Week 2 – Monday 8 July – Ypres and WWI Memorials

Today we bid farewell to Bruges.  We have 4 days here and walked our feet off all round the town and up and down the Belfry.  Our guide book took us on 2 long walking tours – 1 through the main Bruges tourist sites, amongst what felt like a million other tourists, the other to the more out of the way parts of Bruges, beside the large outer canals, past windmills and through some quaint little back streets.  To sustain ourselves, we’ve eaten some wonderful meals and have really enjoyed the Hotel Aragon, which is about a 5 minute walk from the main square.

As we headed out of Bruges in the car, we were reminded how low the low countries are – The GPS told us we were at 10m altitude, and on the trip down to Ypres, we saw it get as high as 30m at one stage.  This was better than in Holland, when it read -10m for a considerable period of time.  In Ypres, where we are heading to, they name the hills by their height above sea level – Hill 60 and Hill 62 (Mount Victoria by comparison is 196m).

The weather came right a couple of days ago, and as we cruised down the roads to Ypres, the temperature was a delightful 34 degrees Celsius – with a nice cooling breeze from having the roof down.

Our first stop was at Roeselare for a Decathlon store – a favourite of ours – Europe’s sporting mega store extraordinaire, and to be found in larger towns in France, and obviously Belgium.  On the purchase radar were an air bed, a pump (electric of course), 2 chairs, a small table, a torch, and two pillows – to complete our camping setup, the rest of which we’d bought from New Zealand with us.

Our destination for the next 3 nights is Ypres, home to the Menin Gate and the centre of all things World War I, in this part of the world.  We got interested in Europe’s war memorials in 2009, when we ended up in Verdun, and then learnt that it was the site of one of WWI’s bloodiest, longest and toughest battles.  I wrote about the battle at Verdun in my previous blog, and the basis for this holiday was formed from that visit. 

http://david-anne-france-2009.blogspot.com/2009/07/thursday-9th-july-week-4-verdun.html

We had marked out the key towns of interest from WWI, and northern most and on the road between Bruges and Ypres was Passchendaele, the scene of the worst disaster in New Zealand’s military history, in terms of lives lost in a single day with 5,000 dead, missing or wounded.  When we arrived in Passchendaele, it is about as insignificant a town as one could imagine.  The highlight was the town map that showed that Tyne Cot Cemetery and visitor centre was only a few Ks down the road, and this was the start of our WWI journey. 

Tyne Cot is the largest British war cemetery in the world containing 11,956 commonwealth war dead and 4 Germans.  8,369 of the graves are unknown.  The name Tyne Cot was given by the Northumberland Fusiliers, who thought that the German pill boxes looked like typical cottages from the banks of the River Tyne in their native country.  This naming convention, of a British “slang” name becoming the official name, is repeated at numerous places throughout the area.

As we walked up the path to the visitor centre, a woman’s voice could be heard solemnly reading out the names and ages of fallen soldiers.  As we entered the visitor centre, the woman’s voice was synced with a screen showing the photo, rank and regiment of the soldiers.  The visitor centre is very modern and contained some interesting information about NZ’s contribution to the war.

The population of New Zealand in 1914 was just over 1m people.  120,000 soldiers enlisted for WWI of which 103,000 served overseas.  More than 18,000 New Zealanders were killed in WWI, 12,500 of them in France and Belgium.  Nearly 50,000 others were wounded.  More than 4,600 servicemen are buried or commemorated in some 80 cemeteries in Belgium.

Some of the overall facts of the various campaigns, are also quite horrendous.  From the 16^th July 1917, the British forces fired 4.2 million shells at German Positions.  In 100 days, they gained just 8 kilometres at a cost of 245,000 British soldiers dead, wounded or missing and 215,000 German ones.  I read later that gain was later conceded in a single day in 1918. 

I guess that was the thing that is really driven home in the places we are visiting – this wasn’t a campaign where the Germans got to a certain point, then there was a stalemate for several years, then they were sent packing.  This war ebbed and flowed – even over a single day.  Some of the stories were of a group of soldiers making a significant breakthrough, at a large cost in lives, only to become stranded and be turned round and sent packing with a similar loss of life, sometimes on the same day, sometimes only a few days later.

