Sylvia's Journal

I spent most of Thursday in the open air part of the Zuiderzee museum that has preserved the life of fishing communities around what used to be called the Zuiderzee (Southsea) and became, in 1932, the Ijselmeer when the dike that connected the provinces of North Holland and Friesland changed everything for them.

I shared the B&B with a young Dutch couple. They were exploring provinces other than their own. We were served a wonderful breakfast in the living room of the innkeepers. The senior B&B guests got the window seats. This morning I was, as the more senior guest moved to the window seat. Two women had taken the place of yesterday’s young couple. One of them had traveled through Afghanistan in the 70s, about the same time Axel and I were there.
Now she is the massage therapist I was looking for yesterday but never found.

My friend Annette showed up in the afternoon in her zipcar from Amsterdam. After a herring follow by ice cream we took a ferry to the outdoor museum for my second visit of the day. We got a glimpse of Saint Nicholas and two Black Peters dashing between the doll-like fishermen houses. They must have been rehearsing their entry in Holland which is not due until the end of November. I imagined that this both confused and excited the small children visiting the museum complex. As if by reflex they broke out in Saint Nicholas songs, en masse.

After Annette left I agonized over what to do for dinner: a snackbar dinner for under 10 euro, yummy but not very healthy, an inexpensive fried fish place where I could not order a beer or glass of wine, or a real (and pricey) restaurant. I ended up at the latter and splurged on smoked salmon, local goat cheese, beer, wine and a collection of mini coffee-flavored desserts.

I stayed up late and watched two docudramas on Dutch TV, one about two Syrian-Dutch children and the Dutch mother’s desperate attempts to get them back from the father’s Syrian family. It was based on a real story and carried the implicit lesson to Dutch women not to marry Arab men.

The other movie was a (New York) father’s chronicling of his only daughter’s growing up and leaving the nest for college. The father, a documentary film maker had applied his craft to his own family. It was intrusive but also moving in the man’s awkward attempt to get close to his growing up daughter and his depressed wife via his camera. It’s hard to imagine that both had consented to this public airing of their family life.