Sylvia's Journal

We visited the Mondriaan home in Amersfoort and two other art musea with ancillary exhibits about color and contemporaries. The forecast of mostly rain for our Holland vacation turned out to be wrong. One sunny day followed another and another. We walked around the old town which consist of narrow streets and canals, bikes coming from all sides and lovely terraces everywhere. We tried the beer of the local city brewer and has some other food stops. It is a town that is usually not on the US tourists itinerary. We would recommend it over amsterdam wich, in the summer, is a place to avoid.

At the end of the day we drove over narrow roads through farmland and woods to my sister’s summer place just south of Amersfoort, where we woould be staying the next few days with the golden wedding anniversary couple and various friends who had flow in from the US for the occasion.

We relaxed, ate constantly all the goodies that Holland has to offer, like cheese and the best bread in th world, and raw herring and such. Slowly more people started to trickle in, nieces and nephews taking care of the last preparations for the 50th wedding party.

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.

Holland greeted me with weather that should not have surprised me: cold, raw and rainy. Nevertheless, Sietske, a friend of hers who is a professional sailor (and used to much water), and three dogs took me out for a walk along the Bosbaan, Holland’s official racing track for boats. It is where Sietske and I spent many weekends during our high school years, when we were in the race for the national rowing championships (we didn’t) in the category 14-16 years first and then 17-18 years after we outgrew the first category.

We dried ourselves off in a lovely goat farm & restaurant (Ridammerhoeve) which may well be a vision of what Tessa and Steve are saving for.

Sietske dropped me off at the train station for the one and a half hour train ride to my B&B in Enkhuizen through wet city- and landscapes pressed down by a very low hanging sky.

I was picked up at the train station by one of the innkeepers, the wife, who put my heavy suitcase on the back of her bike. We walked alongside it crossing one picturesque canal after another. I kept thinking how much Axel would have liked it.

I am now established in the blue room which we had reserved and look out over the rooftops of old houses and the magnificent spire of the Zuiderkerk.

While waiting for the clouds to drift away I busied myself arranging for a haircut and a hot stone massage, all the rest is secondary.