One of the most poignant things in the visitor centre are two photos of the area before and after WWI.  Before, there are towns, fields and roads.  Afterwards, there is just a flattened earth, there is nothing of it left.  I’ve posted up 3 photo of Ypres that are in a similar vein – taken in 1911, 1919 and 2011 – before WWI, straight after it, and now.  At the end of the war, the British were keen to leave Ypres in ruins, as a stark reminder of what the war was like, however, the locals who had other ideas, won the day.

From the visitor centre, we exited out onto the cemetery grounds.  All the British Commonwealth war cemeteries, monuments and memorials are administered and maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission – www.cwgc.org, (funded by you and me, but I don’t begrudge it a bit) and all the sites are kept in pristine condition.   Prior to WWI, there had never been individual war graves, but the need for this type of memorial was recognised even before the war was over. 

The Tyne Cot Cemetery is in a beautiful location, in a slightly elevated location (remember everything here is dead flat), with great views of the surrounding countryside.  It is out in the countryside, so is generally very peaceful and quiet, although there was a sign apologising for the noise of the maintenance work in the entrance way.  The headstones are arranged in neat rows, with as much identification as is possible based on the remains that were retrieved.  For some headstones, this means that there is the name, rank, age, regiment and nationality of the soldier.  There is also a circular emblem when the nationality of regiment has one.  For the New Zealand headstones, there is a silver fern in the top half of the circle, with the words New Zealand underneath it.  For others there is just a headstone, with a cross, with the words “Known Unto God” at the bottom of the headstone, where it was not possible to identify anything about the body.

The semi-circular wall at the back of the cemetery at Tyne Cot is their memorial to the missing.  It holds the names of 34,957 soldiers who have no known grave, and who all died after 15 August 1917.  Their names could not be added to the Menin Gate Memorial because there was no space available on it.  Tyne Cot is one of the places that has a memorial to New Zealand’s fallen soldiers, where their bodies were never found.  There are two Rotundas at either end of the curved wall, with the New Zealand Memorial in the centre of the wall.  There, the names of 1,116 are listed, by order of rank within regiment.  Seeing the glowing references to the New Zealanders efforts in Passchendaele and the memorial to our fallen soldiers was a very humbling and moving experience.

Next stop was at Zonnebeke – just down the road from Tyne Cot and the location for the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917.  This Museum was well worth the couple of hours we spent there.     There were displays discussing the introduction of chemical warfare, flame throwers, mine warfare, both shallow and deep.  The first section was in chronological order and showed what happened in each year, what of the above “technologies” were introduced and where, and what the objectives were. 

The deep tunnelling warfare sounded really interesting / scary.  Both sides were doing it, so sometimes they’d break into each other’s tunnels, at which point the put in a charge on blow it up –bad luck if someone happened to be in there.  On 7 June 1917, they blew up 19 mines with over a million pounds of explosives.  4 of their mines didn’t explode, although 1 later did in 1955 after a heavy thunderstorm.

The second section of the Museum was 20 feet underground, and contained a mock-up of the bunkers that were used for medical procedures, accommodation, and strategizing.  It seemed a very real recreation, and with the flickering lights, constant noise of explosions was a fascinating insight into what life would have been like in the bunkers.

From Zonnebeke, we headed to Ypres to check into our hotel.  Ypres is another beautiful Belgian town.  The Menin Gate leads you into the town, and 200m down the road is the beautiful town square.  Each night, the last post is played at 8pm, and is one of the major events in the town.  We decided we’d go along on our first night, and were expecting a couple of hundred people and a fairly low key affair.  I was not expecting the couple of thousand people that were crammed in under the Menin Gate that started gathering from 7pm onwards.  The ceremony itself takes about 15 minutes, and tonight, there was a platoon of Fire and Rescue Services Officers from Oxfordshire, and a group from Canada.  As well, there were other groups laying wreaths.  I’m not sure how it works, but there were schools as well as families laying wreaths, and there is a program of who will be part of the ceremony each night.

The day concluded with a beautiful meal in the square, at a lovely restaurant, that I suspect we might be back to every night while we are here. 

End of the first week – Saturday and Sunday - Bruges

Being in Bruges, being inspired by the movie In Bruges, we had to, of course, climb the Belfry, to see where the climax of the movie occurred and also to see the magnificent views that are available from the top of the 366 step climb.

