Brussels to Antwerp to Den Haag to Keukenhof to Haarlem to Amsterdam to Eurostar:
(In which some vaguely Cultural and Educational Notes from Belgian and Dutch Travels are Shared with the Gentle Reader)
Antwerp Port Building
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Cultural notes 1:
Wednesday:
Shopping at the Carrefour Supermarket at Midi/Zuid. There is no option to refuse a printed receipt at the self-checkout. I left mine behind, as Australians do, and tried to push through the departure gate. Among the ringing bells and gentle chiding of local shoppers, attendants rushed to retrieve my receipt and aim it at a sensor to make it all stop.
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Educational Notes:
Thursday:
Gent: the picturesque 10th Century castle and Gothic cathedral town is crawling with Year 9 students bearing clipboards and worksheets in English with QR codes to find, and selfies to take, to prove their presence and learning. If you are an English speaker with a map, you WILL be approached by nervous students and asked for directions and possibly recorded. You Have Been Warned.
The other spectator sport is watching kids’ tour groups being barged by aggressive trams who have no respect for the abject wandering of 15 year olds (much like hordes of cyclists in most Dutch cities for wandering pedestrians…).
More Cultural Notes:
Friday:
On most days, the square between Chinatown and the vastly ornate Antwerp station (an neo-Baroque palace for the 19th century miracle of railway transport) has smatterings of young Moslem men gathering to meet/pass the time for whatever reason. On Friday 21 April, these morphed into proud a celebratory EID boys in their fresh haircuts, new finery (although under grungy puffer jackets and hoodies on arrival) gathering to take each other’s solo photos (without puffer jackets and hoodies) to send home from the diaspora.
Fashion sense was a tad competitive, but the celebration (each man in very new, very white, running shoes) was joyful. The exuberance continued on the tram to Schijinpoort, through the narrow streets of an inner city immigrant area (much tidier than in St Gilles) where families in their Friday best were delivering platters of luridly coloured sweets and savoury finger food to other households along the street. Some older African men were in rich brocaded, complex blue and gold patterned gowns: spinnakers in the morning breeze. Many women, eschewing their day-to-day-multi-patterned-in-contrasting-colours clothing, were in two or three plain coloured fabrics with new high heels displaying the easy elegance that some of the competing young males were lacking. I guess that many of their extended families were a long way away in very contrasting circumstances.
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Even more Cultural Notes:
It’s both harder and easier than it looks to cross into The Netherlands from Antwerp in this “borderless” part of the EU.
The signs for “TICKETS” in Antwerp station lead you on a fun, 400 metre circuit around the vast Antwerp station (with platforms on three confusing levels)… When you seek advice from a fast food store guys they will double up laughing: “No, it’s at the FRONT of the station”…. More helpless laughter. You do get used to the idea that things do “work” a tad differently in Belgium….
At the office, outside an open door, there was a small milling crowd of (largely) tourists. When I asked if I could get through (because the usually reliable Eurail app counsels that the international trains need a supplement or seat reservation) there were resigned comments of: “We don’t know/aren’t sure mumble..mumble…”. I went to the back of the mob and joined a couple of freshly landed and bemused Americans. A bored Belgian Railways flunkette appeared at the door and started sorting us into 2 clumps: one for a ticket issuing machine where she pressed the START and LANGUAGE button, and the remnant queue if you just needed a reservation. I scored “Inter” and “Card” as my labels from her mystery printout machine. The American husband stayed with me; the wife headed to the machine (“because one of us will get there first”).
Admitted into the grand booking hall as part of a (now) numbered queue of 40 punters, we were fronted by 8 guichets and two attendants who appeared to be mostly conversing with each other as customers glumly waited to be acknowledged. The discussion in front of me indicated a there was 25 euro booking fee on Thalys high speed trains, and a perhaps a supplement to be paid on board, maybe, on the slower Dutch IC train in 90 minutes. Ponders: I could get a classy lunch in Le Royal Cafe upstairs for less than 25 Euros AND get on the later train. Yes.
