Sylvia's Journal

We left Borne after a tumultuous breakfast, it was another birthday in the Vriesendorp/Borne household, with all the kids and a few hangers-on and us. We barely squeezed around the table, sang happy birthday (again) and feasted on all the delights of a Dutch breakfast.

We drove to Hengelo to visit our friends from long ago whose son will have an Indian wedding in July. He is marrying into a wealthy Indian family and the wedding place will take placce in a fancy resort in Kerala. We will be invited, and, we were told, there will be an elephant, a request from the groom’s father. We don’t quite understand how the elephant will not upset the neatly manicured gazons of the resort but I am told it is a (very) resourceful family.

We squeezed in one more visit to our niece’s new yuppie flat in Amsterdam. It had large windows on two parallel streets and a roof terrace. Sita and Tessa now have 3 nieces and one nephew in Amsterdam (seems to me to scream out for a visit in this direction).

We finally reached our destination, Aalsmeer, for our last night in Holland. We feasted once more on treasured things such as a walk in the dark (with the dog), the company of good friends and a great meal accompanied by good wine. And we are still not done with our vacation!

We are off in a few hours for the long ride to Delhi and hope that this time our arrival will be less hassled. Someone will be waiting for us, we are told, with a sign and take care of things. We paid a lot of money for that. Unfortunately it got lost in transition and, although no longer in my account, seems not to have arrived in the travel agency’s account. Hopefully we can sort this out before we board the plane. After that we plan to sit back and relax.

There was much reminiscing, as some 80 people celebrated my brother’s 60th birthday – some roasts, some toasts, a simple meal in a converted barn somewhere deep in a rural part of eastern Holland. There were siblings we see frequently, those we do not, old classmates, husbands of study friends, cousins and relatives by marriage.

When you live in Afghanistan it is difficult to pick up the thread of where we left of 40, 30, 20 or 10 years ago. I can see people think (and sometimes they even say it), ‘why would a sane person move voluntarily to Afghanistan?’ Others ask, ‘Do you like it there?’ All of the questions are hard to answer, including the one, ‘How much longer?’

Many of the people present at the birthday lunch are either already retired or getting close to being retired. And here we were, not knowing quite what will happen after September 30, 2011. Will there be a job? And if, so, where? Sometimes I was plain jealous of people who know what’s ahead.

We spent a delightful after-party time, first in the barn after the clean up, sitting around a big wood stove, and then later at home, sitting around the big kitchen table, eating snack bar food, blending in with the hustle and bustle of a house full of kids, my nieces and nephews and their significant others, chewing over the day, how wonderful it was and how regretful we didn’t get to talk at length with everyone.

Our time in Holland is nearing its end. Tomorrow we will first celebrate another birthday in this household, then squeeze everything we acquired into our new neon-green suitcase and head out west, in the direction of our next destination, Aalsmeer, then Schiphol and then Delhi.

Axel is discovering the picturesque small towns that can be found all over Holland. There is a certain formula to them that is pleasing and timeless and totally right. Today we went to Oldenzaal, just a few kilometers from the German border. We stopped at the tourist office to get a map of walks and the places to have coffee and apple pie before, during or after the walks.

But when we emerged from the tourist office, ready for a walk it was sleeting and we gave up the idea. Axel parked himself in a coffee shop named after either the goat or the goat herder in Ethiopia who discovered coffee. The shop owner was surprised we knew the story behind the name Kaldi. He was even more surprised that Kaldi coffee houses exist in Ethiopia, clearly not aware that such names need to be copywrighted. I suspect Kaldi/Oldenzaal came after Kaldi/Addis Abeba.

While Axel was enjoying the aromas and taste of the Kaldi coffee I spent hours in a nearby store that caters to knitters, quilters, embroiderers and such. I was in seventh heaven and heaped all sorts of stuff I wanted to buy on an empty counter, joined Axel for a coffee and then took him back to help me choose and keep costs somewhat down.

We had a lovely lunch of pea soup and salmon/shrimp, escaping from the nasty weather, and visited one of the musea in town, an old house, well preserved and donated by the last living relative to the historical society of the town. We glimpsed into 17th century Holland, its treasures of beautiful handicrafts alongside machines of brutal torture (and justice).

Back home we had some quiet time, talked with Tessa before the nieces and nephews and friends descended on us. They served us herring and eel while they cooked a great dinner, then washed up, and let me get on with my (new) knitting. Others took care of the final touches to the 60th birthday lunch tomorrow. There is the kind of excitement that comes with the night before Christmas. All is well and quiet now, even the weather calmed down a bit.