Of course the movie used several tonnes of artistic license, so the insides of the Belfry were nothing like what we’d seen in the movie.  The only queues to be found were the people who were silly enough to get there first thing in the morning, so we queued on the way in, but could have walked right in if we’d arrived 20 minutes later.  The views from the top were pretty good, but now only viewable through meshed wire because of a movie where (spoiler alert) somebody threw themselves off the top of the belfry.  Being a Belfry, there is one set of stairs to go both up and down, so getting up there was easy, but getting down, was a matter of polite negotiation with the later people on their way up.

Saturday really was tourist bedlam, so we did some sightseeing before heading for the peace and solitude of a courtyard restaurant where we had a very enjoyable lunch of carpaccio, croquettes and chicken vol au vent.  Dessert was a wonderfully decadent waffle with chocolate, cream and ice cream, in the best of Belgian traditions.

Dinner on Saturday night was superb.  We took a different course as we left the hotel and ended up in a much nicer part of the city (about two blocks from last night’s electro funk rave).  As luck would have it we saw a very nice restaurant, that was filled with locals.  The highlight of the night was that every table around us ordered a second bottle of wine, without any dramatics from the restaurateur, such as we get in France – Ooooh, la la, hew woant a zecond boatil of vine?  Yes, we do.  An encouraging sigh and hopefully it will be continued into the rest of the holiday.

Sunday started off with a visit to the Salvador Dali exhibition, which is also in town.  We have also visited Dali’s museum in his home town of Figeures in Northern Spain, and it is, like Picasso’s official museum, magnificent.  This exhibition was better than Picasso’s, and very surreal, as was his way.  It was, however, rather sex / erotica centred, but did also had some great quotes from the great man such as:

·         Modesty is not exactly my speciality

·         I am an average painter.  If I were to compare myself to Vermeer or Velasquez, I would have to describe myself as a real artistic disaster.  If I compare myself to my contemporaries, I am simply the best

·         There are some days when I think I am going to die from an overdosis of satisfaction

·         The fact that I myself do not understand the meaning of my paintings at the time that I am painting them does not mean that they have no meaning

·         I am in a permanent state of intellectual erection (strikethrough added by me)

·         It makes me happy that I earn 40,000 dollars before I sit down to breakfast

Such ego – bless the man.

Beyond that, Sunday has been another long walking tour from our guide book, a long lunch, watching the last hour of the Tour de France, a drink before dinner, dinner, good night. 

Day 6 – Friday – Bruges

Bruges was added to our itinerary after we watched the Colin Farell – Ralph Fiennes movie “In Bruges”.  Apparently we weren’t the only people who took Colin Firth’s summary of Bruges with a pinch of salt, and decided that the town had a lot more to offer than his initial assessment suggested.  The town’s tourist map that we picked up from the i-site had the following description in its 5 minutes history section.

“2009 – The movie “In Bruges” wins an award for best scenario(??).   Colin Farrell declares “If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges would impress me, but I didn’t, so it doesn’t”.  But the movie only attracts more tourists”.  Apparently this wasn’t the first time Bruges had been spoken about in less than flattering tones.  In 1892 the popular book ‘Bruges la Morte’ describes the city as a dark, poor and ugly place.  Locals weren’t too happy with this, but tourists saw some romance in it, and numbers increase.

Bruges is a beautifully preserved historic town centred around a large square (the Markt) which has the Belfry on one side, the Provincial Palace on the other and a large number of tourist restaurants on the other 2 sides.  These restaurants all serve the “local Belgium dishes” – Mussels and “Frites”, Stew and Croquettes – all good summertime fare – and of course Belgian Beer.

Like Amsterdam, Bruges is also a canal town and together with its striking architecture, makes it a very pretty town – kinda like a fairy tale – which I think was how Ralph Fiennes described it in the movie.  The easiest was to see Bruges is by walking it, and we enjoy doing our own walking tours, so we headed off on our walking tour (a la local guide book – 10 Euros) mingling with the horse drawn carriages and the many tourist groups, off the cruise ships, following their leader who is holding a number on a stick – i.e. there are a lot of groups, following a lot of leaders.  This influx of tourists, turns the town into absolute bedlam, while the cruisers are all marched at a grey pace from interesting spot to interesting spot, to be filled up with facts, and at some point food.

Bruges used to be a port city, and in fact that was the source of its early wealth, as it was the connecting point to Genoa and the Mediterranean trade.  Around 1500, the port silted up, so it lost its trade, but then somebody had the brilliant idea in 1907 of building another port, hence the town of Zeebrugge….. (Sea Bruges) was created.  The tourist map’s entry for the years 1600, 1700 and 1800 is “Bruges falls asleep”.  No other entry.