And so it was that I found myself, well fed, crammed in the standing room only vestibule with the multifarious luggage of mostly university students for the short, crammed journey over the border to Breda. Fellow passengers commented : “But Friday is always like this!!” At Breda, the doors of the “connecting” train to Den Haag slammed in my face because it took so long to detrain in the crowd from Antwerp. But the company was fun! And no-one demanded a supplement for the privilege.
Between trains I was overcharged for coffee in order to get 70 cents in change for a contracted-out-coin-entry Dutch station toilet. The shiny green ticket is a lovely souvenir.
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Saturday:
The massive Keukenhof:
A sweaty mosh-pit in the drizzle for the selfie-obsessed or those condemned to hellish-organised-tour-processions-in-headsets-behind-some-florally-didactic-harridan-waving-a-flag-barging-through-the-mob. Blooms and arrangements: stunning between the sweatily colourful bodies. Best visual impact: the bulb farms outside of the gardens where lurid parallel strips of ripening bulbs turn flat cultivated fields between canals into swathes of shimmering colour.
Outside the Keukenhof gardens in the vast car park, every arriving bus featured middle-aged sprinters charging headlong into the swirling mass of the crowd yelling: “Get to the front!!” when any “front“ had long disappeared into thick pathways of the floral bulb and lily shuffling.
A young and verrrry chilled American guy, droopy roach behind one ear, sucking on another as part of his marijuwandering tour of the seedier cafes in Amsterdam, heavily inhaled and s-l-o-w-l-y lectured the small bus queue that there WERRRRE buses, but when would ONE FOOOR UUUS arrive (he had been waiting all of 4 minutes) and decided that he, only he, could take charge of the lack of an immediate bus to get him outta here. He slithered under the fence and proceeded on a semi-locutory amble, reeling between passing push bikes and taxis to ask, to plead, to reason, to reasonably cajole, any bus driver on his break to collect us urgently. The selected driver stood up, held the American’s hand impassively and led him back by the elbow, as one does with the other-worldly, pushing his head under the boundary fence (police-arrest-style) while gently informing him that a bus would arrive soon.
American Dude: “See! SEE!! I triiiiied my daaaaarn best but you just can’t reeeeeason with the people here.”
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I escaped to wander the quaint streets, canals and windmill and old port gate in the town of Haarlem on Mz Lizzie’s advice. It was a delight, however the “occasional slight drizzle” was morphing into something more determined, and the moistening feathers in my puffer jacket were regressing into something like slimy, slowly reconstituting, unhappily-regressing-duck-seeking-water-in-draggy-eiderdown, so a quick return to Den Haag and dry clothes were looking good.
Which brings me to Ms Tram Museum! But first:
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Cultural notes 4: Albert Heijn Supermarket:
AH is the ubiquitous Coles or Woolies or IGA of Dutch/Flemish supermarkets. What could possibly go wrong here (after my previous learning experience at Carrefour)? Well:
I foraged the few things I needed and approached the self-checkouts: they are royal blue and loom beautifully above a light-blue veneered tabletop and are nothing like the stainless steel two-layered in and out sensor thingies you might have seen before. There is a barely recognisable scanner hole gazing out at gut level in the looming royal blue thingy.
I approach the checkout gals: “NO. You CAN’T come to US. You MUST do it yourself!”
Return to the self checkout. Nope: still can’t see where to put items before/after scanning.
Reapproach desk. Do the “puzzled old bloke needing the tech assistance of a paid adolescent” thing. (I am getting too good at this).
Get led stoically back to the self-checkout. Demo of how to scan begins. “No, no, no: where do you PUT the items at the start than after they have been scanned?” Well you don’t put them anywhere, you see: you hold them all in the air while one-at-a-time-scanning then you place them on the blue bench with your third hand.
