Orange Crush

So, didn’t expect another entry in my blog from me that quick did you now. Me neither, but as I am back from Holland for almost a week now I feel like I need to report on it, if this will not turn out to be an insightful blog, then may it at least serve as a memoir for my own purposes. Like I said, I am back in England for a week now, and honestly I do not know whether or not I’ve been alive, if the calendar would have said that it had been two days, or two weeks even, I would have believed it. In a failed attempt to enjoy the weather, with time lost going nowhere I have either wasted a whole week of my vacation or put it to the best possible use, which of the two it is, I cannot say with certainty. True enough, I don’t think I’ve had a real week like this past one for many years, and please do correct me if I am wrong, I did not even spend the whole week playing video games, haven’t touched one for months now really, so maybe it was time for me to live in a daze.

Surrounded by empty beer cans of which I am not certain when I drank them, and with a best of REM playing on my newly acquired 5.1 surround system, after getting so sick of two little laptop speakers that in a moment of “clarity” I headed into the town centre and half an hour later came walking back with this nice little setup in my hands, I think I am in proper surroundings to try and remember what exactly I did in Holland and put it into words.

Going back to Holland I think I was more nervous than when I was going to England by myself in the BMW, and why this was the case I am not sure, but before leaving I had promised myself that I would not return to the Netherlands until I was completely finished here in England, and by that not even meaning finishing the academic year but finishing all my money and other resources to make sure I would see as much as possible during my time here and ensuring a good use of my time. So with this in the back of my mind me and my good French friend Amélie, who joined me on my trip to the big NL, partly to ensure I would not turn too Dutch during my stay there and mostly to make sure I did enough touristy things to even prevent me from feeling Dutch, took the A40 bus from High Wycombe to Heathrow airport, and if you want to see how beautiful and ugly England can be I can recommend that you take this bus route. Along this path you shall find beautiful tree covered hills with the occasional stream running either down or through it, and then the next minute you will pass through a hillbilly village that hasn’t seen a proper architect or handyman even for many decades. Maybe I’ve mentioned this before but as soon as you get out of the cities in England, you almost feel as though you were in Eastern Europe where the houses are falling apart, or if they did fall apart then they left them there to rot, old farm equipment that has served well passed its time rests easily next to these houses and add a farm land background to that I really wasn’t sure whether I was driving through Poland or England. Let me also just clear up that this was more obvious on the bus ride from Heathrow to High Wycombe when we returned a week later, but I thought I’d set the mood.

The plane ride from England to Holland is a joke. You go up and you go down, there really isn’t more to it. KLM was kind enough to serve us a mini coke from a can, but came to pick up almost faster than anyone could drink it, and why they used cans it a complete mystery to me as well, if they had just bought a 2 liter bottle and poured from that not only would they have saved money but they could claim to be environmentally conscious as well, although that might lose its effect on a 40 minute plan ride on which more fuel is wasted than actually put to good use, but nonetheless I think I might have a point here. Arriving in sunny Amsterdam felt better than I think it should have, it was too familiar for it to have felt awkward and yet it was too awkward for it to be familiar. If that sentence didn’t make sense, try to read it again. Coming back “home” was a strange feeling as well, I think I had blocked that house, my room, the garden and everything from my head while I was in England, and yet it still felt as though I had never left. A walk on the Dutch beaches with the blind blowing really hard and the dogs running along was an excellent choice to try and put this new situation into perspective and a chance to see whether or not you could see England if you looked really long, this failed of course but might have some relevance when I go claim that insanity plea.

If you really want to know how much of a tourist I was in that one week while I was in Holland, let me recap what I did and surely you will not think that my passport says that I am Dutch. We visited: Amsterdam, Noordwijkerhout, Enschede (mostly the A1 highway though), The Hague, Kinderdijk, Enkhuizen, the Afsluitdijk, Keukenhof and Amsterdam again. And of course there was also the main reason that I came back to Holland, an Easter bowling and dinner with my family which was really enjoyable, but too short to really talk with anyone in depth. So maybe I’ll go into more detail about the trip, I was going to leave it a listing of what we had done, but I still have coffee in my mug so I’ll continue. Amsterdam on the first full day in Holland was good, in a sense that it really enhanced the tourist feeling I was trying to accomplish. And what are tourists supposed to do when they get out of the central station and the sun is shining and they are not really sure where to go? Exactly, a canal tour! I had done one of these before a couple of years earlier, but it was good for me to get some orientation back in Amsterdam and as much as I hate saying this, the tour is really nice. The tapes that say what were are looking at in four languages, all spoken without a hint of Dutch accent of course, are very entertaining by themselves, but the best part of these tours is the guy controlling the boat, I would refer to him as captain, but that would be too much of an honor, this guy had the best stories about people urinating on the boats we were in as well saying where to go not to go (not commissioned of course!), and then all of this in English with the biggest accent that I even had trouble understanding him sometimes, but that is part of the charm of Amsterdam as well, you can hear the Amsterdam accent the locals have when they speak Dutch even flow through perfectly in their English.

So after this most pleasurable boat ride it was time to get in some culture, history and all that good stuff so we headed down to the Anne Frank house. I had never been there before so I had no clue what to expect either but if that family could spend a couple years there, we could surely spend an afternoon. After standing in line outside of the house for a good half hour we got to go inside and do a self guided tour of the house. The wait outside was not bad at all by the way as the sun was still shining and the temperature was very comfortable, but it would have been nice if they served drinks or ice cream right outside, note to self, write that down. The house itself was more of a museum than a historic place, most of the original furniture was gone already and bare rooms with small exhibition stands remained. Even though they had done a great job in making this house into a worthwhile place to visit, it probably didn’t have the impact I would have imagined as you got the full story without getting the experience, the fact that all of that had taken place at the same location that we were standing had faded.