Part of our walking tour on Friday brought us to the Pablo Picasso exhibition.  We have been to (one of) the official Picasso Museums on a previous trip, and were amazed at the range of work that he had done, and what a versatile artist he was.  He was also a prolific artist both in terms of the quantity of art he produced, the relationships he established, both with contemporary artists and desirable woman, as well as the offspring he produced.  In fact, that becaome something of a highlight of the exhibition, trying to work out who he was with, when, for how long, and what off spring resulted.  Most intriguing was the name of one of his wives / partners / lovers – Olga Koklova.  I’ve seen a couple of spellings of her name, but the one above is my favourite.

Anyway, as I say, Picasso was a prolific artist, and not all of it was good, so the order of interesting exhibits we saw from Picasso and some of his contemporaries, was:

1.       The painting by Renoir

2.       Understanding (which isn’t possible) the intricate relationships created by Picasso and his revolving door of female companions (some of whom me with grizzly ends)

3.       The self-managing lawn mower mowing the lawn (badly) in the courtyard outside the exhibition. 

The day finished with us having an early dinner with a former colleague from Wellington and then enjoying a couple of drinks in a full-on, totally pumping, strobe light infused court yard near to the hotel.  Of course it hadn’t started out full-on, but as we arrived there about 10pm, at sunset, we didn’t realise what was about to transpire, so as we settled in for a quiet drink at the end of an enjoyable day, the lights came on, the bass went up fasher than the hemlines, and we were there, people watching the younger generation gearing up for a night out. 

Day 5 – Thursday – Bruges

A bit of a quiet day today.  We checked out of our hotel this morning, so no more of the lovely Dutch hotel owner making us pancakes every morning.  The car pickup is out at the airport, so for the second and second to last time, we took our bag and tent to the bustop and took the bus to the airport. The public transport from most European airports is easy to use and great value for money.   

This year our convertible is black – Yay, a decent colour for a change.  Driving on the right (wrong-side) of the road, is pretty much second nature, but still the Dutch had a curve ball to throw at us on the very first round about.  For some reason they’d put a second, outer lane that you had to transition into to get off the roundabout.   That was of course the first thing I hit, straight out of the car pickup place, so a couple of extra runs round the roundabout was required before we made it onto the motorway, and headed pretty much straight to Bruges.

Museums are the big thing up in this part of the world, and some are the real deal, which we’ve visited and talked about.  The others, try the imagination to fathom what value one might get out of them, so in order to derive some benefit, we are developing a list of museums we have chosen, for one reason or another, not to visit.  So far the list contains, in no particular order:

-          The bag and purse museum

-          The cheese museum

-          The Frites (that’s fries to you) Museum

-          The Museum Lumina Domestica (the lamp museum)

After 2.5 hours we arrived in Bruges – driving straight into the historic centre. We’ve now checked into our Hotel – the Hotel Aragon, which is very nice, right in the historic heart of the city, and spent a couple of hours catching up on the progress of the Tour de France, before heading out to that most Belgian of eating establishments – el Greko – the local Greek Restaurant.   We enjoy Greek food, and El Greko had created a nice atmosphere with an accopolis looking entrance way, and some nice Greek frescoes on the wall and some vines handing from the ceiling.

Day 4 – Wednesday – Museums – Van Gogh & Dutch Resistance

Two museums, and 6 hours on our feet today has made for a rather tiring but very interesting day.

First up was the Van Gogh Museum, and our once again, pre-ordered tickets, which got us past another big queue.  Vincent Van Gogh has always been an interesting character – didn’t start painting until he was 27, dead at 37, never sold a painting in his life time, supported by his brother throughout his artistic career, and increasingly unhinged during the latter part of his life.  The Museum, having many of his original paintings focuses a lot on his technical development as a painter, influences of Japanese art, and peer artists on his work, his relationship with his Brother, Theo, the various phases of his development in the different places where he lived and worked. 

I took lots of photos of the paintings that we liked the most, and you can see them on the blog.  What the Museum didn’t cover was how the world discovered Vincent Van Gogh after he died.  I had always assumed that his brother Theo (who was a well know art dealer) had “got him out there”, but then he died 6 months after Vincent from Syphilis.  It turns out that Vincent was getting very concerned about his financial prospects, as Theo was having financial difficulties, and now had a wife and a new baby (hard to reconcile with the death by syphilis) , and was struggling to be able to support Vincent at that time.  This has been mooted as a possible reason for his suicide.  Anyway, with both Vincent and Theo gone, it was down to Theo’s wife Johanna who was then responsible for elevating the worth and genius of Vincent to the levels we see today.