Pleased that I’m not doing a full weekly shop, I plod through the process. Then I tap my card. The machine begins to make gulping noises and lecturing me in assertive Dutch.
Reapproach desk again. Point with some alarm at the scolding machine. “Oh, it will not accept your card! Please follow me.” She soothes the machine with the gentle stroke of a swipe card. It coughs up an account printout with a bar code. “You need to take this to my colleague at the desk and pay in cash.”
So, 15 minutes after initially walking up to the counter to pay for groceries, I am being directed to walk up to the counter to pay for groceries. I do. I turn to leave.
“STOP!!” She yells. I freeze, wondering what else I can stuff up in this simple transaction (bottle of sparkling water and 4 apples if you must know…).
She RUNS to the exit gate and swipes the receipt I had left behind so I could leave without further ringing alarms.
“And did you enjoy our service?” She witters, as I stumble out into the refreshing drizzle.
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Ms “Tram Museum”:
We were never actually introduced. It was getting late on a wet afternoon, too late for a museum or gallery or another exciting supermarket visit, so a circuit or two on Den Haag’s historic tram looked like ‘a plan’.
There were a few other passengers, and our enthusiastic hostess (Name tag: “TRAM MUSEUM”) did not so much walk down to greet me: she arrived in a one woman swarm. “Where are you from? OHHHH!!!!!!! YOU are AustRALIAN!!!!!!!!! I was BORN there. I’ll get you a map and the tap machine.” Much rummaging and tapping. She returns with the map. “The machine will NOT work! You: The Australian!!! YOU can go FREE!!”
I was trapped. Other passengers seemed not to mind that I was getting The Full Attention.
Ms “Tram Museum” had been a 40 year veteran of managing restaurants with her husband and LOVED working in hospitality, “and now I meet at last someone who is from MY BIRTH COUNTRY!” (Yelled joyously to the rest of the impassive passengers).
Born in Perth, at the age of 12 her parents decided to return to Holland. “School in Australia was behind here. There were shoeless Aboriginal boys who lived in an institution up the road and were treated very badly. I was sorry for them. I hear your country honours 60,000 years of Aboriginal history these days. How did that happen?” You can kind of imagine the conversation at this point from 1967 to the Rudd Apology to the Uluru Declaration to now….
She started excitedly recounting the eating of fish and chips out of newspaper on Fremantle Beach, climbing the back fence to steal fruit from the university campus adjacent to her house, and how carefree her life was before to return to Holland. “My parents could have sent me to an English school here, but they made me go to a Dutch school. They held me back from high school for 3 years until my Dutch was good enough. At least I could understand what my parents said about me for the first time. Schools here were so far ahead of Australia until these blacks started arriving…”
A German couple boarded to escape the drizzle. “There is only ONE more tram after us!” They were still happy to pay 32 Euros to be warm, dry, and rumbling along the canal in an American-style vehicle from the 1950’s. The payment machine worked for them but (stage whisper): “You AUSTralian! You go FREE!”
By this stage, I certainly wanted to go. The handy map helped.
We were rolling out of Scheveningen passing the BAD HOTEL. Scheveningen is the Dutch answer to Blackpool or Brighton’ with a lot more concrete but better food and beers in the semi-permanent promenade restaurants. The massive concrete pier with zip-lines lines and giant Ferris Wheel dominates the coastal scenery for miles with all of the architectural appeal of a third-world air traffic control tower. “SEE those poor yellow-jacketed guys. THEIR job in Summer is to tell arriving cars that the place is FULL and they cannot come in as there is NO ROOM. They are tough as the drivers try to fight them to get in!”
The largely ignored Germans now stepped down from the tram for a sunset beach walk. “Those Germans paid 32 Euros for 10 minutes, but you: AustRAILian: FREE!”
Escape out of this FREEdom was becoming an urgent proposition. “So tell me how to find the Indies Memorial?”
