Xaintrie and Holland couldn't be more different. However, contrasts are always interesting and often generate waves of reaction or similar responses.
Amsterdam is a magnificent showcase of architecture and environment, stuffed full of contradictions; seventeenth century houses overlooked by twenty-first century tower cranes undertaking the city's never-ending renewal.
The construction-site picture here shows an example of the first images of central Amsterdam when arriving by train. There's an awful lot of this, particularly around the central station area.
Yet, across the road from the modern you will see the ancient in all its charm.We stayed with friends in a new-town, 30 kilometres east of Amsterdam. First impressions here were that nothing seemed to be more than thirty years old and this turned out to be true. The town of Almere was seabed in the 1960s and in fact, the first house there was finished as late as 1976.
Spacious and green and very flat, it was, for me, a fascinating place - not least because of its modernity. For example, most of the domestic housing was heated by cooling water from power stations some 20 kilometres away, and future developments at Almere Poort will benefit from the world's third largest solar energy installation.
One of our first excursions was to a country park which houses the Kröller-Müller museum and art gallery. Follow the link for full info, but it is a wonderful place, reached by optionally leaving your car at the park gates then riding a bicycle for a couple of kilometres to the actual gallery and sculpture park.
The gallery contains over 200 Van Gogh and other impressionist paintings, in a calm, rural setting which seemed to us far preferable to the scramble back in Amsterdam to get into the Van Gogh museum there. We didn't manage that anyway due to waiting times and booking restrictions.
By the end of the first week we'd seen more of the countryside and set off for three nights on the isle of Texel, stopping to see the cheese market at the old town of Alkmaar on the way. The famous cheese market at Alkmaar seems to be a rather stage-managed affair but thousands of tourists turn up and it makes for a lively few hours in a pretty town with a picturesque if a bit scary trip on a boat around the canal system, where you have to literally get down on your knees to pass under the bridges.
Texel is a fascinating 25 kilometre-long island, a populated large sand-bank in the North Sea with quaint villages, lush green, flat(!) meadows, sand-dunes and home to the world renowned Texel sheep. We spent 3 nights there, one evening entertained by a famous Jazz trio (Borstlap, Bennink and Glerum) at the Klif 12 Music Club, in the village of Den Hoorn. Good jazz - click on their websites, a revelation...It's still true about the windmills - there are thousands of them, but now these new ones are turbines, producing energy rather than pumping water to form the polders as in former times.
We were in Amsterdam again on the Queen's birthday, 'Queensday', 30th April. This is a unique experience where up to 1 million visitors cram into the streets and on the canals in all sorts of floating craft and go crazy. Here's someone else's blog on this. Well behaved fun in the sunshine, no problems. We didn't even see a policeman until we got back to the Central Station to find our train at the end of the afternoon where we came across a couple of mounted cops, chatting amiably with the some of the crowd.
Time to get back to Xaintrie..
This blog is long enough - more soon.
Mapmaker
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