After the VVG Museum, we did an hour’s walk to the other side of Central Amsterdam to visit the Amsterdam Resistance Museum.  The museum is arranged around a central pathway, that takes you through what life was like under German occupation, how the Germans started off as benevolent occupiers, and rapidly transformed into aggressive oppressors.  Branching off from this central pathway is side tracks that talk through the types of resistance that people were involved in, whether that was disobedience, publishing anti-German newspapers, going into hiding, hiding people – Jews, student protesters, striking workers – the list seemed to expand as the war went on.  Some of these sound quite minor things, but as the war went on, the consequences for any of them started to be the same – shipped off to a concentration camp, or execution.

I’ve mentioned before that bikes are everywhere in Amsterdam, but there’s so much more to them than that.  They cover every social strata, from the young, hip and cool, to the business executive, to the elderly, labourers, office workers, everybody is on a bike.  There are lots of cycle lanes, but for us, as well as the cycle lanes, the tram lines, a never ending stream of traffic islands, and the fact that the traffic is on the wrong side of the road, it’s all quite confusing and we really have to have our wits about us whenever we’re trying to negotiate our way across the roads. 

Helmets aren’t required in Amsterdam, on either bicycles or scooters, and virtually nobody wears them.  The bikes are the sit up and beg type, so you have good visibility, and generally the riders aren’t going very fast, so it doesn’t seem to be any problem. 

Cycling seems to be the thing you do, when you’re doing something else – finding something in your pocket, holding an umbrella, talking on your phone, texting (of course).  The cyclists seem to have some sort of 6^th sense about the traffic.  As someone who does a bit of cycling and makes my way nervously through any heavy traffic area, I am amazed at how well the whole traffic thing works in Amsterdam.  Everybody just seems to make room for everybody else and it works in a way that you couldn’t write a set of rules to hold it all together.  I have read on the internet that “Local Amsterdam bikers tend to ignore red lights. They tote friends on the backs of their bikes. They ride on the sidewalks. They zip past fellow bikers without warning. They don't use lights at night (which is required by law). They chat on phones while weaving through crowds. They're not to be mimicked!”, so maybe it is viewed rather dimly in some circles, but I have to say that I’m gobsmacked at how well it works and how competent everybody is on a bike.

Tomorrow we pick up the car, and head to Brugge, so on to the next part of the journey.

Day 3 – Tuesday – Canal Trip and Anne Frank’s House

We ran into the Paparazzi yesterday.  There is a theatre just around the corner from the hotel, which we were walking past last night.  Just as we came up to it, a bunch of guys who were milling around outside stepped in front of us on the pavement, with their huge lensed cameras up to their face, at the ready.  Ooooh, I thought, who have they mistaken us for, but no, we were able to walk past, before they started firing away.  We turned round to see who was the centre of attention, but didn’t recognise who the couple were – probably a footballer. 

This morning we were up at 7am, and went for a walk for an hour and a half in the area between the hotel and Anne Frank’s House.  It’s a very nice part of Amsterdam, all residential neighborhoods beside the canals, which are nicely combined with a mix of upmarket boutique stores, restaurants and bars.

After breakfast in the hotel we went for an hour cruise on the canals – a must do thing, when you’re in Amsterdam.  There’s a wide range of boats running round the canals – everything from the little pedal boats, which seem to spend a large amount of their time bumping into things, through to self-hire boats, large dinghy style boats, all the way up to the large flat wide boats that can take a hundred or so people and double up as floating restaurants in the evening.  We settled on one of the large dinghy style boats, as it is a beautiful day, and we fancied a slightly less populated experience.  There were 6 of us on the boat, and our driver, Peter. 

We learnt a lot about what Amsterdam is doing to promote environmental solutions in the city, and electric vehicles are a big part of that – our boat was an electric boat, the trams are electric, there are lots of concessions for electric cars, and diesel cars and trucks are being banned from the centre of the city, to improve the pollution levels.  We also learnt a lot about the different districts that we were passing through, the map makers area, the financial district, the port workers sector, the Marijuana barge and a whole lot of other things.  It was a pleasant way to spend an hour

We booked tickets to visit Anne Frank’s House at 7pm.  Again, we had been advised to buy tickets ahead of time, and had bought them a couple of weeks ago, so could go straight to the front of the 100 metre queue at our allotted time.  There is only a small number of people that can be in the annexe at any one time, so the queue only goes down to the extent that people haven't pre-purchased tickets - it looked glacial.  

