With hundreds of other Dutch men and women we visited the Macro in Hengelo, a hangar of a building holding wares at wholesale prices. It was as if everyone had been holding their breath on that forced day of leisure and closed shops on January 1 and now let loose.
We wouldn’t have gone if it wasn’t for our mission: to buy a 220 volt sewing machine and coffee grinder, which we did. Back home in Borne we weighed everything to make sure we stuck to the maximum weight allowed by KLM and hauled our suitcases back into our car.
Led by our Tom-Tom, rented for an extra 6 euro a day from the Budget rent-A-Car company, with the voice of Jane from England (Axel could not understand Eva from Holland) we drove to the largest national park in Holland in the midst of which is one of the finest collections of van Goghs at the Modern Art Kroeller-Mueller museum.
Miss Mueller, the daughter of a the owner of a successful German shipping company, married the brother of the agent of the Dutch branch in 1889 just when Van Gogh was producing one masterwork-to-be after another. About 20 years later she realized he was a genius and started buying his works, first for a handful of guilders, than hundreds of guilders and by the time he started to get famous she had a good collection. Not just of his stuff but many of his contemporaries. Her husband had made enough of a fortune to support her habit. All of this started with her taking a course in Art Appreciation as a young bride at the turn of the previous century.
We drove through what the Dutch consider a snowstorm (a light dusting of snowflakes) to Utrecht to join a very select group of people with whom I had, 35 years ago, organized a big event in Leiden that included a fickle and pot-smoking Georges Moustaki and a series of activities (outdoors, theatrical, serious and reflective) and a considerable budgets pried loose from wealthy alumns who had become industry captains in Holland.
Axel had heard me talk about this group which was the first mixed group in the history of the student association, with Theta and myself the women pioneers, to organize such an event. Come to think of it, Afghanistan is only a little behind.
Theta now lives in an enormous house right in the center of Utrecht that belonged once to a mayor of this city. Her husband Ton escaped on the bicycle before the guys arrived but Axel was allowed to stay. We walked across the square to a lovely seafood restaurant and splurged on great seafood and wine, something we will think about often in a few days. Wine and fishes, it has something of a religious feell to it!
And now on to our last full day in Holland, another reunion with all the folks who were in Senegal when we lived there from 1979-1981. Many of them were at our wedding, 30 years ago. This is the only group in Holland that has never associated my name with any other man than Axel, no history before that.
Sylvia's Journal 
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