Travel without a schedule
Brain duly rinsed. Not even at the station yet and I saw the first strange thing.
There was no puff of smoke, and anyway the shoes weren’t pointed, but still. They were about size 38, too small for me or any of my daughters, or I might have taken them.
I went to Haarlem via Utrecht, but had neglected to look into the litourgia between Amsterdam and Haarlem: it turned out that I had to take a bus. It wasn’t much of a hardship, because the driver was very nice and I sat right behind a mother and a grandmother with a slightly autistic boy of thirteen or so, who knew the types and companies of all the planes that flew across the road all too low. Halfway —in fact in the middle of the village called Halfweg, “halfway”— we could see the litourgia: several wagons full of new gravel for the rail-bed and some men in orange jackets doing abstruse things with it.
This was my day for Knowing Things, apparently. The bus driver wanted to know what “that tower” was, and I knew it was the Bakenesserkerk. A German American (he had German hotel reservations, but as much of an American accent in his German as vice versa; I spoke both English and German with him and he didn’t seem to think it unusual) asked the way and I actually knew where he had to go and that it was only ten minutes. I could tell two women that the bricks in the pavement with names on were part of a sponsorship drive to spruce up the city. And some other random things like that.
Here’s proof that India Palace indeed serves Vegetarians (any artifacts in the picture come from the light falling right into the lens; kudos to Digikam for cleaning it up as much as it has):
Bought tea, and paprika flakes, and pencils (the last part of Rebecca’s birthday present because Deventer is sadly lacking in really soft pencils; perhaps the art shop has them, but we don’t go there because they don’t like children, teenagers, and probably just generally people), had lunch in a sidewalk cafe —it was that kind of weather— and decided that I wanted to go somewhere I’d never been before, at least not consciously. Passed the house we didn’t buy twelve years ago because we couldn’t afford it and didn’t have the time and dedication to convert it, but someone else clearly could, had and did:
Houses the approximate size and general niceness of our house in Deventer, just outside the town centre of Haarlem in the kind of neighbourhood we’ve recently moved out of, cost two and a half to three times as much as ours. Houses the price of our current house, in the centre of Haarlem, have only two rooms at most. We still can’t afford to live in Haarlem. The difference with twelve years ago is that we don’t want to move out of Deventer now, and indeed don’t want to move at all for the next X years, for quite a large value of X. Also, since we left it Haarlem has been spoilt rather a lot; that’s not only our perception, but it’s even in the local paper.
On arriving at the station I hopped on the first train that was going somewhere— to Dordrecht, in fact. In Dordrecht there’s a slow train due east, going through the south of Zuid-Holland and the west of Gelderland, all river land. I know that I must have been there before, at five or so, but all I remember of that time is that we got stranded near a “nature” swimming pool and my father borrowed swimming gear for himself and me so we could get in the water. This was at Beesd, and it’s still there though I didn’t go there this time.
Instead, I became interested when the train stood still for a while at Leerdam, waiting for the train from the other direction to pass, and I could see a marching band on the nearby square. I got off the train to look but the band was already leaving, to be replaced by another. I found out later that it was an afternoon show for junior bands. Just caught the last one, with flag-waving.
Strangely, all the drummers were boys, all the flag-wavers were girls (the youngest a cute black girl of about eight, who had only one flag and took part in only two acts; the oldest were fifteen or so and did everything), and the brass players were about half and half. It’s so different from things I’m familiar with that I couldn’t see or hear if they were actually any good, but I enjoyed it and was sorry when they left. Though the leaving itself was worth seeing.
Eventually I ended up in a train to Arnhem and got talking with a woman who, on hearing that we don’t have a car, correctly deduced from that (I wonder how) that we don’t have a TV either, and was surprised that I carried a cell phone. Obviously, in her mind, someone without a car is a Luddite across the board.
The station of Arnhem is in a state of rebuilding, and they’ve ingeniously put the bike shed on top.
As I sat on the stairs (at the far left of the picture) eating my supper I counted at least ten cyclists trudging up the artificial hill, panting, to put away their bikes.
I also saw a UFO —at least it was flying and I couldn’t identify it— but none of the three pictures I took of it have enough resolution to show it. I think, rather, that it was a white balloon that a child either lost or deliberately let fly.