I have just finished reading her diary, so my impressions of the annexe and her experiences there were very fresh in my mind. It was a funny feeling sitting in a café on the other side of the canal having a coffee, knowing that not so very long ago people were hiding and living in fear of their lives in places like the one we were about to visit.  It made us feel very lucky to live in such a free time, and to live in a tolerant society where people are mostly free from persecution. 

The annexe is very small, with lots of little rooms.  In addition to the cramped conditions, was the fact that the 8 occupants had to be mostly silent all through the working day because the factory workers didn’t know they were in hiding there, and couldn’t be trusted not to betray them. 

The tour of the annexe took about 45 minutes, and contained lots of videos about the people hiding in the Annexe, the situation in Amsterdam during WWII and how the Jews were treated and their freedoms reduced over time, until they were rounded up and deported to concentration camps in Germany, Poland and Austria.

We ended the day at an Argentinian Steak House, which is one of the most common types of restaurant in Amsterdam.  I’ve tried to find out why, and the answers I’ve found range from “cos we like meat”, to “it’s the simplest way to make money”.  Not the historic connection or some other interesting connection between the two countries I was hoping for, but at least the meal was good.

Day 2 – Monday – The Rijksmuseum

Today’s excursion has been to the Rijksmuseum – the magnificent art gallery in the centre of Amsterdam. (We read today that it was re-opened in April, after major refurbishment, so we feel privileged to be able to visit).  The gallery is laid out chronologically and gives an excellent narrative in how the styles of art have evolved over the centuries, why they evolved the way   they did, and who the main players were.

A picture paints a thousand words, so I've uploaded about 20 photos to give you a feel of what we've been looking at.  The museum starts at about 1100 A.D. and moves forward from there, highlighting the early religious art, which was then followed by much more individualised work with lots of portraits, leading to more everyday scenes, landscapes, the through to impressionist art.  Interspersed in all of this was a good mix of military art, as well as furniture, and pottery in the form of delft pottery. Its piece de resistance is the Night Watch by Rembrandt.

I’m starting to think that the Dutch love queues.  All the museums advise you to buy tickets in advance to avoid the queues, and so we’re well prepared.  Having said that it would be easy to get it wrong and find yourself trapped in a queue.  We got to the Rijksmuseum at about 10 am, with our pre-purchased tickets.  That’s early, so no problem for us.  By the time we had finished after 1pm, people arriving were queuing to get in the door (about 50 metres and moving at drip feed pace), then queue once inside to buy a ticket to get into the galleries (about 100m). If you wished to leave anything in the cloak room – a queue, the toilet (I say toilet because for the woman there was only one working and the queue was running at 25 minutes – while I waited for Anne).  There was a queue for the museum café, despite their being loads of other café’s within a couple of minutes walk outside.

Anyway, the trip to the Rijksmuseum was hugely enjoyable.  It is a magnificent building and a beautiful display piece for about 8,000 of the 1 million art pieces that it has in its collection.

Our walk around Amsterdam has reminded us of a few other things that Amsterdam and Holland are famous for, but that had kinda slipped our mind in the run up to researching lots of other parts of our holiday.  First up Marijuana – the smell of it – everywhere, the seeds for it, or a starter kit – at the flower market, smoking paraphanelia – at specialist retailiers dotted liberally (what else) round the place.  Need to know more, go to the Hash, Marijuana and Hemp Museum, right here in Amsterdam.  Rated number 97 out of 255 attractions in Amsterdam by Trip Advisor.  It would have been higher, but most people who went there, got the munchies and went for a burger afterwards, or were too chilled out to write a review.

Then there are clogs.  The wooden shoes famous around the world have moved into the 21^st century…… and Wainuiomata.  Yes, you can now get fluffy clogs, with slip resistant soles.  You can of course still get the original wooden clogs, but I don’t think there will be room in my bag for either type.  To date, I haven’t seen anybody actually wearing clogs, but every tourist shop has an absolute wall full of them.

Anyway, that’s it for today.  Tomorrow we are going on a canal cruise, then visiting Anne Frank’s House – talk soon.