A Weekend At the Museum

With weather cold enough to freeze the canals this weekend we knew we’d have to find something to do that involved being warm (which immediately ruled out staying indoors) so we set off in the slush and snow for the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.  There are over 50 museums in Amsterdam and just like Haarlem’s 180 eateries, we feel obliged to try them all. The Rijksmuseum is by far the biggest, and probably the most well-known.

The wonders of buying a 50 euro annual museumkart is that with entry usually 10 or 15 euro’s a time, we don’t feel guilty if we don’t see every exhibit in one go - we can easily go back again for free. We soon realised this was just as well at the Rijksmuseum, as we’d only allocated a morning, rather than a week to wonder through its vast corridors.

The building itself is pretty impressive, let alone what it’s got inside. Most people come to the Rijks to see the Rembrandt’s and these masterpieces are huge, displayed in a magnificent domed hall.  We walked fleetingly through rooms containing metalwork, ceramics, religious artefacts, furniture, and model ships. We admired the library reminiscent of something out of Hogwarts, before  taking refuge in the café. It was all too much. Definitely one to come back to  another day.

January has been nominated museum-month. We’ve got a busy few weeks coming up  in February, then we’re hoping better weather will encourage us to get outside more to explore, so  with our appetite’s whetted, on Sunday we headed off to the Teyler’s museum here in Haarlem. The Teyler’s is apparently the oldest Museum in the Netherlands and it was like stepping into a time warp. It’s an amazing place, and again for me the building  was  the star of the show. The Teyler's contains an eclectic mix of scientific instruments, fossils, bones, precious stones, with a few old paintings thrown in for good measure. It’s a boy’s own dream – early batteries, telescopes, an 18^th century centrifuge….Mr T had to be dragged kicking and screaming back out into the cold.

Waste-Not-Want-Not

Welcome rays of sunshine have arrived in Haarlem. We’ve had the first dry days since our return from the UK at Christmas; the bikes have been retrieved from the shed and are back in their racks. It probably seems alien to those back in the UK that although we don’t have any car parking for our house, we do have our own personal bike rack.

I’m still in awe of this whole Dutch cycling phenomenon. Yesterday, I spotted a snaking line of young cyclists all in matching fluorescent jackets up ahead. It was a school trip – teachers and pupils all out on their bikes together. It would be unheard of anywhere else but here. I really don’t think my teenager (wants to) believes me when I tell her if she lived with us she’d be off on her bike to go clubbing every Saturday night.

The unexpected sunshine has heralded a few days of hectic activity. I’ve been feeling particularly creative. I made my own soup for lunch and even baked a cake – that’s a first for many months, and definitely the first since we arrived in the Netherlands. The urge to bake came on very rapidly and required a quick dash to the supermarket. When it comes to grocery shopping not knowing the language is not such a problem as I first envisaged. I managed to work out the Dutch for caster sugar is fijne kristalsuike – pretty simple - and as for self-raising flour, that was even easier to find - it’s self-raising flour. In typical Dutch fashion the cake came out of the oven a great deal more sturdier and solid than it does back home, but it’s a start. 

Perhaps Dutch frugality is starting to rub off on me.  I can shrug off consumerism and commercialism and head back to basics.  There are several what I would call old fashioned haberdashery shops in town, catering for those who like to make their own things. A couple of months ago there was an entire Sunday morning market dedicated to sewing and upholstery. It was positively inspiring – I wanted a sewing machine; I wanted to buy reams of fancy fabric, colourful buttons and paper patterns. Fortunately the urge soon passed, but I'm seriously contemplating knitting after I spotted a kit for making woollen cupcakes - seriously, the baking and the knitting sorted in one go. (Do you follow a recipe or a pattern???)

