Friday, May 04, 2007

Wessel staying with us











This week I have the whole week off from work (school). Thursday I went to Bergeijk to pick up my brother who has the syndrome of Down, for a short stay until Sunday afternoon. Of course we had a break at the famous road restaurant Hajé, where all furniture is for sale (4th picture). Then we continued heading for Heeg, a small village with a reliable outboard engine sales and repair shop, where I bought a good 2nd-hand engine for my new 2nd hand sailing boat; he had good advice and we agreed that he would put the engine on the boat May 18, so that we could immediately sail to my newly reserved harbour place in Earnewald, at the Frisian lakes. I need the engine because you can’t get there by sailing because of the low bridges. I feel like a king. Wessel got a Tamaha-cap (the engine’s brand name) for his collection of I estimate a hundred different caps, and he was as glad as somebody “normal” who would get a Mercedes for free. The other day we went first to Leeuwarden to buy a clock, broken by Wessel at his arrival because we were so negligent to have it on our living room table, where it doesn’t belong, and to buy another cap worn by Frisian farmers as we told him (a tourist cap with Frisian flag decoration); in the afternoon we went to the clogs museum of the clog factory 3 miles further. Wessel can’t wear clogs, but he was happy with a red farmers’ handkerchief to put around his neck, how happy he was!

The 3d picture is a rack filled with tourist clogs (Frisians don’t wear them despite the flag decoration or maybe just because of that), the 2nd picture shows the genuine clogs from the area that many men wear when they do garden or other outside work, including myself. They show a traditional, centuries-old pattern.

In the clogs museum I took a picture of a school poster with a presentation in pictures and verses of what happened in Holland during World War II (1st photo). The fragment shows how in the Winter I was born (1944) masses of hungry people travelled by foot from the cities in the West to the North of the country where agricultural products were still available. It shows also someone listening to the English radio which of course was forbidden, and a group of Jews on transport to Westenbork, a “Durchgangsslager” (transition camp) to the final destinations in Germany. A very relevant picture today, the 4th of May. Click on it to enlarge so that you can see the details.

1 comment:

Evie said...

I hope you and Wessel enjoy your visit together.