Travel Europe | #17 Postcards from Netherlands

Travel Europe | #17 Postcards from Netherlands

Valentine 2008, I found myself going Dutch. Nadira, a friend and a former colleague during the days in Sarajevo, invited me over to the Hague, where she worked as a researcher for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. It’s a mouthful I know. Saying in layman term, the tribunal is a court set up by the NATO to catch big criminals during the war in the early 90s in what now Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia. There are more countries in the Yugoslavia, but these were the main players where the war escalated.

Nadira was the perfect travel partner for an absent-minded, spontaneous traveler like me. The only thing I had to do for Netherlands was booking a flight ticket. Once there, she took care of the rest. She’d already planned in advance where to take me, what to do in the city and what to eat. Every day, if we were not on the street, I had hot breakfast, lunch and dinners literally brought to me on a plate. Except for the days when she had to work, and I roamed and explored the Hague by myself; we took trains all over the country. We went to Delft, the little town which produced the world-famous pottery; Goulda to sample Dutch famous cheese, the nearby Utrecht and Maastricht, the oldest city located within walking distance to Belgium.

One can’t say she’s been to Netherlands without setting foot in the drug and brothel mecca of Europe, Amsterdam. I went there without Nadira to meet another friend of mine, Sedef, whom I met in Poland four years ago. My time of carefully planned travel was soon over as Sedef was just another me, “Uh, I don’t have a map. I just walk you around until we run into something. I prefer to get lost.” Yeah, it took us a few hours cruising around unknown parts of Amsterdam. I followed Sedef to Eindhoven where she lived and studied at a University in Eindhoven to work on her graduate degree.

Netherlands, judging by the first look, was a very healthy country. There is nowhere else you’ll see as many bikers and even more bikes. Dutch were a group of healthy and handsome people. Most were tall, fit and well-dressed. You won’t expect to see bikers in tight sweatshirt and cycling pants and ugly helmets. On the contrary, Dutch dressed in their regular every day satire: suits, dress, short skirts. Even little kids had their own cute little parts on the bikes. It was such a lovely sight with bikes at every corner, in every city across the country.

It was in Netherlands that I completely changed my travel conception about Europe. Up to that point, I had only eye for Eastern Europe and dismissed Western Europe where know-nothing tourists hanged out and that it was nothing special. What a difference Europe would be without its west.

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