Here, people make do and mend. When  your  shoes wear out  - you take them straight to the cobblers. This is not a throw-away-society – in fact  it’s a hassle to throw anything away at all. The local council don't provide a bin collection service.   We have to take our general household rubbish to an underground bunker in the next street which can only be opened by a personal swipe card. Presumably this is to monitor how much each household wastes, and to encourage re-cycling, although our  re-cyling point – for glass, plastic and cardboard is a further five minute walk away.  It's a definite deterrent. I’m already thinking some sort of water-collection device for plastic bottles,  wine-bottle garden art, and perhaps a sort of giant cardboard/papier-mache Wendy house for the summer. Who knew after all these years I'd finally get my chance to become a budding Blue Peter presenter?

Antwerp

It was during Mr T’s last business trip to Antwerp that the incident with the boiler took place. Call me paranoid (because I am) but when he said he was off again for a couple of nights, it wasn’t a case of please don’t leave me, but can I come too?

We arrived on Monday evening and the Grote Markt was quiet. Antwerp’s main square is awash with bars and restaurants, in fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many bars and restaurants in one place, but we only wanted a drink (we’d eaten before leaving Haarlem, to lessen the time the cat was by himself - yes, I know, I’m daft). The barmaid insisted we sample the chef's sausage rolls - she was giving them away free. Mr T is a sucker for sausage rolls, but this thing was the size and weight of a brick. Even he ended up resorting to hiding the remains under a serviette.

Despite popular belief company wives are not funded on expenses. There was no full English for me and Mr T was up and out of the hotel by eight the following morning. Two whole days to fill in Antwerp – by myself.

Of course by now I’m used to setting off exploring on my own.   Being Belgium of course it was raining, and because it was before noon, everything was closed. No problem, I would just walk, splash through the puddles, and admire the architecture.

I took shelter, as corporate wives tend to do, in a café, and managed to make a mug of very hot, very sickly chocolate last for at least an hour. I stumbled more by luck than judgement upon the Rubenshuis – the home of artist Peter Paul Rubens and managed (just) to make that last another hour. I bought sandwiches to take back to the hotel room, watched Bargain Hunt, and then set out again in the rain for the Fashion Museum. The Fashion Museum presented a conundrum. I found the building, I found what I thought was the entrance, but could I get the door to open? No. There was no door handle, no sign to push, slide or pull. I could see people inside, but they obviously couldn't see me.  I'd like to think I was too short for the automatic sensor, but on the other hand, perhaps the Mode Museum is was just like one of those uber-exclusive boutiques; with my mac,  hat, gloves, scarf and umbrella perhaps I just wasn’t stylish enough to be let in. I’ll never know.

The following day presented more of the same. A morning at the historical museum or the printing museum didn’t really appeal, and I don’t do religion, so while I admired the exterior magnificence of Antwerp’s many churches I had no desire to go in. In typical corporate-wife style I resorted instead to browsing the main shopping street. Two handbags for the price of one? I'm married to a professional buyer - I know a bargain when I see one. After that, I felt I'd exhausted Antwerp's possibilities.

We have promised ourselves to see as much as mainland Europe as we can while we're over here. We've already done Bruges and I'm really not bothered about Brussels, so I think we can pretty much cross Belgium off our list. Bought the chocolates, drank the beer and left the sausage roll. Tick.

A Blustery Day

In order to escape the air of despair that transcended over the house on Sunday afternoon following the student’s departure back to Bristol, Mr T and I headed for the beach. We knew it would be grim; Zandvoort is always grim and I find it very hard to picture this resort awash with warmth, sun umbrellas, bikinis and Bermuda shorts. The grimness would suit our mood, I thought, it will be quiet, just me and Mr T on the beach, drowning in the solitude of self-pity.

Of course it was not quiet. Had I forgotten what country we are in? There may well have been leaden skies and a force ten gale blowing, but that doesn’t deter the Dutch. What better way to defy the weather than to zip up your anorak, pull on your hat and head out into the elements.  The North Sea waves crashed onto the beach creating more foam spray than a night club in Ibiza, the gusting wind howled, making conversation more or less impossible and walking against it very difficult, yet still people were out there, strolling along the sand.

