Episode Eight - 'Brussels & Rotterdam'

Firstly, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone! I hope your Christmas was as memorable and enjoyable as ours.

The last time we spoke we were in Paris, about to head off to the Belgian capital, Brussels. The train trip from Gare du Nord to Brussels-Midi was very relaxing despite having gotten up at 5:30am that morning. As we crossed the border into Belgium we thought about how close everything in mainland Europe really is - in Melbourne a 90 minute train trip will leave you in the middle of nowhere, but in Paris it left us in another country.
After catching a train on the Brussels metro we arrived at Madou station and pulled out our hotel reservation print-out - 'We are two minutes walk from the Metro station'. Again, we were a little sceptical of the claim, given our experiences earlier in the holiday, but to our surprise the hotel really was two minutes walk away. It just took us 10 minutes to get there the first time because we headed in the opposite direction, despite having two maps to guide us. Good work.
In fact, throughout our two-and-a-bit days in Brussels I think we were lost more often than not. I don't know if it was the fact that each street has two names - a French one and a Flemish one - but we spent a fair chunk of time looking at our map. Despite the mild frustration of getting ourselves lost too frequently, the fact that two languages are spoken in the city is kinda awesome. Brussels really is at the crossroads between the Netherlands and France in terms of geography and culture, and walking down the street you would hear Flemish and French in almost equal proportions. It was quite cool.
For the remainder of our first day in Brussels wandered the streets, checking out the Christmas markets and all that cool stuff. We indulged in some local cuisine, local beers and some photo-taking.

The majority of our second day was also spent on our feet, wandering, looking for a laundry and an internet cafe, and window shopping. We stumbled upon a three-storey English language bookshop which was dangerous given that I had just finished the book I was reading. I managed to contain myself and buy only one book which was a good effort given the dozen or so that I was eyeing off.
By all accounts the Belgian capital often gets overlooked by most European holidayers which is a real shame. While we didn't get to spend anywhere as much time there as we would have liked, we found it most enjoyable and would certainly go back.
After our second night in Hotel Sabina - where the owners had dragged two single beds together to form a 'double bed' - we once again woke at 5:30am and headed down to Brussels-Midi by Metro in order to catch the Thalys train to Rotterdam. I have to admit that we were both a little nervous about spending three days with people that we hadn't met, but when we hopped off the train at Rotterdam Centraal and we saw Ivon & Henk waiting for us with welcome boards showing our names and a photo of us, we knew that there was nothing to worry about. They looked genuinely excited to see us, and thus began three days of my father's cousin and her husband treating us like royalty.

From the station they drove us around Rotterdam, showing us the sights like the Euromast, the swan-bridge, and more personally, the building from which my Oma & Opa's ferry had departed when they first emigrated from Holland to Australia way back in the 1950s.
By the end of the first evening in Ivon & Henk's company, we realised that we were going to be spoilt beyond comprehension. Both of us felt uncomfortable about the lengths that they had gone too but I guess it was their decision, and we made it known how grateful we were. After an early dinner we made the 45 minute trip north to Gouda where we checked out the Christmas Eve celebrations, the light show that was being projected onto the town's church, and spent about an hour and half ice skating. We discovered the following morning that police had found a man's corpse at Gouda only hours after we were there which was a little scary.
On Christmas morning we woke up around 8am and partook in a lovely breakfast which Ivon and Henk had prepared for us, before jumping in the car and heading to Kinderdijk, a World Heritage site famous for its 19 windmills. It was awesome to see the fabled Dutch windmills, but it was more than a little chilly and we quickly headed back to the car and their lovely house in Hoogvliet.
As a quick aside, we have this small notebook in which we have been writing down the details of our trip from day to day so that we might remember all of the infinite many amazing experiences that we have had since we left home, and also to make writing this blog a little easier. It is worth noting I guess that throughout the notes that we took during our three day stay with Ivon & Henk, the words 'we feel so spoilt' appear more than a couple of times. Their hospitality was amazing to the point where several times we just found ourselves shaking our heads and saying 'you are crazy, you didn't have to do that!'.

