A Couple of Days in the Netherlands

In mid-July we met up with Stephen's Dad and his partner Anne in the Netherlands, where they were visiting Stephen's Grandparents and other family members.

We started off our trip in the best possible way - by locating the frites vendor at the airport and ordering a big serve with mayo each.  Nom!

We were staying at Stephen's Uncle's holiday house, in a place called Vinkeveen - it's about 20km from Amsterdam, but is actually in the countryside - there were sheep farms literally 5 minutes away.

Vinkeveen is a very strange place - it has many fingers of land jutting out into the lake, which were apparently left behind when they finished dredging peat.  As a result, the land is rather unstable.

I didn't get any good photos when I was there, so I hit up Google StreetView for this one just now - that isn't an optical illusion, the houses really are tilted like that.  The majority of the houses were on bizarre angles, apparently due to the peat compacting and settling over time - even the house we were staying in was on an obvious angle (although it's hard to see from the photo above).  This was very confusing when getting up in the morning and made the whole trip a bit surreal.

Between the weird sinking peat fingers are many canals, which played host to a never-ending stream of Dutch people on boats of all shapes and sizes, parading past our dock.

We even joined the parade at some points.  Here's Stephen's Dad Harm and his partner Anne driving the boat.

Stephen and his Dad did some important fence-painting while we visited.  Don't ask why they're wearing matching clothes.

Aside from the family visiting (which I unfortunately didn't take any photos of), there was plenty of time for touristy side-activities, courtesy of Stephen's Dad, who is keen on Stephen learning about his Dutch heritage.  Stephen is in general rather dismissive of his Dutch heritage in regards to everything except mayonaise on fries and potatoes.

We visited the kaasmarkt (cheese market) at Alkmaar, which is apparently a traditional-style cheese market, running like it's the 17th century.  I wanted to go as I missed it last time I was in the country - I am not sure what I was expecting from the cheese market, but it was very odd.

These men are cheese porters, and they load the cheese (gouda in this case) onto their little sled.  Those things that look like brown suspenders are actually shoulder harnesses - they hook the bottom of those to the ends of the sled and carry the cheeses around in a kind of weird shuffling run.  

 

You can see them unhooking their harnesses here.  The different hat-colors apparently signify different cheese-porter guilds.

Once the cheeses have been sold, they get loaded onto these carts and pushed around at a run to somewhere else - the whole thing was very confusing and I have no idea what was going on, but there were cheeses and it was fun.

 Being a touristy kind of place, there were also people selling things and dressing up in crazy clothes - here's a woman wearing clogs and a funny traditional hat.

I always assumed that the canals were an anomaly of Amsterdam that people just associated with the Netherlands in general, but apparently this is not the case.  We drove around a large portion of the country (well it isn't very big) under the guise of teaching Stephen about his Dutch heritage and also looking for pannenkoeken (I was heartily on board with this venture), and the whole country is riddled with canals.

Here are picturesque canals in Alkmaar.

Here are more picturesque canals in another town.

And even more picturesque canals in yet another town.  Yes, the whole country is covered in canals.  I learned my lesson.

I made a list of delicious Dutch foods to eat before leaving, which Stephen's parents obliged in taking us to.  We didn't think it would be so hard to find pannenkoeken in Holland, but it was!

Pannenkoeken are Dutch pancakes - like big thin crepes.  They layer toppings on top while it's cooking so that the toppings bake in - this one is apple and raisin, but they put all sorts of things in, including bacon and cheese (which is delicious).

Once you get your pannenkoeken, you put powdered sugar and special syrup (stroop) and roll it up to eat it.  Delicious!

We also visited a special poffertjessalon while we were there, which was open for the summer months.

We ordered many many poffertjes from the chef, which he made on his gigantic cast iron poffertje pan.

 And here they are, with apple and powdered sugar and cream!  Yum!  (Although 20 poffertjes each was a bit much.)

We had a great time in the Netherlands again and it was great to see Stephen's Grandparents, Uncles and Aunts and cousins (who have all grown a lot since last time we saw them 4 years ago).