If you have enjoyed visiting this site Old Fart Expats – which has the stories of our adventures as two older people working, living and travelling in the Netherlands, and in Europe, then please consider checking my other site which is about my designer and knitter life.

I know I have mentioned such things as ball warmers and trees with scarves – so you do have some idea of my other life. But that is the outrageous nearly knit art graffiti life – oh and we are planning an installation maybe on April 1st – April Fools Day. I don’t know if that is a term used here in the Netherlands so the installation may not benefit from that as it might in New Zealand or in the UK. It does depend on completing the piece and it will not be in Haarlem. Just in case I forgot to mention this – the Haarlem Balls are nearly back. They are waiting to be installed once more. So maybe on Queens Day – will that be a good day for an installation here in Haarlem? Will keep you posted on that one.

But I am also a bona fide knit designer and I am also thinking of a sculpture – metal piece with knitted wire (thin wire). The creation of it could be very hard on the hands – but I have discovered of late that anything is achievable should you think of it then you can do it.

I digress again.

If you are a knitter, or want to be a knitter. If you love colour work, or just love colour – maybe exploring my designer knit site Connielene Knit Designer will stir in you the need to knit again or to learn to knit if you do not yet, or just might enjoy some of the stories there as well. I do also have 2 etsy shops which I add patterns and pieces to as I am able to. There are a few beret and cape patterns should you be interested. The links to Connielene Etsy shop is here as well as the link to Unique Boutique Knits where my patterns and other pieces are available.

Oh and if you also use Facebook then I would love it if you would “like” my page there as well ConnieLene Unique Designs & Knits

We all need fans in our lives, I hope you will “like” my facebook page there enough to be a fan – the old Facebook parlance – they do keep on changing things. But if you like it please tick it – Thanks

Queens Day / Koninginnedag : or is it Orange Crazy Day?

Orange Boat - orange guests

April 30th – Queen’s Day is a national holiday here in the Netherlands. It is a celebration for the birthday of the Queen of the Netherlands (Queen Juliana’s birthday). The date has been retained as Queen Beatrix birthday is in January – not good weather for a party in all the streets of the Netherlands.

And it is a big street party, everything is Orange for the House of Orange, and everyone can sell anything they wish to anyone else.

So it is a birthday celebration, a freemarket, street party, costume party, Orange Fest. Bring something orange to wear if you are here on April 30th, or buy something orange to remember the day with.

Any New Zealander in Maastricht would look at this sign and say – wow! what a sale – everything is free.

A New Zealander looking at this sign in Amsterdam would say why do I need a Urinoir? The pub / cafe beyond the sign should have a toilet and that is where I was, and that is what caused the need for a Urinoir in the first place.

hmm - scary

What! – Head to Toe “The Hairdresser’s” what does that mean? – that people here have head to toe hair to be washed, styled, blow dryed. Or does it mean that the hairdresser will add hair from head to toe. It sounds really scary.

We spent Friday night on the botelboat in Maastricht which is permanently tied up in the very centre of the city – on the Maas River. The BotelBoat is a quite inexpensive (cheap) Bed & breakfast. We arrived around 5pm and it was snowing lightly and very very cold.

We found our way to our double cabin on the main deck with ease – it was number 30. It was so very cold so we turned on the gas heating full blast.

This cabin contained a very nearly double bed and a shower and toilet. The only chair was in the tiny wardrobe. We had to fold up the chair to enable us to put our back pack and bag into the wardrobe as well. When we undressed and dressed the plastic rubbish bin was on the bed along side the person who was not undressing or dressing. There was not enough space for 2 people to be dressing and undressing at the same time.

We have stayed in the very modern designer Eden Hotel in Maastricht as well and thought we would try something completely different. This hotel had less clothes hanging space than the tiny cabin on the boat but it did have enough room for us each to get dressed and undressed at the same time, and it was warm.

Then we went out to purchase gloves for JJ, dinner, gluhwein and so on. Several times we worried (I worried) that we should go back to the boat and turn the heating down, but decided (we decided) to wait till we got back rather than risk the walk to the boat twice in the slippery snow and ice which was formed on the footpaths.

The room was not hot when we returned.

