Finally, they exclaimed: «Oooh, Yugoslavia!»….my face twichwed and I growled: «Ex-Yugoslavia».. By the end of our conversation the nice lady told me a charming story about how she once visited her sister in Slovakia and they sailed down Danube river all the way to VIenna. A lovely story,really. Maybe it was around Christmas. Maybe they saw each-other for the first time after many, many years and had a marvelous time making up for all those lost moments. Maybe they bought themselves some nice new fur coats, maybe even a goldfish for the butler's son (he is such a nice young boy, such a shame that he should be so pour..!). A charming story, but… what has it got to do with Croatia?! The next day, same thing happened…two more fur-coated american madams, and one asks me. «Craotia? Is that near Maastricht?», while the other one, even after my ex-Yugoslavia refernece, continues to stare at me blankly.
Hmmmm….»Proud to be a Croat»?!
Netherlands 1 – Belgium 0
In Amsterdam, in a store where we couldn't find what we needed, we asked the salesman for help. He not only spoke excellent english, but also very kindly helped us and explained where we woud find what we were looking for. He even marked those places on our map, along with the routes that would take us there. Several new customers entered while he was helping us, but he let his co-worker handle them. It was as if he really cared that we don't get lost. Very nice guy.
In Bruxelles, in our desperate search for someone who could tell us how to get to Grand-place from the main railway station, we decided to ask the subway ticket salesman. He mumbled «no english», completely ignored our sad puppy eyes and went on to help the next guy in line. He made it very clear that we were unwelcome at his desk and required to remove ourselves from his immediate vicinity. We had no idea where to turn, but thankfully we soon came across a man who was heading in our direction and actually spoke three and a half words of english. He was a university proffesor.(?!)
Netherlands
There are over 10 000 km of bicycle trails in Netherlands, and statistics show that 80% of the population owns a bicycle. There is a bike trail along every major road and pedestrians are not allowed to use them. This is something that is good to know if you are visiting Netherlands, because the bikers can be very unpleasent if you get in their way. I don't speak the language so I didn't grasp the entire context, but I suspect «idiot» in dutch means what it means in most other languages….There are «Rent-a-bike», «Rent-a-skate»,»Rent-a scooter» stores on every corner. The Dutch are way more advanced than we are when it comes to securing their bikes – the locks we use would probably be considered museum articles over there. They use huge metal locks with space-like mechanisms and take all removable parts of the bikes (such as seats!) with them. Parking lots for bikes are also nothing like ours, where you can barely fit 20 bikes in the space provided for them. Theirs are huge, with several parking levels.
Amsterdam is built on the river Amstel canal and it prides itself with more than 1000 bridges . The three main canals are Herengracht, Keizergracht and Prinsengracht. Considering the fact that almost one million people live in Amsterdam, there is never enough parking spaces, and most are situated along the canal edges. That can get tricky, so fences are erected to ensure parking safety. However, this doesn't seem to completely take care of the problem since on average, one car a year ends up in tha canal. (That's cute – I can imagine the fish and the ducks exchanging emails: «Another one down! There's a party on location, bring a date!»).The proces of fishing the cars out of the water seems to be quite well rehersed and fast – at least I would insist on it to be if it was my car that took the leap. Still, I imagine it takes a certain amount of special talent to park your car into the water and I simply haven't developed it yet– I'm not worried though, I'm sure I'll get there eventually.
Since I'm describing Netherlands here, I'm sure many people are interested in that special feature that is only legal in this country.
However, this didn't fascinate me all that much – there are so many interesting things in Netherlands that it proved difficult to even cover the basics in only ten days. Personally, I was quite impressed with «Schiphol» international airport. I love airports in general, but this one I liked especially beacuse of its ingenious way of marking the parking levels. Instead of the monotonous, neverending P1, P2, P3 boards, the Dutch have devised a somewhat different and still practical way to mark the airport parking levels. They use pictures of dutch motives – you'll find levels marked as tulips, lighthouses, windmills etc. No matter how hard you may try, you can't get lost. I tried.
