Monthly Archives: October 2013

Lost in Alblasserdam

Adventures, The Netherlands, Travelling in Europe,

Every country has those typical things for which the country is known. The Netherlands has several. One of the things I was determined to see while I was there was windmills. A brief search of the internet and I found Kinderdijk outside of Rotterdam. Rotterdam appealed to me anyway – something different, something not Amsterdam, but also a large port city. I like port cities – they tend to be a little more real and gritty than tourist-oriented capitals. So I traveled down to Rotterdam on Friday afternoon and checked into a lovely backpackers hostel called ROOM Rotterdam.

Saturday was windmill day. The day took longer to get going than I had hoped. It was 10am by the time I came down to (free) breakfast at the hostel. This turned out to be a good thing because a cursory glance at the website of the waterbus I was planning to take seemed to suggest that the next boat left at 12 noon. I had a little time to charge my various electronic devices.

Just before noon, I headed for the waterbus station. The waterbus is a boat that acts like a bus – passengers get on and off at various stops, just like a bus. The only difference is that it travels on water.  It’s really a very pleasant way to travel if you’ve got enough navigable waterways – which the Netherlands is definitely not short of.

The waterbus website had indicated that a “Dagkaart” – a hop-on, hop-off day travel pass – could be purchased that would cover both the transport to and from the area and entry to Kinderdijk. The website failed to say where these day tickets could be purchased. I got to the waterbus stop but there was no ticket office. I assumed the staff on the boat would sell tickets as passengers got on. When the boat arrived, this didn’t seem to be the case. Eventually I asked and the waterbus staff member looked confused that I wouldn’t know and told me that someone would come around on the boat – as if it were perfectly natural. For someone used to transport systems that require you to pay before you get onto the vehicle, it seemed a little odd to me.

The waterbus headed off and we travelled down the river for several stops. The conductor/ticket collector/ticket sales person eventually came around. He informed me (and several other tourists seated nearby) that we wouldn’t be able to get out at Ridderkerk, the stop that the pamphlets and websites had indicated was usual place to stop for the Kinderdijk, because the small ferry that normally took passengers from the waterbus stop to the Kinderdijk didn’t run on weekends. Instead, we would need to get out at Alblasserdam and find our own way to Kinderdijk.

He asked if I had a bike with me – most people take their bikes (for free) on the waterbus. I said I didn’t and he told me I should get a bike because it would take me about 15 minutes cycling but 45 minutes to walk. When we landed at Alblasserdam, I headed out in the direction the conductor had indicated to hire a bike. Either I got the directions wrong or the waterbus conductor was less generous and interested than he seemed. Pretty soon I was quite a long way from the water with no bicycle rental shop in sight.

It was a pretty town so I didn’t mind wandering around a little. I walked along a main road past suburban homes. I thought I had seen a map on a square near where I had started out. I turned left at a bank to head back that way. I walked along the street for several blocks but did not find the square or the map. I turned left again and walked through a small shopping area. There were bicycle shops, all closed on a Saturday afternoon, but no bicycle rental places. There was a bakery and a restaurant and a hardware shop. There was even a van selling fish, an actual fishmonger’s van, doing a brisk trade. There didn’t seem to be a corner store, for some reason. I could have used a bottle of water. I realised I was now lost.

I followed the road past tiny, double story houses whose front windows looking directly onto the street. I was curious and interested in the little houses, with their wall decorations and their tiny gardens, but I kept finding myself accidentally looking right into people’s sitting rooms. I felt like an intruder. Suddenly I’d be looking at people drinking tea or having lunch or chatting with friends. I looked away. Yet, each window invites you to look with a flower arrangement or ornaments or potted plants or tea sets arranged just so to please the eye of the chance passer-by.

At a T-junction, I came upon a church tower and had to choose a direction. Church towers are great if you’re wandering in a strange town, just as long as you take note of what they look like. In this part of the world, there are quite a lot of them, so if you’re not paying attention two similar church towers can lead you somewhat astray. I took a picture of the tower, just to be safe, and turned left.

I rounded another corner. The houses seemed to go on forever in their little rows but across the road was a park. The park seemed like a good option, especially when I realised it was called Kinderdijk park. Sadly, it did not contain any actual windmills. It did, however, have goats and sheep and ducks and autumn trees and green, green grass around a tiny canal.

It also had rather a lot of cyclists sharing the same small path as the few pedestrians. By the time I had narrowly escaped being run over by a group of what must have been 10-year old boys, I was more than ready, now that the park had given way to suburban back gardens with vegetables and sheds, to take a road to the right. The road went up a hill. At the top of the hill, I found a main road and, across the road, the river I’d come in on that morning.

Without realising it, completely by accident (or perhaps instinct) I had un-lost myself. I guess the lesson is, well the lessons are, just keep walking and trust yourself. My meanderings had taken me right back to where I needed to be. I was glad I hadn’t panicked and gone back to Rotterdam on one of the buses I’d passed. I’d spent a good hour walking around the town but it was a great way to see an ordinary neighbourhood of ordinary people in the Netherlands.

The Familiarity of an Unfamiliar Language

Ideas, The Netherlands, Travelling in Europe,

I keep catching myself. I’ll be sitting at a table, idly watching the conversation move back and forth, or sitting quietly on a train, zoned out but hearing the words drift by. Suddenly, it occurs to me that the words I’m listening to, the conversation I’m following, isn’t in English.

Perhaps I am used to the extreme opposite when I travel. The complete strangeness of Hangeul (Korean) or Swahili/Shona/Bemba, distant relatives of languages I know a little, with just a few common words. It is disconcerting to find myself in a country where the foreign language is familiar. I don’t speak Dutch by any stretch. I didn’t realise how much I would understand.

