Twice Mice » The Netherlands

One family across two countries

Lydia — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:36:13 +0000

When Hayden’s parrain JT flew over from NYC, we took him to the quirky towns of Dutch Baarle-Nassau and Belgian Baarle-Haartog, all tangled up within each other like a jigsaw puzzle. Located across the Dutch border, twenty Belgian exclaves can be found here, with seven Dutch exclaves within the Belgian exclaves. This meant that Hayden could stand with one foot in the Netherlands and one foot in Belgium:

There is a “front door rule” that means that the position of the front door determines whether a house is classified as being in Belgium or the Netherlands. The nationality of the home is also indicated by a flag next to the house number. We visited the house in which the border goes straight through the middle of the door, and thus has two addresses (and two doorbells):

Loveren 2
2387 Baarle-Hertog
Belgium

and

Loveren 19
5111 Baarle-Nassau
The Netherlands

There was even a divisive border across my lunch, separating the savoury cheese and potato pancake from the sweet cherry crepe. I ate each in isolation and they were delicious.

Plus, JT hand-delivered to us a delicious Black & White cookie, all the way from New York City. Hayden is still too little, so I ate it for him.

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Lydia — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 10:34:33 +0000

This week Hayden visited his fourth country when we accompanied Adrian to a conference in The Netherlands. Less than two hours on the train took us from Brussels to Amsterdam. The hotel gave us a free upgrade to a bigger room to fit the cot, and we had a lovely view over the main square.

While Adrian and his students presented their work to an international crowd, Hayden and I took long walks along the canals. The air was brisk but most days we had beautiful blue skies that were perfect for sightseeing. Once the talks had finished for the day we met up with Adrian and his colleagues to talk science over a few beers.

We had breakfast each morning in the elegant Winter Garden of the hotel – a huge glass-roofed room built in 1881 and filled with tropical ferns and a long buffet table filled with tempting treats. I started each day with poffertjes (tiny pancakes) with sour cherry sauce, and ended the day with poffertjes with maple syrup.

In between pancakes we managed to do some shoe shopping, as well as visiting the Wetheimpark and the Resistance Museum. A lovely way to mark the end of my maternity leave and squeeze in one more mini break before I go back to work next week.

Tulpenmanie

Lydia — Mon, 09 May 2011 18:31:48 +0000

We celebrated another beautiful Spring weekend with a trip to Holland to see their tulips at Keukenhof, the world’s largest tulip garden – the Netherland’s answer to the Floriade of Australia.

Adrian and I started our train trip at Brussel-Zuid. Various friends boarded our trains in Brussel-Centraal, Mechelan, and Den Haag, in what Cedric termed a “logistical triumph”. He also warned us that statistically the Brussels-Amsterdam local train was prone to the most delays in Benelux, however we were in luck and we made our connection with minutes to spare. A bus then took us from Leiden to Keukenhof, and we stepped through the front gates of the chateau to a magnificent garden and greeted with the sounds of an old-fashioned automated pipe organ.

In the 15th century, Keukenhof (“Kitchen-gardens“) was originally the site for the herbs and vegetables for Teylingen, held by the Countess Jacqueline of Bavaria, converted into a flower landscape by Jan David Zocher and his son Louis Paul Zocher in 1850, and then first opened as a tulip exhibition in 1949 to promote the Dutch flower export industry.

There are 15 kilometers of walking paths over 52 hectares, and over 7 million flower bulbs hand-planted. They even hire 12 swans for the duration of the opening period, fill their ponds with dutchings, and have a “t Hofje” children’s farm filled with chicks, lambs, calves, and piglets. It was a beautiful day, and even though it was filled with people there was plenty of space for everyone.

I found out afterwards that bridal parties and their photographers get free entry, although it’s unlikely that I would be able to fit into my wedding dress at the moment.

By the afternoon some of our party were feeling a little tuliped out, so we made our way back to Leiden for an afternoon of bar hopping along the canals. We finished up at Annie’s for dinner, sitting on a floating platform and watching the procession of boats filled with party-goers celebrating another fine afternoon of light and warmth.

Amsterdam and Haarlem

Lydia — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:51:21 +0000

For a country that is so close, we have not given the Netherlands the attention that it deserves. We were nudged to explore more of it when Adrian’s dad and his dad’s wife came to visit us a while back. We stayed the big bright city of Amsterdam and took a day trip to Haarlem. While in Amsterdam, we had lunch at the delicious Pancake Bakery for me, and dinner on a pizza and icecream cruise for Adrian. We visited the wax figures at Madame Tussauds, and I was amused to discover that Adrian had previously thought it was a serious museum of important historical figures.

The next day, we took the train to Haarlem, a delightful and fascinating town just outside Amsterdam. We saw signs to “Molen De Adriaan” and decided to take a detour. We discovered the most delightful windmill, and ventured inside. The woman asked us if we wanted to take a look in the museum upstairs. It was a few euros each, but we decided to splash out. We were astonished and delighted to discover that we had bought a private tour of the entire windmill. Our tour guide was an old man with an extensive knowledge of mills and wind. He told us about the secret signals that the windmills used that were dependent on the orientation of the vanes, how to convert circular motion into up-and-down motion, and even took us all the way to the top.