That should have warned us – but we went to bed, me in thermals, socks, 2 merino singlet top things and JJ in his PJ’s and socks and we huddled and we froze, and we laughed and laughed. When one moved the other also had to move because there was not enough space in the bed to move out of sync with each other. As you get older it is important to move in bed or else you cannot move the old bones in the morning. In this place we could have been frozen solid had we not moved in the night. Someone in another cabin who was not having a good time – banged on walls. Can you believe that – no sense of humour.

In the morning early dim dim light we discovered that there was ice on the window – so we couldn’t see out, and then we discovered that the ice was on the inside of the window.!%*&^%$#@! seems there was a gap in the window edge.

No wonder we were frozen and didn’t really sleep all that well.

But we got up – we certainly didn’t shower – too risky taking anything off to go into the shower – we just added more clothes and went to breakfast, then we packed our things and went out into cold morning of Maastricht.

Remember that we did laugh and laugh, and we are planning a return trip just not in the middle of winter next time, as it really was fun.

We were in Maastricht for a steam train ride to a Christmas Market in the Velvet Caves in Valkenburg. It was absolutely worth the night on the Botelboat.

JJ was on the morning train to Maastricht and sent this email to Bruce in NZ. It is not quite verbatim.

On this misty morning at 8:07 AM JJ having caught the 6:30 from Haarlem to Amsterdam, then boarded this one – the lizard train at 7:07 bound for Maastricht.

I can see the fields outside, with the disembodied gates standing in isolation in the mist. No fences, no cattle troughs as the wide, deep drains serve both purposes. The water table is about four inches below the surface, yet surprisingly the paddocks are not boggy. There is a high proportion of sand in the earth (which used to be the sea floor), so it’s very free-draining. Just as well – water is everywhere.

We cross huge rivers and canals. They are edged with dikes, with much higher dikes set well back. The Dutch don’t fight the water, they manage it. Their philosophy is “Give the water somewhere to go”. Hence the double-diking – the land between the remote and close dikes is sacrificial. In a land where half of the country is below sea level, flooding is extremely rare. The last flood that caused serious loss of life was in 1953, when the Zuider Zee overflowed, killing 1800 people. The Dutch promptly cut the Zuider Zee off from the North Sea. Now it’s a very big fresh-water lake. A subsequent flood in the sixties created a series of secondary lakes on one edge of it. A bit more work with dikes and drainage stabilised it completely, and now the properties that edge the smaller lakes are worth megabucks. To put all this in perspective, more people are killed every year by floods in Bangladesh and India than the Dutch have lost in the last two centuries.

In the next decade, the Dutch will spend 600 billion Euros (man that’s over a trillion NZ dollars) on strengthening the sea-dike defences. These guys are serious about water management. Kaeo and Kawakawa would be very different places if New Zealand employed Dutch hydrodynamic engineers.

But I digress. The title of this is “The lizard train”. The train to Maastricht is a trap for young (and old) players. Maastricht is about 230 kilometres South-East of Amsterdam, and the train goes nearly all the way there before it makes like a lizard – the tail breaks off and goes somewhere entirely different! I was told about it when I started. Not so a colleague of mine who has been here about two months and wound up in the wrong city last week. He was very pissed off. He finally made it to Maastricht, where they all laughed and said “Oh yes, all the Amsterdam-Maastricht trains do that”. He then worked late to catch up on the time he had lost. At about eleven PM, he boarded the train to Amsterdam and fell asleep. Halfway there, he found that the train had stopped. Then the whistle blew. Funny. The train didn’t move. Alarmed, he got off and asked the guard what was going on. “Oh” said the guard, “for the last two trains of the day, only the front half goes to Amsterdam. The back half goes back to Maastricht”. So he had to wait there for the last train. He got home at 1:00 AM.

Next morning when he arrived red-eyed and worn out, we were all so sympathetic (not!). We laughed like drains.

So now it’s 11:45 AM, and I’m still on the Lizard train. The journey is usually about 2 1/2 hours. But the lines are out for maintenance, and they announced it to all the passengers in Dutch! The others got off while I was typing this, and suddenly the train was going backwards! I got off at the first stop and found out what was happening. They told me that it was all fixed and I should simply take the next train. Bullshit – the lines were still out. This time they made the announcement also in English, so I have had to travel a roundabout route. Teach me to not laugh at David!