I could tell you all of the things we did in a minute to minute story, but that would bore you more than it would bore me and frankly I feel like writing that much anyway, I’ll continue with the story but will only mindlessly say too little with too many words for the parts that I feel like I can do that, and since you’re still reading, you must be interested anyway. Now a place that I had never really visited before, only very quickly and not taking the time to see all the sights is The Hague. Never before had it occurred to me that this is a pretty neat city as well, and yes I said neat mainly because I don’t want my limited vocabulary to shine through just yet. As far as I can recall, and again there is a chance that I am wrong, I had never before had the pleasure to see the Binnenhof, Buitenhof, Bovenhof and the Binnestebuitenhof in real life. I had purchased a city walking tour guide as I was as much of a tourist as Amélie was, and to save money I bought one which covered 40 Dutch cities and towns and because of that it only had limited information on each of them. After having a proper coffee we attempted to do the suggested tour of the Hague and because the book was in Dutch I did my best to point out all of the things of interest. The book failed me fast enough though as it said that we were supposedly in the royal gardens of the palace but we couldn’t figure out which building was the actually palace, so as it turned out later in the day we had mistaken the royal stables for the palace, so my compliments to the builders of the stables for making it look like a palace. Quickly enough I had decided that the tour we were supposedly following was not going to be as interesting as I hoped we followed the tourist information signs to the Panorama Mesdag, and on the way there it had occurred to me that there was a slight smell of horse coming from the “palace”. Now this Mesdag thing is overrated, the painting apparently is really big and they portray it in a way that it looks more like a scenery view so that you don’t even see it is a painting which for me ruined the effect a little, if they had framed the thing instead of putting sand in front of it I bet it would have been one of the most impressive paintings, and frames, I had ever seen. The dimensions of the painting we lost in the way it was portrayed and even though the tapes kindly informed us of the size of the thing, again in several different languages without a trace of Dutch accent (…), there was no way to actually tell it was that big. Although I might sound a little negative about going there, don’t think that I regret going there. It is one of the things that teachers tell you about in primary and secondary school and can leave a gap in your Dutch heritage feeling if left unattended, I was happy to have been there.

So, continuing on, I have even visited a place that I had no clue about before Amélie had suggested to go there, Kinderdijk. Maybe I have been told about its existence before, maybe not, either way I was completely oblivious to the fact it was there, and that it was such a tourist attraction as well. For those of you who don’t know what Kinderdijk is, and I don’t blame you for not knowing, it is a big field full of windmills. You might be thinking, “so what?” and those were my thoughts exactly, but apparently windmills are a very Dutch phenomenon and tourist love to go visit it as it is so unique, and since I was now a tourist and I dared not to object the fact that we going to visit it, and looking back it was a nice scenery and I must also admit I have not anything like it in any other country so I guess this makes me somewhat ignorant as well, but at least I have seen it now and can help further the promotion of the country I’m sometimes afraid of calling my own and rarely do even call it my own. Drifting off again. Oh yes! The Keukenhof, or the Kitchens Garden translated. Many years I’ve lived right by it, many years cursed at the Sunday traffic it brings in the months that it is open, and always laughed at the amount of Germans and Japanese that go to visit it, but never before I had actually had an open enough mind to go there and take a peek at what was behind all those trees. To my big surprise it was a worthwhile exhibition of many different flowers in a park that was so much bigger than I had hoped, but still did not grow weary of within the hour, I am not sure as to exactly how many hours we spent inside the park but it could’ve easily been four and we hadn’t even seen everything yet. After having lived in England for three months I guess it’s easier to appreciate the beauty that has been so normal for so many years, never before had I looked at flowers and not seen work, naturally I still saw a lot of work, but it didn’t feel as if I had to do it, or even still really knew how much work it was. And with that thought I think I’ll leave you for today, maybe I’ll be back with another story soon, who knows, as I am typing this in word before posting it on the internet I have not yet incorporated any pictures into the story and I think I’ll just make a small selection and post them right under here. It is time to go do something else as I would like have most of my assignments finished before going back to school and being too busy with drinking Guinness, as well as trying to find a work placement for the forthcoming semester, which in England is probably harder to find than a good meal. Ach ja.

Pictures!:

Amsterdam as seen from the boat.
Amsterdam vanaf het bootje.

So many bikes in Holland!
Wat zijn er toch veel fietsen in Nederland!

That's not me, I'm the one taking the picture.
Dat ben ik niet, ik ben degene die de foto neemt.

Ice cream anyone?
Iemand een ijsje?

Beautiful Palace! Or are these the stables?
Prachtig paleisjes! Of zijn dit de stallen?

Ah yes, I do pose for pictures sometimes.
Ja, soms sta ik ook op de foto.

Ah you see, this is the palace! At last! We've found it!
En dit is dus wel het paleis, uiteindelijk toch gevonden!

Kinderdijk, enough said.
Kinderdijk, genoeg gezegt.

Nice harbor town of Enkhuizen.
De mooie haven van Enkhuizen.

Yes, I was in the keukenhof, and no I did not sit there the whole time.
Ja, ik was in het keukenhof, en nee daar heb ik niet de hele tijd gezeten.

Amélie and I infront of the flower flields!
Amélie en ik bij de bollenvelden!

This post was created under the influence of R.E.M.’s “In Time – The Best of REM” and Red Hot Chili Pepper’s “Blood Sugar Sex Magik”.