The traveller finds a home

My blog is woefully out of date and I apologise to any/all readers who have been waiting with bated breath for the next installment of Maryka's Great Travelling Tales... well, you can breathe properly again (and stop bugging me about when my blog will be updated) because I'm back! But since this page is getting quite long -- after all, when I do write, I tend to barf out a lot of stuff -- this post will be the last of Maryka the Nomad. I've created a new page for Maryka the Nederlander, as you can see from my main blog page (also another for photos, when I figure out how to put them into a few albums). So check the new one for future updates.

Just to bring some closure to my travels through Holland (last time you heard from me, I was experiencing lovely and provincial Emmen), here's a not-quite-brief rundown on what I've been doing the past six weeks. After spending about ten days with Gerjan and Lucie, I headed out on the road -- well, more accurately the rail -- to travel around the country and pick a place to live that appealed to me. In a roughly clockwise direction:

• Nijmegen, the oldest city in the Netherlands and the only place I went where there were no canals, only the swift-moving River Waal reminiscent of my upstream paddling days on the Peace River in Alberta during the Mackenzie Expedition. This is because Nijmegen is located towards the southern part of the Netherlands and actually has some elevation above sea level. They are currently rebuilding the Valkhof tower from medieval days as part of Nijmegen's 2000th birthday. Very nice city and the hometown of the Van Halen brothers, what else can I say?
  

• 's Hertogenbosch, aka Den Bos, a small but very quaint old triangle-shaped town with canals threading throughout and a very cool open-air "markt" where vendors come to sell everything you can think of. Also the largest church in the country, Sint Janskathedraal. I really liked Den Bos though it wasn't quite big enough for me to live, but I'd love to go back and spend more time there.
  

• Middelburg, biggest town in Zeeland, which is the southwestern-most province in the Netherlands made up of several fingers of land poking into the sea. This is the area where the great flood of 1953 obliterated most of the land and devastated the people, and where the Dutch created the Delta Project to control the sea for future storm swells. The centre of Middleburg is completely surrounded by water with many bridges that open twice an hour on a rigorous schedule for various sailboats and other tall watercraft. The hostel I stayed in was just out of town in Domburg and was in 13th-century Kasteel Westhove, a real castle complete with moat!
  

• upon reading that Rotterdam, where the "old-world appeal" of the Netherlands was "consciously kicked to the curb" after World War II (according to one of my guidebooks), I was left wondering what to expect and doubting whether I'd like it. Surprise, I found I liked it quite a bit and spent some time pondering why exactly that was. In contrast with most cities (even Toronto) where old majestic buildings are flanked by newer ugly ones, Rotterdam is full of interesting experiments in architecture, civil engineering, and social planning where somehow the weird-looking buildings don't look bad or out of place but rather quite cool and classy. Before I saw Rotterdam, I never really put a face to the name "post-modernism", but now I get it. Plus it has the wonderful Museum Boijmans van Beuningan, where I discovered I really like surrealist art.
  

• 's Gravenhage, aka Den Haag, aka The Hague, the political centre of the Netherlands and home of the Canadian Embassy. I spent a day or so bumming around the city, then headed out of town to suburban Wassenaar to visit and stay with Lucie's sister Carry's family. With husband Bert as my advisor and son Erik as my guide, I spent a day biking through the dunes to Madurodam and Scheveningen beach (I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't even know the Netherlands had dunes and beaches before this) and had a great time. In fact, since then I've visited Wassenaar again, this time on my own bicycle. Erik is considering running the Rotterdam Marathon with me next spring, or at least I'm currently twisting his arm over it.
  

• Leiden was my next stop, mostly because I thought it might be a good spot to live, given that it's a hearty university town. But the combination of a terrific rainstorm that soaked me and my backpack, and all the nose-in-the-air students around town kind of turned me off. That said, it is a very pretty town with a cool 8-storey "molenmuseum", one of those old-fashioned Dutch windmills restored to full 18th-century detail. I missed the Keukonhof gardens while I was there, so I will be going back at some point, probably in the spring.
  

• Utrecht was the place where I had an inkling I might want to live... and when I arrived I figured this was pretty much it. In fact, I was so convinced that I spent my entire three days at the hostel searching for a place to live and I did absolulely no touristy stuff whatsoever. Basically, Utrecht is not too big and not too small, has a big university but is not dominated by it, is home to the biggest railway hub in the Netherlands, is within about 40 minutes of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Den Haag, and has a really nice feel to it. I managed to find a room to rent in my few days there, which was nice because then when I left, I could with a carefree mind enjoy my days in....
  

• Amsterdam. Originally I wasn't going to visit it on my tour, figuring it was worth a visit of its own, but after I scratched Maastricht off my list, a few days opened up for Amsterdam and I'm glad I went. It really should be a country all on its own because it is so different from any other place in the Netherlands. The layout of the old and new towns follows a series of concentric canals (more than in Venice, apparently) with dozens of narrow streets filled with tourists, tourist shops, and more tourists. The Red Light District has a candidly open and unaffected attitude towards sex and prostitution, and coffee shops abound with an almost pure and natural sense of belonging. In some ways, I think a place like Vancouver could learn a lot from Amsterdam; at the same time, I understand why Dutch people who live anywhere but here are weary of the constant appeal of "sex and drugs" that somewhat defines their country for the rest of the world. Still, Amsterdam is a place I will visit again, if only because I haven't seen all the museums yet.
  

• After leaving Amsterdam, I stopped for a night at the house of Marloes and Oscar, Lucie and Gerjan's oldest daughter and her boyfriend, in Heerhugowaard. The next day I got the tour of the military airport control tower where Marloes works as an air traffic controller in Den Helder. After lunch at the base, I was off to Leeuwarden via bus, which took me over the dike built on the Zuider Zee, now the IJsselmeer freshwater lake. Leeuwarden is in Friesland, and I felt I should see it because that's the real heritage of the Sennema name. It was worth it just to see all the shops and streets with names ending in -ema or -sma, which denote them as Frisian. There's even a Leendert Sinnemastraat, named for a man from Friesland who died in the war resistance. I'm thinking when the weather gets cold, a little visit with my skates to Leeuwarden is in the cards, maybe if I'm lucky this will even be an Elfstadentocht year?

After Leeuwarden, I made my way back to Emmen via Groningen and spent a couple of days collecting myself and my things before heading back to Utrecht to move into my new apartment. And that's where the tale of my travels comes to an end and a new chapter begins with my official residency in the Netherlands. Stay tuned to blog #2 for that story, it's got some good stuff already!