We drove into Germany, to Essen’s Folkwang Museum to see an exhibit about Paris reinventing itself in the late 1800s as seen through the eyes of impressionists and early photographers. It is then I realized that we have Kabul in deep in our cells.

There was so much that reminded me of Kabul, a city in transition, trying to modernize itself, just like Paris of the 1880s. That city that was a construction site for decades; Kabul has been for a decade now and more to come. There are wide avenues now that used to be potholed streets, sidewalks where none existed, trees and rose bushes where there used to be mud and garbage.

The Paris of 1860 went through a similar transformation. There were the photos of demolition works, the new sidewalks and sewers installed that allowed people to stroll in the rain, the planted trees but also the traffic chaos in Pisarros’s streetscenes, carts and other traffic going in every direction from every side of the street, not unlike Kabul now.

There were scenes of women, covered from head to toe, with glimpses of lace-edged pantaloons that are no different from those worn by Afghan women today. A picture of the 1878 World Fair showed a pavilion with dark skinned turbaned men – Arabs, Turks or Persians, exotic and mysterious men from our part of the world.

Renoir’s famous Bal au Moulin de la Galette reminded me of Shindagha at midnight, along Dubai’s Creek, where families hang out (no dancing, no hugging in public and no alcohol) but otherwise a similar atmosphere of joyful social gathering.

I took in the Impressionist street scenes in Paris of fruit and vegetable sellers, not that different from Kabul, except that the sellers are male rather than female, but everything is just as colorful. I looked for a long time at Signac’s painting of modernity: smoke stacks bellowing God-knows-what into the atmosphere, polluting the city air – that too is very familiar to us.

And when we got to the section about the Paris Commune the parallels between the old Paris and the world we live in became even more pronounced. We saw pictures of a burned out City Hall – it could have been Darulaman palace; the barricades with the sandbags, the artillery, the cardboard coffins with the dead. In the midst of Paris’ transition, all was not well and something was brewing and about to boil over.

Throughout this extraordinary exhibit we could see the tensions between those who wanted Paris to grow up and become a sleek modern city (Baron de Haussman) and those who wanted things to stay the way they were or even pull France back into something long gone. It is a familiar tension that we see and feel everyday in Kabul.

The audio tour provided some context and snippets of writings that illustrated how the birth of the new Paris was not an easy one: the artists who scorned Engineer Eiffel with his silly tower, the upsets about the tearing down of tenements lining narrow alleyways where fresh air never entered, in the name of public health (where did all these people go we wondered?). The new spaces allowed breathing room for new and old architectural treasures and the majestic avenues lined with stately mansard-roofed apartment buildings. That is old Paris for us now, but once it was newfangled and modern.

Today, on our first (non travel) day of vacation we did not manage to shake Kabul out of our system. Maybe tomorrow? Maybe never?

On our first day in Holland we drank too much coffee, bought licorice, and then got lost trying to get into Amsterdam for our breakfast date. This was undoubtedly a Hertz revenge plot because we had declined to rent the expensive GPS along with the car. We could buy the darn thing for the same amount of money we reasoned until we got lost.

Eventually we were guided by cell phone to our Amsterdam breakfast destination and filled ourselves up with eggs, Dutch bread and a variety of pork products.

We dropped our host off at a workshop in Huizen and then headed further East to help Axel discover Holland off the beaten path. We drove to the lovely but very cold town on the Ijssel river (Deventer) which is famous for its ‘koek’ (a sort of spiced dense cake) then drove to my country doctor brother Willem’s house near the German border, with a bag full of koek.

The cold in Holland is very different from the cold in Kabul – more biting, more unpleasant, even though the khak and teel (dirt and diesel) smells are missing. The weather, other than being cold, was sunny and clear and the fields and streams still showed signs of the harsh winter weather that covered Western Europe during the Christmas holiday.

Before dinner Willem took us to a local shopping mall that would compete favorably with American shopping malls. We brought electric blankets for our Afghan bed, lots of DVDs and the GPS unit that we had needed so badly earlier today. If t does as the package promised, we won’t ever have to rent a GPS.

We bought paper napkins at IKEA for which we had to walk the entire length of the IKEA seduction trail. This had Axel breaking out into a sweat and salivating alternatively.

For our pre-dinner aperitif we were treated to haring and beer – two extraordinary treats for us, while for dinner we had pheasant – one of those gifts that country doctors get during the holiday season.

That was as much as we could handle on this very, very long day that started eons ago in Delhi infamous Transit Space. Having arrived on time and as planned (with our luggage in tact) and having completed our first day program I am left with this wonderful light vacation feeling now, mixed in with the sleepiness that comes from traveling on a night flight across several time zones. It is nice to be at one of my multiple homes.