, and she ends up at a hostel called The Apple. The door to her bunk room has no lock, and the room smells strongly of mildew. After using the dirty bathroom and finding an old, rotten sandwich in the locker by her bed, Ginny decides to leave.

Ginny can’t shake a feeling of dirtiness after leaving the filthy hostel. She buys a bag of cookies from a grocery store and sits on a bench to eat. She starts to get worried as she looks for a room; everywhere that has a room available is too expensive for her.

Finally, she passes a little house with a sign advertising that it is a hotel. She figures that she’ll try one last place before going back to the train station and leaving Amsterdam. The little hotel is full, but an American man—another guest—overhears and asks Ginny to wait, saying that he doesn’t want to send her out in the rain with nowhere to go.

This man is Mr. Knapp, and he’s from Indiana. He’s traveling with his wife and two kids, Olivia and Phil. The Knapps invite Ginny to stay with them; Phil will sleep in his parents’ room so that Ginny can share a hotel room with their teenage daughter, Olivia.

The Knapps are kind, orderly, and “whippet thin, dressed exactly as the guidebooks recommended, in easy-to-maintain, modest, all-weather clothes” (207). The hotel room is small but is clean and comfortable.

Olivia doesn’t say much, unpacking quickly before putting in her headphones. She doesn’t seem surprised that her parents have invited a stranger to share her hotel room.

The Knapps invite Ginny to dinner, but she declines, preferring to take a long shower. She grabs one of Olivia’s magazines and her iPod, not having had the luxury of music and headphones since she left home. Oliva comes back earlier than expected, catching Ginny listening to her iPod and displeased to find Ginny’s wet clothes draped around the room.

Mrs. Knapp wakes them up early with a printed schedule of the day’s planned activities. The first destination is the Rijksmuseum, the art museum that Aunt Peg had asked Ginny to visit.

The Knapps are quick and methodical in their museum visit, wanting to check all the “must-see” items off their list and move on quickly. At Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, Ginny wants to linger longer to really look at the painting since this is the one that Peg mentioned in her letter. The Knapps agree to meet her by the museum entrance in an hour.

Once the Knapps have marched off, Ginny begins looking for Piet. She checks all the labels and signs around The Night Watch for clues. She doesn’t find any mention of someone named Piet before it is time to leave to meet the Knapps.

With the Knapps, Ginny visits four other museums that day. They have dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe. At dinner, Ginny notices how quiet Olivia is compared to the rest of her family.

Ginny stays with the Knapps for three more days before they have a “free day” in their schedule. Ginny is relieved to have a quiet day after the rigorous schedule of visits to museums, brewery tours, parks, and canals. Ginny and Olivia decide to split a day pass to a local internet cafe; Ginny goes in the morning, and then Olivia comes in the afternoon to take her spot.

Ginny is browsing the Internet when both Miriam and Keith log on to an instant messenger. Miriam sends a few messages, but Ginny doesn’t reply because she doesn’t want to break Aunt Peg’s rules by communicating with someone back home. Miriam realizes the issue quickly and tells Ginny, “If you’re there, log on and off really fast” (219). Ginny does so, but the process makes her miss a few messages from Keith, who is gone by the time she logs back in. Upset to miss Keith, she decides to message Miriam after all. They message back and forth a bit, but Miriam is mostly interested in asking about Keith.

Oliva arrives for her turn at the computer, and Ginny has to cut her conversation with Miriam short. It is jarring to step back out onto the street in Amsterdam after chatting with Miriam for a minute. Ginny decides to go back to the Rijksmuseum and look for Piet.

Upon reentering the museum, Ginny considers that Piet may be a guard. She asks the guard in the room with The Night Watch, and he tells her that Piet is currently guarding in the 17th-century still-life room. Ginny seeks him out.

Piet is a young guy. When she asks him about the painting, he doesn’t know what to say. He tells her, “It’s just part of my life […] I see it every day” (221).

Back at the hotel, Mrs. Knapp excitedly tells Ginny that they’ve scheduled a bike ride to another town, Delft, for the following day, their last day together.

When the tour begins, the tour guide gives her a bike that is too large for her, telling her that it is because she’s “big—I mean tall big” (224). Ginny feels singled out because Olivia is taller than she is.

