High on Life

Friday 23rd October

High on Life

Well Amsterdam – how do we describe it to those of you who have never been here – to start with we had two nights out on the town here! Very lively place with a definite distinct “odour” in the air! Lots of coffee shops here – not quite the menus we have back at home – things on these menus included expresso, latte, lady joint, foil, skunk joint & hashish to name a few. Signs in lots of pubs windows saying smoking allowed in here – cigarettes and joints! Seemed quite unreal with the police riding their bikes around and seeing people in the coffee shops and pubs smoking marijuana in full view of them. The other exciting (not quite the right word) part to Amsterdam is the girls in the windows – Brent called Rae naïve as she didn’t quite expect to see so many girls flaunting their wares right in front of you and then watching men enter their rooms. These girls obviously are the Dutch welcoming party as they smile at everyone, chat to the many men and we think invite them in for a 20 minute cuppa. We didn’t get tempted though ‘cos a cuppa can cost 50 Euro or more and there’s a lot of wine drinking in 50 Euro. They are treated well these girls with nice warm rooms behind their glass windows, someone should look at their thermostats though as obviously too warm and they have to peel off sooo many clothes, better than freezing I guess and also keep’s the cuppa’s warmer longer. At any one time there is on average 380 girls working so lots of window shopping here!! Apparently some men tried to set up their own business in the windows but after three days and no sales they decided to leave it to the girls!!!! Amsterdam is also home to quite a few museums. We visited the Torture Museum, Hash Museum and Sex Museum – all very unique and nothing much has changed over 150 years. We also saw Anne Franks house – this was the house where she wrote her famous dairy during the war years. The other thing we couldn’t believe about Amsterdam was the huge number of bikes here – everyone bikes everywhere, the bikes rule the road. There are about 150,000 bikes stolen each year but Brent reckons they just forget where they left them!
We have done a lot of sightseeing in the last week in both Holland and Belgium. In Holland we visited –
Madurodam which is a miniature Netherlands – the area of this place was 18,000m2 and took us through old Holland/Netherlands right up to some of the modern architecture. Everything in the place was operational but obviously in miniature. The airport had airplanes going down the runway and also had an operational baggage carrier. The boats that were cruising around the canals had to wait for the bridges to lift for them to go under. The church even had bells that rung on the hour. We bought a souvenir pair of clogs from the mini clog maker – we could hear them being made, next thing a mini truck pulls up at the clog maker and the clogs are dropped into the back of the truck and the truck then drives around to us for us to pick up our pair of clogs – amazing.
We have also visited Kinderdijk which has 19 working 18th century windmills. It was a very crisp fresh Sunday morning when we biked to see the windmills and unfortunately there was no wind so there were none working for us, however one of the windmills is open to the public so we walked around inside it – hard to believe that this windmill housed a family of 10 back in the early 1900’s.


We also had a tour around the Delta Works which is a massive dam built to protect Holland against flooding after the big floods they had in 1953 which killed 1900 people. The Waterland Neeltje Jans is where the tour starts and is right by the main surge barrier. We walked inside the barriers pylons and could see how the whole thing works – if the sea-water gets rough & rises more than 3 metres then the barriers are automatically shut and the water would then flow back out to the North Sea and not into all the canals around Holland. They needed to do this as at least 40% of Holland has been built below sea level. The Delta Works took 20 years to complete and is seen as one of the world’s greatest engineering works. The Oosterschelde which is the area of the Delta Works is now a National Park – we had a boat trip out to the Oosterschelde but realize how lucky we are back at home when people on the boat were disappointed not to see any seals!! The Dutch really treasure their National Parks but I suppose when you live in a country that is the most densely populated in Europe you would too. New Zealand has 6 times more land area than Holland but Holland has 4 times the population.
From Holland we drove through to Bruges in Belgium. Bruges is another pretty wee town but this time with lots and lots of chocolate shops! Belgium is known for it’s beer, chocolate and mussels. We went to a shop in Bruges that stocked 350 different types of Belgian Beers. We did sample some of the chocolates (very nice) and a couple of the different beers. Rae liked the raspberry flavoured one (1.9%alcohol) and Brent liked the Duvel (8.5%alcohol) – Duvel is the name Belgium name for devil. We also had a great pot of steamed mussels.
From Bruges we travelled up to Ypres – which is where hundreds of thousands of soldiers fought over this cramped corner of the Western Front for four years of concentrated warfare during WW1. Ypres and his surrounding areas (Flanders Fields) were where 103,000 New Zealand soldiers fought during WW1. 60% of these men lost their lives here and considering we only had a population of one million at the time it is the greatest loss of lives in New Zealand history. Flanders area includes the famous Passchendale fighting grounds. The total loss of lives for the Commonwealth was 185,000 so this is aptly been assigned the memorial area for our WW1 troops. The Menin Gate is a memorial for the soldiers that passed through it daily on their way to battle on the Western Front. This bridge is in Ypres and every night at 8.00pm the Last Post is sounded here. The traffic is stopped and the night we were there, there were 500+ people attending including some school groups who laid wreaths. A very moving ceremony. It was surprising for us whilst visiting the bridge in the afternoon and reading the names of 54,000 soldiers who lost their lives we saw a fresh bouquet of flowers from “From the Parliament and People of New Zealand”. Whilst this place serves as a memorial for all the lost Commonwealth Soldiers, the New Zealand soldiers are named in another well known memorial cemetery at Tyne Cot. We visited Tyne Cot which also had a very informative information centre – the names of the 47,000 commemorated there are continually read out over loud speakers and in the centre their photos are displayed accordingly on screen. From Tyne Cot we then went to Polygon Wood Cemetery and Buttes New British cemetery where the New Zealand memorial stands. The weather was very dull and dreary and it wasn’t hard to imagine the conditions the soldiers fought in. We then left Belgium and drove into France and we went to Anneke Cemetery where Rae’s Great Uncle is buried – a casualty of WW1. Rae felt very privileged to be able to visit Harry Gilchrist’s grave on behalf of the Parke Family. All in all a very sombre couple of days but also very gratifying.
We are now in Villers Sur Mer which is on the Normandy Coast of France where we are intending to visit the Normandy D-Day beaches in the next day or so.

Au revoir