The Netherlands in Belgium in the Netherlands

Lydia — Wed, 27 May 2009 10:01:32 +0000

On the weekend we showed our houseguests one of the quirks of living in Europe – international borders that are a little higglty pigglty. Baarle Nassau and Baarle Hertog are two towns on the Belgium/Netherlands border. In fact, the border between the two countries is so confused that the towns have to place a diagram in the main street to explain the situation – the red perspex represents Belgium and the clear perspex represents the Netherlands:

This confusion is due to centuries of sales and swaps between the lords and dukes of the region. Yet still today, these borders are considered strict international boundaries. As we strolled through Baarle, we crossed the border dozens of times, and I was careful to have my passport ready. As we explored the suburbs, we noted that most of the residents were very nonchalant about the location of their house. For the most part, the only way that we could tell which country we were in was by very carefully examining the house numbers. Dutch houses have a red stripe on the left and a blue on the right. Belgian houses have a black/yellow/red flag in the top left hand side. This apartment complex straddled the border, and had two front doors, so the residents had both a Netherlands (left) and Belgium (right) address – very useful for tax purposes:

The two cities of Baarle Hertog and Nassau have different police forces, laws tax systems, fuel costs, speed limits, alcohol licensing laws, closing times, and mobile phone rates. A letter posted from Hertog to Nassau travels via Amsterdam. And yet the border quite often cuts right through a business or home.

But best of all, in these odd tangled territories, the sun was shining and all the stores were wide open on a Sunday. So we were able to sit outside, eat chocolate and beer, and soak up the sunshine in the enclaves and exclaves of these intertwined cities (note how the border continues down the middle of the road behind us before finally crossing the street).
.

Inside the Secret Annex

Lydia — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:51:10 +0000

When Adrian suggested that we visit Amsterdam on our last day in Benelux, I realised that I would be able to visit the Anne Frank Haus. Reading “The Diary of a Young Girl” touched me deeply, and the thought that I would actually be able to walk through the Secret Annex was bizarre.

Photo from annefrank.org

Anne Frank started this diary on her 13th birthday in 1942 and continued it for two years. At the beginning, she simply is a young girl from a Jewish family, living in Amsterdam. By the end, she is living her whole life in hiding from the Germans who have occupied The Netherlands and who are sending Jews and so many others to concentration camps. She details her day-to-day life in her diary, confiding her thoughts and dreams. She states that after the war, she would like to publish her diary and become a Dutch writer.

Photo from annefrank.org

As I read her diary, I connected with her on a very personal level. I felt that she was writing directly to me, and she became a dear friend over the course of the pages. Her diary is one of most important and touching books that I have ever read. Being able to visit her house was a privilege that I never imagined.

The place in which she lived is now a museum. I never realised that it was on the edge of a canal, though the chestnut trees that she describes in her diary are prominent as they line both sides of the street. As we walk through the entrance, we can see ads for Otto Frank’s pectin “Opekta”, used for making jam, and the bags and barrels in the storeroom at the front. He also sells “Petacon”, used for making sausages. Then, we walk through the rooms until we are confronted with a bookcase, slightly ajar to reveal a stairway behind it.

Photo from lydiamann

It was an extraordinary and surreal experience to walk behind that bookcase. I walked up the stairs, and then I was actually inside the Secret Annex. After the family was betrayed and captured, the Nazis took all the furniture, though left Anne’s diary laying in the debris. Otto Frank requested that the house remain unfurnished, to allow free movement of visitors, and as a reminder of all that was lost in the Holocaust. In Anne’s room, her pictures remain stuck to the wallpaper. The royal family, film stars, figure skaters, her friend’s summer home, and thirteen postcards are all visible. I stuck similar images to my own wall when I was fourteen. There is a postcard of tea-drinking chipanzees, sent to her by her mother in 1937 from England. I stood for a long time in that room. The room in which Anne wrote her diary, confided her dreams and her fears. The windows completely blacked out – no glimpses of sunshine through the cracks. My heart broke for her, and for the millions of others who have lost so much due to war and prejudice. There are photos displayed of what the room may have looked like when Anne was in hiding:

Photo from annefrank.org

There is a book by the exit that lists the names of over 100 000 Dutch Jews who were deported to concentration camps. The name we all search for – Frank, Annelies Marie – appears as a single line in a volume as dense with people as a phone book.

At the bookstore, we bought The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank – six women’s stories who had been in the death camps with her after she was betrayed, and survived to tell their story. One of the women, Janny Bradnes-Brilleslijper, who sought out Otto Frank after the war to tell him that his daughters were dead, ends her story with this message:

I want to repeat, I have told this because I want to make it very clear to a large number of people that all discrimination – whatever form it takes – is evil and the world can go to pieces because of it. Actually, literally, go to pieces. Discrimination against someone because of his skin color or his ears or his hair, or God knows what – we can all die from that. It only takes one person to say, “He isn’t as good as I am, because he has…” You can fill in the rest.

All discrimination deserves moral outrage.

Photo from annefrank.org