Ginny likes the town of Delft, which she describes as “absurdly cool” (224). While in Delft, Oliva tells Ginny that she’s gay and that her parents don’t know. Oliva thinks that her brother, Phil, has probably guessed as much.

Olivia’s revelation makes Ginny think about the concept of not noticing things that are right in front of you. She reflects on Piet, who said that Rembrandt’s great painting was “just part of [his] life” (226). These thoughts don’t lead her to any great discovery, however. She is left thinking that “Aunt Peg had screwed this one up” (226).

At dinner, Mrs. Knapp gives Ginny an itemized list with her share of the expenses for everything they’ve done the past few days. Ginny doesn’t mind covering her costs, but the way Mrs. Knapp gives her the list makes her feel shy and embarrassed. The costs of all those museums and meals added up, and Ginny is worried that the €500 she owes the Knapps will bring her bank account balance very close to zero. Still, she goes to an ATM and withdraws the cash to pay the Knapps. While she’s out, she opens Peg’s next letter.

In Letter 10, Aunt Peg finally brings up the illness that killed her. She reveals that she knew she was sick before she left New York because she was noticing little problems like slips of memory. In fact, she reveals that she turned away from the job at the Empire State Building because she had forgotten the suite number where she was supposed to report for work. “The other version made for a better story,” she writes (231).

Peg describes how by the time she was with Charlie in Amsterdam, she knew for sure that something was wrong, although she thought it might be a problem with her eyes. However, she was too afraid to go to a doctor. So, she instead went to an artists’ colony in Denmark. She instructs Ginny to fly to Copenhagen, Denmark, after sending an email to an address she provides; Peg says that someone will pick Ginny up at the airport.

A man named Knud picks Ginny up from the Copenhagen airport. He drives an expensive-looking motorcycle with a sidecar. Riding in the sidecar, Ginny observes that Copenhagen looks a lot like Amsterdam. Knud parks the motorcycle next to a canal and leads Ginny onto his houseboat. Knud makes Ginny a sandwich while she admires the ornate wood carvings all over the boat. Knud is a folk artist who “studie[s] and revive[s] crafts that [are] over a thousand years old, using only authentic materials and processes” (238).

Knud pulls the boat out of its parking spot and begins to drive them north. They sail for two hours before Knud docks the boat on a pier next to a field of modern windmills. Once they are docked, they talk about Peg. Knud knows that Peg died and is glad that she sent Ginny to see him. He describes the windmills as art that is beautiful and also useful, and he points out that the sun is still up even though it is 11:00 pm. Peg, Knud tells Ginny, came to Denmark to see “the midnight sun” (239). He had taken Peg to this very spot; Peg loved that the windmills represented hope for the future by reducing pollution.

Ginny goes to sleep while Knud drives the boat back to the city.

Not wanting to repeat the search for hostels that she experienced in Amsterdam, Ginny had done some research online and found recommendations for a hostel called Hippo’s Beach. She heads there after parting ways with Knud.

The man at the front desk of Hippo’s is welcoming and calls Ginny a “pretty girl with pretzel hair” (242). He introduces her to four other guests who are in the same bunk room as she is. They are eating sandwiches, and Ginny offers to share her stroopwafel cookies from Amsterdam. They are four friends from Australia who traveling together for the summer. Their names are Nigel, Carrie, Emmett, and Bennett. Emmett and Bennett are brothers.

Ginny is pleased to find that Hippo’s is clean and well kept. The Australian friends invite her to hang with them, but the experience is very different than being with the Knapps. These four don’t have any solid plans and aren’t even sure how long they’ll be in Copenhagen or where they’ll go next. They give Ginny the nickname “Pretzels.”

After enjoying an afternoon nap, Ginny’s new friends take her to a beer hall. Ginny isn’t much of a drinker but enjoys sipping on a beer while the others drink a lot. Soon, the crowd in the beer hall goes wild when an announcer comes on stage and initiates the night’s entertainment: karaoke. Ginny’s new friends chant her nickname, Pretzels, until other people in the crowd take up the chant and Ginny finds that she’s been nominated to compete in a karaoke competition against a Japanese businessman sitting with his friends one table over.

On stage, the host gives Ginny a wig, and the Japanese man, Ito, begins to sing. Ginny surprises herself by singing too. She wins the contest. She and her friends join Ito’s group, who insist on buying them all drinks and paying for their cab ride back to the hostel at the end of the night.