Zaanse Schans

We've been meaning to visit Zaanse Schans for a while, so when we finally had a free Saturday when it wasn't raining we were happy to finally get there.  Zaanse Schans, about 45 minutes in the bus North of Amsterdam, is a preserved historic village that is particularly popular for it's functioning windmills.  It is quite beautiful and although it is touristy, it is a different type of touristy compared to the city of Amsterdam.  

We started our visit with a tour through the museum which contains items and displays from the Zaandam region's past- a little bit dry but there were a few interesting things to see, including the reconstruction of the Verkade chocolate and biscuit factory.

The windmills were the main attraction.  There was 6 or 7 big windmills along the edge of the river which were open for tours.  We visited a saw mill called Het Jonge Schaap (the young sheep) and saw it in action, sawing a large tree trunk.

The wooden shoe factory was mostly just a shop, but it had a display of unique clogs, both functional and novelty.

There was also a live demonstration of how they make wooden clogs these days- not by hand as in years gone by, but with these 3D copying machines that can use an existing wooden shoe as a template for a new shoe.

A video of the wooden shoe copying machine

There were different types of windmills including a saw mill, spice mill, a flour mill and an oil mill.  It was a really nice walk along the water past all the windmills.

Just for something a bit different, there was also a preserved Coopery- a barrel making workshop.  It was cool to have a quick look inside and see the kind of professions that were at one time well respected but now quite obsolete.

We had a nice lunch at a little cafe, and wandered around the area visiting some of the other attractions, including the Albert Heijn museum (the first Albert Heijn shop ever built), a cheese factory and a bunch of other touristy shops.  Overall it was a really nice place to visit and is definitely on the list to take visitors to who want to see Dutch things on their holiday.

Friesland Style

Last weekend was my work's annual weekend away.  We stayed in a seaside resort village near Anjum which is on the Northern coast of the Netherlands, right on the border of Friesland and Groningen.  It's a very sleepy area of Holland with lots of farms, wide open spaces and big houses with backyards.  It's the kind of place that people who live in Amsterdam think is terribly boring, and that the only reason to go there is to go sailing.

The resort itself was very cool.  It was not a traditional resort with a big hotel, but had streets lined with traditional Dutch houses that were set up as individual holiday apartments.  We were lucky enough to get a house to ourselves (partners were invited).

The main activities of the weekend were visiting the seal hospital and doing a cycling tour of the area. The Zeehonden creche at the nearby town of Pieterburen was a place where sick and injured seals are cared for and rehabilitated until they can be released back into the wild.  The seals wee cute and funny to watch but it was really sad ti find out about the serious damage that humans have done to the seal population by taking over and polluting their natural habitat with commercial fishing and shipping passages.

The cycling tour was like a scavenger hunt on wheels.  Our team was given a GPS unit- not one with roads and directions, but one programmed with markers that gave a compass point and a distance, and it was up to us to pick the right roads to get to the next point.  In typical Dutch style, the cycling was easy because the bikes were good quality and the roads were flat, but it was quite a hot day and we were pretty tired by the end of it.

Spreek je Nederlands?

Een beetje... (a little bit...)

Fortunately 'een beetje' is a broad enough term that it can be used to describe my small vocabulary and broken grammar that we like to refer to as 'Dinglish'.  We took lessons earlier in the year but have been on summer holiday recently, and we start again next week.  I was doing some revision of last term's lessons and it's unfortunate how much of the content I've forgotten in just a few weeks without practice.

It is perfectly possible to live in the Netherlands without speaking a word of Dutch.  Ninety percent of your essential interactions are possible in English, and the majority of the remainder can be done in text where Google Translate comes to the rescue.  However as I attempt to become more immersed in life here, it becomes obvious how speaking Dutch would make life much easier.

Even though pretty much everyone speaks English, I'm discovering that not everyone is confident or comfortable doing so past the initial surface interactions.  I've found myself quite a few times recently in social situations where I am the only, or one of very few, non-Dutch speaking people in a group, and after the initial greeting and a bit of small talk (ironically usually including questions about how the Dutch lessons are going), everyone invariably reverts back to Dutch.  It seems that Dutch people don't really like speaking English to other Dutch people.  I can't blame them- if you can express yourself faster and more accurately in Dutch (to 90% of the people listening) then why wouldn't you?

Anyway, it's just more motivation to work hard on the lessons.  Back to the CD and texbook...

August Wrap-up

Here's some of the highlights of the last month of Summer in Amsterdam.