At around 3pm on Christmas Day, Ivon's brother Ton and his wife Joka (pronounced yo-ka) arrived and Christmas got into full swing. The six of us indulged in a 'gourmet' dinner, a Dutch tradition which involves a large barbecue-like hot plate which sits on the dining room table with miniature frying pans sitting on top. Everyone gets a fry pan each, and you cook pieces of meat, fish, vegetables, cheese, bread and various sauces to your liking and repeat the process until you are about to explode. It was great to be able to partake in a Dutch tradition like that and both Sharon and I ate until we felt sick. Our entire stay with Ivon & Henk was punctuated by the trying of many new foods and drinks - eel and various other types of fish that we hadn't tried, oliebollen (doughnut-like balls dusted with icing sugar), Jenever (a juniper-flavoured liquor), various Dutch beers and other regional specialties.
Ton & Joka were great company as well. The six of us spent hours sitting and chatting about everything from Dutch swearing-slang, to famous Australian musicians and the effect of the European Union and the Euro on the Dutch economy and socio-political climate. It was a most tremendous Christmas, and one that we won't easily forget.
While the 26th of December is Boxing Day in Australia, the Dutchies party on. The 25th is typically spent with family while the 26th, the second Christmas Day, is usually spent with friends. Ivon & Henk took a break from tradition and drove us to Ton & Joka's place in Waspik, a small village about 45 minutes from Hoogvliet, and after watching their pet rabbit 'Happy' bounce around the living room and a Jerry Lee Lewis DVD, the six of us piled into various cars and headed toward Renkum in the country's east to trace my family's history.
My Oma and Opa (Ton & Ivon's uncle and aunt) had both lived in houses in and around Renkum for their whole lives until they emigrated to Australia. We spent the day visiting and taking photos of the houses, many of which hadn't changed from when my Oma and/or Opa used to live there. We got many strange looks from the current owners who must have thought it a bit weird to see two car-loads of people piling out onto some random back-streets in rural Holland to talk to each other, point at various houses and take photos. It was a fantastic day and I felt so lucky that we had been given the opportunity to trace some of my family history, and that not only Ivon & Henk, but Ton & Joka were happy and willing to drive us around and give us a commentary for each house that we visited.
We finished the day with a visit to Doorwerth Castle where we ate croquettes, drank hot chocolate with whipped cream on top (so tasty!) and tried the German specialty, gluehwein. One of those simple little, memorable moments happened as we were leaving the castle. Seeing that the moat around the castle was starting to freeze over, I threw a stone at the lake, and it just bounced of the ice. I know it sounds like such a dumb thing, but when you come from a city when 10 degrees is 'freezing', to see a creek freezing over because its about two degrees below freezing is kinda special. At least I thought so anyway.

As if we needed any more evidence to suggest that Ivon & Henk were doing a fantastic job of looking after their Australian guests, they drove home via IJsseslstein - a 45km detour - so that we could get out of the car, take two photos of a radio tower that had been turned into a several-hundred-metres-tall 'Christmas tree', and get back in the car before driving home. It was all their idea, and we just didn't know where to look - they were obviously happy to look after us but we felt so indebted to them.
After a drive home of around 90 minutes we indulged in a delicious feast of a dinner - homecooked dinners are such a godsend after spending so long eating restaurant/junk food - and sat around talking and drinking, before heading to bed tired and still flumoxed by the hospitality shown by our Dutch hosts. To put it all into some context, just before we went to bed that night, Ivon gave Sharon a handful of English pounds that were left over from her and Henk's last trip to England so that we might have something to spend when we got there. We both pleaded with her that she should keep it for their next trip to the UK and failing that that we should at least give her some Euros in exchange. She wouldn't have a bar of it and we were forced to take the money and after counting it all up we realised that there was around 70 pounds. That's a fraction over $150 Australian. It was just crazy. Oh, and on that same evening Henk put on an album by this crazy Dutch band (the name escapes me) and I remarked at how awesome the music was. He said he would make a copy, and after doing so he came back downstairs and handed us the original. They just wouldn't let us take the copy and we had to take the original. It was all a bit uncomfortable, but so amazingly kind-hearted at the same time.

This morning we packed up our bags - now lighter after jettisoning the two bottles of Chianti that we bought for Ivon & Henk from the farmhouse in Tuscany - and after another delicious breakfast we piled back into the car for the 30 minute trip to Rottedam Centraal. Again, we had planned to take the Metro to Centraal but they refused, and being -4 degrees outside, our attemps to argue were only half-hearted. They accompanied us all the way to the train platform, making sure we had everything, making sure we were on the right platform etc. Sharon & I boarded the train to Amsterdam and sat down, talking about how much we would miss them and laughing about how well they had treated us. Apologies if it sounds like I am repeating myself, but it was so beyond what they were obliged to do for us that it was incredible. It's hard to imagine that they didn't even know us beforehand - they were just doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, and perhaps maybe a little bit for my Oma, to whom they had promised that they would look after us, and who they affectionately referred to as 'Tante Betts'.

Anyway, here we are, sitting in a little internet cafe in Amsterdam. It's warm inside, which is a nice change from the -4 which it has been all day.
After getting off the train at Amsterdam Centraal, we walked out onto the busy street to see a whole bunch of police standing around a roped-off area. We couldn't see what was going on, besides the fact that there was a bunch of rubbish and clothes in the middle of the roped-off area, surrounded by a few visible-from-10-metres-away splashes of blood. Welcome to Amsterdam.
After that introduction to the Dutch capital we found our hotel with surprisingly-zero hassles and then headed to the Albert Cuypmarkt where we bought not only some lunch, but thermal pants and warmer gloves to protect us from the biting cold. It's all a little bit deceptive. For us Melbournians, blue skies and sunshine usually means warm weather. Not here. The sun was out, the sky was clear as anything, and yet it was -4 degrees. I'm just glad we aren't in Winnipeg; -30 is just ridiculous.

Anyhow, that's about all for this installment. We are planning on spending New Years Eve in Amsterdam and heading into Germany thereafter. We are exactly half-way into our two month adventure and so far it has been a blast. Hopefully it continues to excite, educate and impress.

If we don't speak in the next few days, Happy New Year and all that. We will be in touch.

Matt & Shaz

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