Holland revisited - August '10

Little did I think a week before that I would be sitting in Mr. and Mrs. Aafke’s house at two in the morning sipping a cold can of superior Dutch Heineken. It was Govert’s birthday and I managed to get on the guest list, yippee! I had a cunning plan for the next day and thanks to the generosity of Mr. Aafke, who lent me his super Audi Coupe with GPS in English, I made an early start for Arnhem. This is one of the essential WWII sites and part of a much bigger story covered in the book and film ‘A Bridge too Far’ so I ticked the box on that one. Arnhem is a Saturday Market town and it was buzzing with fruit and veg stalls, Cheese (Gouda) bigger than the wheels on a ‘Monster Machine’ and of course herring, lovely, this season’s herring, beautiful. There was also a multi-Ethnical party going on with an eclectic (been dying to use that word since I read it in an Irish Times Travel article) mix of Orientals and Surinamese – Check out Surinam on Google, it seems like an interesting place to go. I visited the Airborne Museum in The Hartenstein Hotel, http://www.airbornemuseum.org/language/en got the T-Shirt, saw the guns, uniforms, rusty tins and stuff that well, gives you a certain ‘hands-on’ feeling, considering that the final battle happened around this Hotel. A more somber memorial was the Allied Cemetery not far away (I couldn’t find the German one). It contains British, Irish (Irish Guards, another interesting story), Australian, New Zealand and Polish troops. One of the more poignant sights were the headstones of two brothers who had consecutive serial numbers and who died on the same day.

Back to Haarlem, park the motor and enjoy a brew. Caroline (from the June trip) will be arriving tonight and we will probably go into town for the Jazz Festival. The three of us decide to cycle into the center of Haarlem and the town is buzzin’ with major bands on the main stage in the square and all around, the various bars had set up stalls with deejays. After doing several rounds of this as well as revisiting some of the places I went to in June, you’ve got to check to make sure they’re still there, remounted the bikes and headed homewards. We skidded to a halt outside the ‘Witte Zwaan’ by the canal, all very apt, because there was a crowd outside and a classic Dixie-style band playing inside, we stayed for ages, the classic ‘one for the road’ stop, it was a ball. Funnier still was the cycle home and I witnessed that rarest of sights, a Dutch person falling off a bike, the expression I believe is ‘I forgot to peddle’.