• Not really a highlight, but important nonetheless- Nana was diagnosed with cancer, and Samflew back to Australia to spend 2 weeks with her family.  Sam really enjoyed the chance to be with the family during this tough time, and also had a fun weekend in Sydney with friends before coming back to Amsterdam
• Nick and Erin's visit (as featured on Nick's blog)- it was great to see these guys and share Australian impressions of Europe as they spent a few nights with us during their European holiday .  We went out for dinner a few times including Vapiano's at Rembrantplein (amongst the Gay Pride festival) and Toscana's at Haarlemmerstraat, and a nice afternoon in the Vondelpark
• Sam's cousin Kata and her husband Brenton spent a night here on their roadtrip through Europe.  We had a really great dinner at Bazar turkish restaurant on Albert Cuypstraat
• BBQ at Sybran's house, enjoying the summer weather with some friends
• Sanne's birthday party at Almere, which is only a half hour drive but took us almost 2 hours due to sub-optimal public transport.  Almere is a beautiful suburb North East of Amsterdam, across the IJ.  Sanne and Hans' house was really nice and backed onto a canal.  It was very different to the busy and often cramped city of Amsterdam
• Stepping up to help out on the hosting and welcoming team at church, which is not my usual style but they need people and I'm keen to help, so we'll see how it goes
• Small screen highlights- Olympics, Walking Dead, Falling Skies, How I Met Your Mother
• Paper highlights- Finally finished Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, a long and often difficult but very rewarding read. ALso started Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea

Boy & Bear at the Paradiso

Aussie folk rock favourites Boy & Bear were in Amsterdam this week.  They were playing at the Paradiso, an old church converted into one of Amsterdam's best and most famous musical venues.  The hall is a good size, small enough to feel intimate but big enough to have atmosphere. Even better, it's only 1km away from where we live, so no need for cramming onto public transport or looking for a carpark.

Last time I saw Boy & Bear was about a year ago at the Enmore in Sydney.  Compared to that performance, they were more confident, relaxed and talkative which must come with experience, and also probably because the crowd here was much smaller than at their home town performance.  They possibly took this relaxation a bit too far when they at least twice had to restart songs because they started at the wrong time or sang the wrong words.  Fortunately they were good about it- they apologised, had a bit of a laugh and carried on with the awesome tunes.

My friend Sybran came along and, if his reaction to hearing Boy and Bear for the first time is anything to go by, I think they have just won themselves quite a few new Dutch fans.  I also really enjoyed the music and the venue, and will definitely be making an effort to visit this great music hub more frequently.

Heat Wave

This weekend was uncomfortably hot.  Being Australian I'm ashamed to admit this, but the 35 degree days were so unexpected.  Even at midnight it was high twenties, which makes it very difficult to sleep in our apartment with its small double-glazed windows and lack of ceiling fans.

It was, however, beautiful weather to go to the beach.  I went to Muiden with some friends from church, where we went by boat to an island out in the IJmeer.  Muiden itself was a cute little town on the water's edge, where lots of people were having morning coffee at the cafes.  It was very sleepy though, and you would have to be very patient to live there because the main road had a swing bridge on it which would open up to let boats through, meaning that everyone with their cars and bikes just had to wait for 10 minutes until the bridge closed again.

On the island, it was no beach by any Australian standards, but it was really nice to be near the water, play football, swim and barbecue.  The area was packed with boats, from small dinghies to larger tourist cruise boats, and many sailing boats.  Everyone was relaxing and enjoying the sun, because despite its heat there are not many opportunities to do so in Holland. The sun was scorching, and there was a lot of very sunburnt guys that evening

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Summer Holiday Part 11

On our last night in Paris, and the last night of our holiday, we went to see the Eiffel Tower.  We caught the metro to Trocadero where we had a great view of the tower, despite the pouring rain. 

Our last dinner together was had at a little bistro around the corner.  It served basically pub food, but it was good and cheap, and we entertained ourselves by making paper hats.  Our waiter was a champ and we convinced him to wear a hat, and there was a British lady at the table next to us who also wore one of our hats.  It was a really fun night.

After dinner we went back to see the eiffel tower lit up in the dark, and it was incredible to see. It was the night before Bastille Day, and there was apparently some lights display that happened on the hour, but at 10:30 it was between displays, and we didn't want to stand around in the rain.  We rushed home in the hope that we might be able to see it from the rooftop terrace that our apartment was advertised as having, but when we got back we found that there was no rooftop terrace.

The next morning, our last day, we had to be out of the apartment by 11am, but because we were in a self-serviced apartment and not a hotel we could not leave our bags there, so we caught the metro to the main station (Gare du Nord) and left our bags in storage there, as this is where our train home would leave from later that day. We stopped for a coffee and had a bit of a wander around, but because it was a public holiday most things were closed, and it was not a terribly interesting area of the city, so we caught the metro to Luxembourg and visited the gardens. 

Fortunately the whether was much nicer than when I had been here the previous day, and we had a great time relaxing on the public chairs in the sun.  At the fountain we hired a toy sailing boat and set it out into the water where it floated around the pool at the mercy of the winds along with all the other sailing boats. 

After a bit more sitting around in the park for a while longer, it was time to head back to the train station.  We had one last coffee together, and as our train's details flickered up onto the revolving flap timetable board, we said our final goodbyes which was very sad.  It made it a bit easier that only 3 and a half hours later we were home (almost 30 hours before our friends would be), relaxing on the couch, preparing for life to return to normal.