Ahh, the Dutch…
Saturday, September 03, 2005
Getting up at the crack of Afternoon, we headed off to the train station and on to Rotterdam. Our Eurail Passes have saved us so much money over the last couple of months. We were able to use them to go to Rotterdam, which otherwise would have cost us €4.50 each, each way. That’s nearly $40 NZ! It wouldn’t be realistic without the passes. Anyway, the train to Rotterdam only took 20 minutes or so, and the first thing Maarty saw when we got off was another of the ‘food in the wall’ places, so off he goes with his €1, to get a fried sausage thing… he thought it was going to be chicken and corn, which he would have loved, but no! Even though the name sounded a bit like the English equivalent of Chicken and Corn, it was not… it was, in his words, kinda stupid mushed up meat with no particular flavour. Fortunately he eats pretty much anything these days, so scoffed it down anyway.
We didn’t know what to expect from Rotterdam, other that that it had a river and was in Holland. Arriving we walked out of the station and were greeted by practically nothing, other than a map that seemed to us to possibly be upside down… which on further investigation, it was. So we turned left, not right like it told us to, and headed for the centre of the city. After visiting a fountain in the middle of a perilously busy roundabout, we found a tourist information centre where we were told that there was a festival down by the water. Excited, we headed in that direction, only to discover that what the Dutch call a festival, we would call a big group of people standing around not doing a hell of a lot. Very odd. It was the weirdest thing to have thousands of people gathered to watch the waterfront, with nothing actually happening on it. It did give me an opportunity to get candyfloss though… yum yum! We waited an hour for something to happen, feeling like dumb tourists, wishing we knew why every one was there, before deciding that it was rather a waste of time and headed back over the bridge. When we were halfway across the bridge, suddenly out of nowhere came 2 military helicopters, flying at high speed toward us. Music started and we saw some of the many boats line up… ‘what’s this’ we thought? We then saw the strangest thing… the helicopters were at the head of a parade, consisting of about 4 little military boats and about 10 inflatables, looking like ducklings following their mother. All very strange – this was a big river and the four little boats didn’t male you go WOW they must have a good military. After about 2 minutes the parade was over and the boats dispersed leaving the helicopters. This however was amazing, they were doing all sorts of tricks – as if their commander had said to them why don’t you go out and just show off for a bit… They were almost going upside down, and banking really hard and lots of cool stuff. Eventually, a couple of guys jumped out into the water (which is what Maarty had been saying they should do for a good half hour) for mock rescues. It really was very interesting to see, but as we left we were still wondering what the hell it was all supposed to be about.
After a little shopping we headed back to Ties’ place as we were going to go to Tonte Ville’s to watch the soccer; our first football game! Better learn the rules if we’re going to live in England, I suppose. We both sat there fascinated at how slow the game moved, by half time there had only been one goal scored… In the end there were about 10 other people there, many of whom spoke fantastic English, so we had a blast. We even got to see a video from home, as family friend Theo had recently sent them a video of something he had made for a local TV channel (we think) called Holland Overtures (or something). Strange video but nice to see Birdlings Flat, anyway! What an awesome evening!
posted by Maarty @ 12:00 pm,
