Emma & Maneesh on the Big OE

Today is day 16 of our trip. After a sleep in we mucked around the campground trying to get our washing dry and using the internet that we had access to. We left the camp ground at mid day, and headed into Eindhoven city centre. It was a beautiful warm sunny day, a nice change from the past few. Sunday here still seems to be a day where almost every business is closed, and it was not any different in Eindhoven. We just walked around the extremely quiet city streets just to have a general look around. It's a very modern city, with some really impressive, stylish architecture around. We had trouble finding anywhere to buy food, and had to resort to McDonalds for lunch! We went back to the van, and headed north west for 10km to a small town called 'Best'. Here there was a WWII Military Museum with particular emphasis on 'Operation Market Garden' – an Allied operation which was based in this part of the Netherlands, and liberated the Dutch people with the help of the Dutch Resistance. The 101^st Airborne Battalion was involved (from Band of Brothers). It was a fantastic museum but unfortunately there was no English information to tell us what we were looking at. Still we really enjoyed it, the pictures were great, and they had a lot of machinery including tanks and airplanes, as well as displays of mannequins in several scenes. We spent almost two hours at the museum, and were on our own for large parts of it which was nice. Some of the photos there were amazing, including inside concentration camps, quite a few of Hitler, and copies of the propaganda posters used by the Nazis in Holland during WWII.
From Best we headed further northwest to another small town called 'Hank'. It puts us just over 100km from Amsterdam. We have come to Hank because we have heard there is supposed to be one of the best car museums in Europe here, and are interested to see what it is like. We found a nice small campground out in the countryside, and just sat back in the van for the evening. I attempted to fix one of our kitchen taps that had not been turning on, however created another problem, while somehow coincidently fixing the other problem, although not completely. So that spoiled the evening somewhat. Still if worst comes to worst we just need a new kitchen tap to fix the problem.

We enjoyed the weather today and wandering around Eindhoven. It seems to be an up and coming city and it would have been nice to experience it with everything open. It seems like a really nice city. The military museum was great and we were happy we made it, despite our GPS trying to take us on an 'off-road' route through a forest. The countryside is very flat and green. Not so much wheat planted in these areas as in Belgium and France. We have only managed to spot two windmills so far. Still I am sure we will see more in the coming days. Holland is totally and utterly FLAT. You can see for miles in all directions. The countryside is still wheat and cornfields, although we have seen a few fields of flowers, mainly calla lillies. It would be nice to see the flower fields in tulip season.

July 27^th

After cold showers (because there were no signs up about how much the showers were or if you needed a token), we left the campground – was actually quite nice, as it's another hot, sunny day. Before leaving Em asked the campground owner about our tap and if there may be somewhere near that might be able to help us. Despite having no English he understood what we wanted - thanks to Em's good miming - and directed us to what might have been the perfect shop. We found the shop without difficulty, and found they made caravans. Unfortunately they were closed. There was a man in the yard and Em called out to him, so he came over and helped us. They only had single pipe taps with a mixer so we did not take that. He told us of another couple of large shops where we were heading, one in Rotterdam and one in Amsterdam. We left there to go to the car museum. On our way I spotted a motorhome repair shop. The kind older man there was able to help us - He had the tap we wanted, but in brown, not cream, which didn't bother us, as the décor in the van is mainly brown anyway! However the tap did not have wires in it to hook up the switches for the water pump. Still we thought we might be able to use that one and bought that anyway. We drove to the car museum from there, to find that it was closed too! Unfortunately there was not someone there, so we missed out on getting to see it. We saw the entrance room and it looked amazing. It had 10 beautiful old vintage cars in it in pristine condition. So we left there and started to drive towards Mascha (Marsha) and Jeröen's (Yeroon) house. They are a dutch couple, and Em worked with Mascha at Palmerston North Hospital. They now live between The Haag and Amsterdam, in a small place called Voorhout, with their 14 month old daughter Sophie. We found the camper shop in the south of Rotterdam on our journey up, and stopped in. First we went to the part where you buy caravans at, and they directed us to another part, so we went there. Well, it was like a camping supermarket. There were isles of cutlery, chairs, dinner sets, chemical toilets, light bulbs, taps – everything! Except, unfortunately, not have the right tap for our van. So the man there said try their workshop. We went down to the workshop with the van. It was our lucky day – we met a very helpful man, and he was fantastic. He came and had a look at what we were after, then he went away and came back with the exact tap that we needed! He said they had one in stock because they were doing maintenance on a caravan 2 weeks ago and had to order one in, and so ordered another one just in case. He fitted the tap for free as well! It was brilliant, we were very happy. So after a small bite to eat we continued our journey up to Voorhout. We passed through Rotterdam which looked like a very cool city. It's the biggest port in Europe, was completely razed to the ground during the war, and has been rebuilt with ultra-modern buildings. We got to Mascha and Jeroen's house at about 3pm. After we said our hello's and met their beautiful 14 month old daughter Sophie we went to the beach. It was not a nice afternoon, so we went to a cafe on the beach to get out of the rain and wind. After coffee and watching the kite sufers, we went back to their house and once Jeroen got home from work he cooked us a fantastic BBQ. It was great. We even sat outside in the warmth and ate it (the weather improved dramatically). After a great BBQ and lots of talking we realised it was getting quite late and finished our day there.