“SEE that CHURCH there. It’s Catholic but looks so PLAIN outside to stop all the Dutch Reformers complaining. But go inside, see, and it’s beautiful Art Deco where the reformists cannot see…”
“So: the Indies memorial? It’s at Stop 10???”
We were slowing for the stop. Ms Tram Museum was loudly flustering for her glasses on the pamphlet rack (but at least she was out of my face) as the tram ground to a halt. I gave her a small package of kangaroo pins to say thanks for being the FREE Australian: telling her it was such a memorable experience. (This is quite true). As I stepped from the tram she opened up a small pack and delightedly yelled her thanks to “You: AUSTRALIAN!!!!” And was last seen running to the back of the tram to excitedly show her coloured roo pins to the three other passengers, who’d been gratefully sidelined to enjoy their sightseeing for the last boisterous 15 minutes.
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Peace.
The short walk was into parkland with a small ornamental lake. I did not know what the “Indies Memorial” might be: a monument to colonialised people like the colonial exhibition buildings in Paris perhaps?
A short downhill walk into a soggy overgrown park led to a modest triangular platform covered in fresh memorial wreaths. To the rear, built into the rise, was a stainless steel grid fence. Confined, suffering black-cast Grecoesque human forms foreground the grid on a memorial plinth: “8 Dec 1941 - 15 Aug 1945”. Behind these contorted forms and framework was a humble memorial bell.
This subdued, simple, moving structure commemorates Dutch colonisers who suffered and died under Japanese occupation of what is now Indonesia. Given the complexity of the history, where many Indonesians welcomed the Japanese as liberators (at least until the harsh realities of “Co-Prosperity” were imposed upon them), it is understandable that this quiet, understated memorial to suffering, grief and loss seems an entirely European affair.
A slow walk back to the tram stop: the last historical tram of the day pulled in. I was greeted warmly and gently by the hostess and left alone to reflect, and to admire the tram-driver’s morose dog, chin on paws, balefully staring out of the doorway to the passing mansions as we trundled back towards the downtown shopping area.
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My final night in Den Haag, and in the Netherlands:
It had taken some finding but a small Indonesian restaurant provided a brilliant rijstaffel meal. Leaving, I walked across the unassuming square, surrounded by restaurants on three sides and a church on the fourth to find some more of this afternoon's familiar suffering bronze figures, superimposed this time upon on a Star of David. This square commemorates Rabbi Isaac Marsdan who died in Sobibor in 1943, and more than 10,000 Jewish citizens removed from Den Haag by the Nazis. In the centre of the square, stainless steel empty chairs support fresh floral wreaths.
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Tuesday:
It’s not a Friday train but still crowded, travelling to Amsterdam sitting with a KLM flight attendant heading to Schiphol Airport. She’s good company: happy to work two flight shifts per month as respite from the children. KLM seems to have been somewhat more caring of its flight staff than, perhaps, Qantas during Covid. She’s happy to take on any route, but found flying to and from China in “full spacesuit” pretty challenging. She asks if I’ll be in Holland for King’s Day (the orange bunting is already going up) when the nation celebrates and kids sell their unwanted toys? “Maybe next time you are here???”
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I’m writing this in a coffee shop under Amsterdam Central station, looking out at the ferries to the north. Some modest houses with gardens are over the water to my left; high rises are to my right. I’m waiting to go through “formalities for Eurostar” again. I’ve just been informed by a couple from Kent who are regular travellers, that it will be pretty much like St Pancras, except that, since bloody Brexit, we all have to be checked in and have immigration clearance and be locked into a room the size of 2 classrooms (because security have now taken over the rest of the space). All this, before the train can pull in to the platform.
It is starting to rain. “We hope you have an umbrella as the immigration queue is not all under cover. They’ll hold us at the end of the awning, then you run through the rain along the platform when directed and into the Eurostar building.”
Could be fun.
Sounds like a Plan.
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