Bowling, boozing, coffee shops and cards.

Holland is in my top 3 for sure. Probably thanks to Amanda's amazing family and their incredible hospitality. I think we ended up staying in Langedijk, which is an hour north of Amsterdam, for about 10 days. Relaxing, eating great food and drinking heaps of pilsner. After my dismal performance in two legs of ten pin bowling, I was well on my way to inebriation. Thankfully we'd taken the offer of a ride to and from the bowling alley. I don't think I'd have made it back home on a bicycle.  We all headed back to Joop and Pauline's (Amanda's auntie and uncle) place for a game of cards. Just about everyone in Holland speaks great English, but with cards I tried to join in by counting in Dutch. Pretty hilarious for all. Especially as my short term memory was vague as a result of all the pilsner. A bit later we hit the pub for yet more pilsner and a game of electronic darts. It counts for you. Ideal for someone in my state. It's all about games when hanging with Amanda's family. Bullshit, Patanque, Sjoelbak (a table version of shuffleboard) and Kezeen are wicked games that provoke more than enough competition to be exciting/infuriating. All are best served with pilsner and an assortment of salty snacks.


I tried to go for a run the next day to sweat out some of the beer... and shots apparently, I don't remember. This was a bad idea and resulted in me standing beside a canal in the countryside trying my very best not to vomit. I felt very sorry for myself, but improved a lot when Joop took us out for a spin on his canal boat. Years ago Langedijk was surrounded by water and thousands of little rectangle islands upon which farmers would grow vegetables or crops. Some of the canals and islands still remain so Joop showed us around the waterways. A great hangover cure.

More from Amanda's golden half camera. Left: The kaasmarkt in Alkmaar. Right: Amanda , Scooby and Joop in the canal boat.

A few days into our stay we took a trip to Alkmaar, a medieval market town just south of Langedijk. The centre of town was full of games, food vendors, rides and crying kids all in town for the annual kermis. A kermis is a kind of travelling carnival with some pretty amazing rides and games. Most play awful techno music and have PA's announcing hilarious things in English like "It's a super machine". Amanda's cousin Lieke, suggested we go on the Booster. Looking at this beast of a ride I realised suddenly how ridiculous humans are. Some things we do for entertainment are so stupidly unnatural. I guess that's the fun. Anyway it's basically a giant steel girder standing 60m tall vertically, with an axle through the centre and seats attached to each end. We jumped on and got strapped in, and then it slowly rotated 180 degrees and stopped to let people get on the other end. So we were at the very top, 60m in the air with a stunning view over Alkmaar and north Holland with a chilly wind in our faces. All of a sudden the ride kicks in proper and starts winding up to full speed. There's something unnerving about the sound of a very high powered electric engine revving upwards with you bolted into a seat going through a giant spin cycle. The seats also have a separate rotation so things get pretty wild pretty quickly, especially at 125kmph and 4.3g about 5m from an ancient church steeple. I think it went for about five minutes, after which I was desperately ill but luckily not sick. I tried to act cool and pretend nothing was wrong but soon had to suggest that we sat down for a coffee. Motion sickness is weird.

BOOSTER!!!!

Later in the week I thought I should sample one of the local coffee shops before trying to overcome my motion sickness woes on some more rides. Maybe it would settle my stomach? Walking into a coffee shop and buying something that is considered illegal in my home country is a strange feeling. You feel naughty, yet liberated. Cool, yet very uncool. Coffee shop workers must get pretty sick of all the classic tourist types strolling in, getting high and heading to the nearest snack bar for a croquette, so I asked Amanda to help us blend in by speaking Dutch. She basically said 'if you want to get high you can buy it yourself'. Fair enough. No point pretending I'm not a tourist. So I used some hilariously bad Dutch to ask for a joint and some matches, with reasonable success. At least I tried. I bet most geezers don't. So there I sat with Amanda in a cosy little coffee shop in Alkmaar trying not to cough my lungs out, smoking some very very potent weed. Maybe it was a special 'you'll think your dying' tourist blend, I don't know, but I quickly entered the fourth dimension and pondered my own minuscule existence. After a few minutes of buzzing out Amanda reminded me that we were going to go on a big scary ride, so we said thanks to the nice lady behind the bar and moved on. Outside it all became a bit much for me. So many people, all looking at me, knowing I was a stoned tourist, hating me. PARANOID. We had a look at the ride we wanted to go on called XXL Inversion. Similar to Booster but with a few more axis of rotation, louder more aggressive techno music, and scary lights that make skull faces. A real gut winder. In my state I was a bit freaked out by all the lights and the awful techno music, and there was a possibility I would grab the DJ's mic and say "Hello. Hello everyone. Can somebody call me an ambulance because I'm in trouble. Time is moving really, really slowly and everything is flat. I need you to call me an ambulance, or failing that my mummy. I really want my mummy because I'm not being dramatic, I think I might be dead. Is that clear, Mummy or Ambulance?". So we didn't go on the ride. Instead we tried to bike the 7km back to Langedijk which itself was a mission. I got confused on the way and stopped in the middle of a bicycle lane intersection, annoying some girls who (my paranoid brain assumed) had said "That guy isn't a local, he's obviously a stoned British tourist." But they were speaking Dutch, so may not have said such things. Eventually we got home. I had several strong coffees and some cereal then watched bad TV movies for a few hours. Amanda went to bed.

Amanda's father grew up here. No lie

Amanda's father grew up in a windmill. It's now a museum and Amanda's aunt Coba was kind enough to give us a grand tour. The sails were up so the mill was turning, although the water screw was disconnected. Those old mills are pretty amazing feats of engineering. With hardly a scrap of metal in them they can harness the relentless wind to push water up and up through a series of locks and dikes then back into the sea, so that the land can be planted and farmed. Imagining the water screw in action I wondered how important this old technology may become in the future. 



History and science lessons completed we returned to Alkmaar yet again. This time for a party! Birthday parties in Holland are great. Lots of beer, lots of food, lots of laughing. When you arrive at a birthday party, it's custom to greet everybody with "feliciteerd" and a hand shake. This can take a while but it's a great ice breaker and lets everyone know that you're foreign and rubbish at speaking Nederlands. When they find out you're soon to become a member of the family, beers flow towards you with unflagging regularity. Oom Nico's (Uncle Nico) 50th birthday was certainly no exception and we had an amazing time. Rumours surfaced of all of us heading into town to check out the kermis. I would have a chance to ride the XXL Inversion after all. And what a bizarre mix of fear, adrenalin, anxiety, fright, and awe that ride was. Hanging upside down, sixty metres above an old market square, held only by a hoop of hard plastic and your own cramping fingers is very very exciting, but also very bloody scary. Alkmaar looks nice at night upside down and flying by at warp speed.