Sylvia's Journal

Today the front from the south east arrived in northern Holland. It was raw and cold and so we lingered over breakfast for hours, stuffing ourselves with the breakfast delicacies of Holland (cheese and butter) spread over all sorts of bread including the famous Frisian sugar bread.

We are eating more calories in a day, packaged as the most exquisite meals, than whole village sin Afghanistan get to eat in a week. Rich meals made up of things we cannot get in Kabul: fresh cod straight from the North Sea, small local shrimp, razor clams, and rare beef (plus of course wine and beer). We licked our dessert place clean without shame.

We never rented the bikes to ride around the island, if such a thing was even possible what with the military shooting in the western end. It rained and we had no rain gear. Instead we went to the tiny local museum built in an entirely preserved house that was built in the 1500s. We admired the seascapes painted by a young Norwegian woman who ended up marrying a Dutchman and became the student on one of Holland’s famous landscape painters (Mesdag).

We watched a (silent) home movie made in 1936, playing continuously in a loop. It gave us a glimpse of ordinary life on the island: beach life, someone turning 90s, the marching band, school children. We watched its innocence, knowing that things were already falling apart (or building up) in Germany, a little further East, what was to come and what the people in the movie had no idea about.

I had my hair cut, continuing my collection of hairdressers: Uzbek, Lebanese and now Vlielandese. We walked a bit in the rain and wind, went indoors to warm up (tea and mustard soup), went out again, in again etc.. We ended the day with a massage and another great meal. Afghanistan feels very far away. It is.