July 28^th

Today we spent most of the morning at Mascha and Yeroen's house, and left for Amsterdam city later than we'd planned to. Nevertheless, when we did make it out the door Mascha and Sophie kindly walked us to buy train tickets and took us to the train station. It was all of a bit of a rush in the end, but we made it onto the train safely. We were on the train at just after 11am, and caught our first train successfully and changed correctly onto the station to get us into the city centre. On the second train Em and I were sitting there, in a carriage on our own. We thought the seats seemed a bit more comfortable but kept on chatting away, then the ticket man came along and asked to see our tickets. We happily handed them over, and we were told we were in first class seats, and that was not what our tickets were for. He said that should be a fine of 50 Euros each but we said we couldn't read any of the signs, because they were all in Dutch, so he warned us and thankfully let us off! Anyway we made it into the city and managed to find our way into Chinatown in Amsterdam. Randomly we came across an amazing bakery and bought some beautiful sweet fruit breads for morning tea. From there we wandered around the canals, admiring the red brick terraced canal-houses, the trees drooping over the water, and all the bicycles and boats lining the streets and waterways. We decided we'd have lunch and try and get to the Van Gogh museum in the afternoon. We found a great falafel place for lunch, then wandered down to the Rijk's museum. As it turned out this was different from the Van Gough museum, but we were still happy to wander around and see work from Rembrandt and Vermeer. After we were done in the museum - which took a good couple of hours - our legs were rather tired so we thought we might as well head back to the train station. We got side tracked and ended up at Coster Diamonds, a famous jewellers. They had demonstrations of diamond cutting and diamond history, which were interesting, but you were quickly hurried through to their show room. From there we left and made our way through the teeming shopping streets, to the Dam Square, with some impressive old stone buildings, back to the train station, and successfully made our way back to Voorhout. We picked up a few groceries on the way back to Mascha and Jeroen's house, and that evening we made them curried chicken for dinner. We were able to eat dinner outside again because it was such a nice evening. After dinner we started watching Blackbook, a Dutch film (with subtitles) set during WWII in the Netherlands. It's about a Jewish woman who spies for the Dutch Resistance while working for the Nazis. We were all really tired so we only managed half the film, but it was great.

July 29^th

This morning we were up much earlier, and after waiting for the post office to open at 9am to buy our train tickets we were on the 9:02am train into Amsterdam again. Today we managed to get into the city without any ticket problems. The trip in is very pretty – past lots of fields, canals, and a few windmills. Once we arrived we made our way straight to the Anne Frank house, but when we arrived we found a queue of about 100m, so decided against that and went to the Van Gogh Museum instead. Here we had to queue for about 15 minutes and it started to rain, but thankfully it didn't come to too much. We were in the museum for about 2 hours, which was long enough to have a good look at the Van Gogh works and a very rushed look at the remainder of the works in the museum. It was very good and there were English explanations of all of the paintings, which was nice. Background details of his life were also given which made it much more interesting for someone like me who had very minimal knowledge in the first place. The paintings were displayed in chronological order. Em had studied some of his works at school so she very happy to see his originals. After we were done in the Van Gogh museum we walked around for a while. Thankfully the rain had stopped so we were able to continue to explore the city. It actually got really hot and sunny for the afternoon. There was a neat art shop on one of the canals, and we spent quite a while choosing three small prints to buy – paintings of the canal houses in Amsterdam. We ate lunch at the same place as yesterday because we both loved it the so thought we should get more. Afterwards we sat in the sun and ate an ice cream and enjoyed watching the people around us for a while, before wandering the city in a roundabout way back to the Anne Frank house. We went through the famous Red Light District, which was quite a bizarre experience. The legal prostitutes hire out glass windows on the street front, and stand inside in their underwear, dancing and trying to lure business. The queue at the Anne Frank House was still quite long, but shorter than this morning so we thought we might as well just wait. It moved quite quickly thankfully. It was not quite what I was expecting. I thought there would have been more secret rooms enclosed in the house. However it is an amazing story. It seemed so hard to imagine that is was real and that she was aged between 14 and 16 when she wrote her diary, detailing life as a Jewish family in hiding during WW2. Afterwards we explored the city some more on the way to the train station. I had kebab for dinner, but Em was still too full from our lunch, so she had a little snack from the quirky snack shop – it has a wall full of little rectangular windows with a small hot snack in each one. You put in a few coins, and open a little window, and take your snack – great fun! We trained home and got there at about 8:30pm. It was a long day, but we were happy to have spent two days in Amsterdam. It is such a great city. Despite its liberal approach towards many things it is still a very clean, friendly city. When we got back to Mascha and Jeroen's house, Mascha made awesome hot drinks, and we finished watching Blackbook. It was excellent and we both highly recommend it. It is a dutch film, and is filmed in Dutch, so does have subtitles but is well worth the 2 ½ hours it takes to watch. Afterwards we headed to bed.