On our Dutch bicycles riding back from The Fred on Saturday morning past a barrel organ with the Dutch barrel grinders shaking their money tins in time with the traditional oompa loompa jingle; I’m carrying fresh bread from the bakkerij and ham from the slaggerij for breakfast, Sean is carrying a bunch of tulips and I’m thinking – “we are really living in Holland now”.
And we are gradually settling in.
I have joined the library (the central branch has an English fiction section) and we have both joined the gym. On Saturday morning, Sean is the only bloke in the gym and the women mostly sit on bikes reading (I don’t know why, they ride bikes all the time) so we have most of the equipment to ourselves.
I have joined a Pilates studio. The teacher is a ballet mistress type older English lady who has lived in Holland 16 plus years. The other two women in my class are Dutch and as soon as the class finishes they gossip in Dutch – are they talking about me?
Sean has even booked into UN French language course.
Tonight we have been invited to a barbecue by some other Australians and there is an Anzac Day event on Sunday for Australians too.
We have both bought shoulder satchel bags – de rigueur for the Dutch cyclist.
We have already broken the coffee machine and I have figured out why Dutch people go home for lunch – because you can’t buy decent gladwrap to wrap your sandwich in. (Also the potato peelers are crap – honestly for a country that lives on mash! And you can only buy crappy barbecue tongs.)
But we still do touristy stuffDuring the week I visited the Bredius museum which is the previous house of an 18th century gentleman Abraham Bredius, the former director of the Mauristhuis. The museum is just across the canal from the Mauritshuis so he didn’t have far to go to work. The house is jam-packed with his private collection of 17th century art including Rembrandts and Jan Steens. I was one of 4 people in the museum at the time: one other guest, a lady working at reception and a bored security guard in the upstairs room.
We had dinner at Didong, the perpetually booked out Indonesian restaurant around the corner. Indonesian food is popular because Indonesia or the Dutch East Indies was a former Dutch colony and the Hague had many repatriates who settled here following Indonesian independence in 1945. There are still strong ties with Indonesian culture and The Hague has more Indonesian restaurants than any other town in the Netherlands. The menu is written in an amalgamation of Dutch –Indonesian and we get the Dutch waitress to translate: the “cow rendang” is recommended– and we end up with quite a few dishes more than we anticipate (see photo).
On Saturday we rode to the The Haagse market which is the largest open air market in Europe and we had been recommended to go by a couple of people. Sean doesn’t like crowds. The markets were thick with the melting pot of ethnicities that is The Hague: Dutch, Indonesian, Turkish, and Moroccan. All our bodies brush against each other, my hand is rigidly clenching my new “Cos” handbag (Cos is my new favourite fashion store). Pickpockets are apparently rampant. The food but particularly the fresh seafood which goes on for several hundred metres is wonderful. We decide to try raw herring which is intended to be dropped into your open gob and swallowed whole. Instead we gingerly test it with forks. The first mouthful is fleshy and wet and well, fishy. Delightfully served with raw onion, unfortunately it doesn’t win us over and we cope with about 3 mouthfuls each. The raw fish and onion flavour stays in our mouth for ages. Eventually Sean starts hyperventilating from the teeming throng at the market and we get back on our bikes. Sean told one of his Dutch colleagues he thought the herring tasted too fishy and she gave him a look like he was an idiot.
On Sunday we went to the Kukenhof gardens (in bloom from March to May) along with the rest of Europe who are stuck here because of that volcano in Iceland. We had imagined a tranquil stroll through immense fields of dazzling and spectacular arrangements of tulips however we got stuck behind the osteoarthritic shuffle of the grey hair brigade and frankly the tourist to flower ratio tainted the experience a little. Nevertheless, the colours were gorgeous and vivid and the fragrance was exquisite. Sean liked the hedge maze and the free “fatboy” cushions on the lawn for sunbaking.
Hopefully we will have internet at home tomorrow, hurry up Ziggo! Snell, snell!
No comments:
Post a Comment