It comes in handy. Yesterday, I got to Rotterdam and headed out to take the tram, as per instructions sent by the hostel. There was a schedule posted. The tram I was waiting for was supposed to arrive every 10 minutes. But the sign with the expected times of the trams didn’t show it (yes, there are signs indicating how long you’ll wait, just in case the timetables are ever so slightly off – I imagine there will shortly be a post which is an ode to the awesomeness of Dutch public transport).

After waiting a while, starting at the screen, it occurred to me that I was reading the text scrolling across the bottom. The text indicating that the tram I was anticipating taking was not running on this particular day from this stop. Mentally thanking every Afrikaans teacher I’ve ever had, I headed off to the metro instead, instead of waiting around for ages and ages in the cold.

Inside the metro station, I looked around and couldn’t see a ticket desk with a human. I needed a ticket and there were ticket machines. Except there weren’t, because even the name of the machines was in Dutch. I picked up a ticket and only as I was leaving realised there was an option on the first page to use English instead (when I picked this, out of curiosity, it turned out to be English only to the first page, FYI, for anyone who doesn’t read Afrikaans).

It happened again this morning: I was reading a bilingual brochure for an attraction I wanted to visit and accidentally found myself reading the Dutch instead of the English, which turned out to be more detailed and more accurate.

Usually, I travel with a guidebook. This trip was so last-minute, so unplanned that I didn’t pick one up. Instead, I’m relying on maps and brochures picked up from information desks and hostels. And overwhelmingly in Dutch. Understanding a little makes travel easier. If I can’t immediately understand things, I find I can figure them out. I’m more confident. I can’t speak the language (I don’t generally speak Afrikaans either – just read and understand) but I can generally understand most of it.

There is something else. It’s something I struggle to explain – it’s comfortingly familiar. Perhaps it is the music of the language that is similar to Afrikaans. The voices of teenagers laughing on the square. The quiet conversation of an elderly couple on a bus. Even the people, the “types” feel predictably familiar.

Beyond the familiarity of the Dutch itself, there is a vocabulary of place that is familiar here. More than familiar – it represents a world I learned as a child. It struck me yesterday as I sat on the train from Amsterdam to Rotterdam. Outside the window, along a canal, were houseboats. There was a story, a long time ago, about a mole and a rat and a toad. Was it The Wind in the Willows? In it, there is a river or a canal and a houseboat. The pictures looked like these houses. On a canal. Somewhere in my head, I have held, all these years, a picture of a houseboat and a canal that didn’t match any of the houseboats or bodies of water I would ever see. It existed for me nowhere but the books I read as a child. Yet here it was. I made a note to complement the classics with African books for all the children in my circles and wondered how many other things there are in my mythology of the world that have no substance beyond imagination (for me) because they have never existed in my physical reality.

Like woods. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep…” “If you go down to the woods today…” “They shut the road through the woods seventy years ago…” I could go on and on. There were woods in Narnia, possibly the central book series of my childhood. There were woods in all the Enid Blyton books. There were no woods in South Africa. I’ve seen montane forests with hundred-year-old yellowwoods. I’ve visited the tropical rain-forests of the Congo. I had never walked in the woods until today.

It shouldn’t be possible for language to be both fragile and robust. Over the years other concepts had become attached to those words for me – forests for “woods” and yachts for “houseboats”. But language bounces back. The actual thing fits so much better that it quickly replaces the substituted concept. And those things – the real world things to which words should be anchored – make it possible for reality to translate from the unfamiliarity of Dutch to the gentle, safe familiarity of Afrikaans and, eventually, English.

Coming in to Land

Adventures, Travelling in Europe,

Written at 36,000 ft on the flight between Johannesburg’s OR Tambo Airport and Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam

The image on the flight tracking information screen says we are flying over Brussels. On the map I can see Calais and Amiens and Cantebury. Names out of stories and fairytales and books. I find myself struggling with the idea of Europe. The idea of landing in a European city.

I studied Africa. Europe was, particularly once I reached university and was able to focus my studies, a sort of background noise. Europe became important only in so far as the histories of the African places I was studying were impacted by Europe. It’s funny; it’s fairly common to study African history from the premise (and misconception) that Europe and Europe’s own troubles, shaped Africa. African historians and history departments struggle against this. In the determination to see Africa for itself, I didn’t realise how far I had moved from European history.

It wasn’t until I started working on this hastily planned trip. I know so little about Europe. I can differentiate between Togo, Ghana and Chad, I can chronicle the history of the conflict in the Eastern DRC, I contrast different explanations for the underdevelopment of Mozambique and I can converse intelligently on the relative chances of re-election for Malawi’s Banda and Zambia’s Sata. But I couldn’t tell you what the neighbouring countries of the Netherlands are.

Yet, here I am, coming in to land over the perfectly even green fields of Holland on a fairly ordinary Tuesday morning. Small fields laid out strip on strip. Bodies of water – lakes? canals? – silver under the clouds. It looks cold out there. The little bit of sunshine disappears with a final sunbeam of light through the airplane window, and we plunge towards a day European autumn day.

I keep trying not to let anyone on the plane see how enchanted and disconcerted this trip is making me. I doubt they would understand. I’m not even sure I can explain it. Europe does excite but it also confuses me. I am African. That is the touchstone of my identity. But I’m also a white South African with a European heritage (especially if the UK is included). I come from a country and a continent with a long and difficult history of conflict and contest with this place. Particularly with the Netherlands, that started all the development and complexity, the good and bad of colonial and post-colonial state-hood for South Africa. I didn’t intend to be here – my travel dreams are African, not European – but now that I am, I am excited to find out, to explore, to see first hand. At the same time, I remain apprehensive. It’s not a fun history. Coming here feels a little like walking directly into that contested space, walking into an emotional and intellectual storm.

The plane comes in to land.