It was yet another occasion when I marvelled at the hardiness of the Dutch. Why wouldn’t you take your kids to the beach on a day they have every chance of getting  swept away? There’s no molly-coddling here. The day before we  had spent the evening at a friend’s birthday party, chatting to a friendly Dutch family. We had discussed our respective houses. How do you teach your youngsters to go safely up and down those steep stairs, I asked, their early years must be fraught with accidents. Yes, Dutch mum agreed, they are. A couple of falls is usually all it takes, however, for toddlers to become proficient and you always put something soft like an old mattress at the foot of the stairs to cushion those early falls. I must remember that when my elderly mother comes to stay.

So the student has gone after a happy week dodging trams in Amsterdam and soaking up a bit of culture. I took her to the Hague where we marvelled at the Panorama Mesdag, a full 360 degree painting, 14 metres high of the beach of Scheveningen created in the1860's. It was amazing, if slightly disorientating and something of a hidden gem. The good thing about having visitors is that it makes you seek things out. That bad thing is of course that visitors always leave….

 Scheveningen looking a lot calmer in 1860 than Zandvoort in 2015.

Accidents Will Happen

 Firstly, apologies to any regular readers for lack of recent posts. To be a successful blogger you need a succession of events to blog about.  The daily grind in California always seemed to provoke some sort of WTF jaw-dropping moment, while our life in Haarlem seems to tick over relatively smoothly. Moving from the UK to the Netherlands has been a comparatively easy transition. The Dutch, apart from all that cycling, are remarkably like us - the Brothers Gruff and Grim on wheels - and so too is the weather.

Following a two week stay in the UK catching up with friends and family, we have returned to Haarlem with the student daughter in tow while she waits for uni to begin back in Bristol.

The first item on her agenda was a trip into Amsterdam. Amsterdam reminds me of London. It’s more a separate entity than typical of the country it’s in. It’s a law unto itself, and therefore a day out in Amsterdam, is very different from our ‘normal’ routine here in sleepy old Haarlem.

Deciding to set off early to see if we could beat the queues for the Anne Frank museum, our plans were immediately delayed at the station when the O-V travel card top-up machine declined my payment, and then totally scuppered by three coachloads of Japanese tourists with the same idea. By the time we reached the Anne Frank House the queue was already snaking around the block.We re-grouped and decided to go to the Royal Palace in Dam Square instead.  Anne Frank may have been an early riser, but the Royals like a lie-in. The palace didn’t open for another hour.  Early morning, first week in the New Year was not a good time for killing an hour wandering around Amsterdam’s narrow cobbled one-way streets.  The regular hazard of kamikaze cyclists was compounded by hoards of early morning delivery vans, street cleaning vehicles and Xmas decoration removal trucks. Roads were completely blocked and the whole place was one big accident waiting to happen.

We took refuge in a café.  The stackload of crockery that came crashing to the ground as the waiter overloaded the ‘empties’ trolley with one tray too many right in front of us was just a taster of what was to come.  Back out in the street a middle-aged lady with no spatial awareness (yes – that was me) narrowly avoided  having her arm taken off after misjudging the distance (and time) needed to skip around the parked delivery truck before the oncoming tram.  Next, a teenager waiting at traffic lights (yes - that was her) just avoided being mown down by a reversing window-cleaner’s van by her quick thinking mother who grabbed her out of the way in the nick of time. In between we also witnessed another white van man reverse straight into a motorcyclist. Now I know why there are so many people parading as the Grim Reaper in Dam Square.

After lunch most of the deliveries appeared to be over and I did contemplate perhaps returning to the Anne Frank house to see if the queue had gone down, but by then we were nearly back at the Central Station. To stay one moment longer in the city where we had already cheated death seemed like tempting fate….

Back in Haarlem, just yards from our house the student remarked quite merrily that we had made it home unscathed, before tripping up on a loose paving stone.