Week 8 - Beer, Chocolate, and Remembering

by Tim Perrin

Monday, September 19, 2005

Belgium has turned out to be a delight, but that is primarily due to our marvelous hosts.

After saving us from ourselves, Dirk and Magda were phenomenally generous and fun. Magda had to work too much of the time so we didn’t get to spend as much time with her as we would have liked, but Dirk retired obscenely young and was able to take us to Brugge for the day.

Today, Brugge is about 15 km from the sea, but in the 1500s it was a thriving sea port. However, its sea access silted up and that was that.

Today, it’s a pretty tourist town trading on its medieval heritage.

I have to say that I thought I would be getting tired of medieval towns by now, but I’m not. (Talk to me in another six months.)

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

In Canadian military history, the name Passchendale is one of the most important. The Passchendale action was merely part of the larger battle that took place around the town of Ypres, which had the unfortunate fate to become a place the Germans wanted and the allies decided to defend. In fact, there were three battles for the town. The first occurred in late October and November 1914. In the second, in April and May of 1915, the Germans tried out their new secret weapon, chlorine gas. After this attack failed, the Germans contented themselves with merely blowing the town to bits with constant bombardment.

But it was the third battle of Ypres that has come to be known simply as the battle of Passchendale. Unlike the others, this was launched by the allies. The British commander, General Haig, hoped to break through the German lines, though why he thought he could do so after three years of stalemate is beyond me. Nonetheless, in July, he started a 10-day bombardment of the German positions. So much for surprise. When the troops came out of their trenches, the German machine gunners were ready for them. Over the next three-and-a-half months, more than 310,000 allied troops were killed and wounded, more than 250,000 Germans. In the final push in early November, British and Canadian troops survived mustard gas attacks to take Passchendale ridge, General Haig declared victory, and everyone dug in for the winter. At its greatest, the advance had been about five miles.

More than 12,000 victims of the various battles in and around Ypres are buried at Tyne Cot War Cemetery in Passendale (the modern spelling), about eight kilometers northeast of Ypres. About 1,000 of them are Canadian, more than half of them unidentified. Another 35,000 names of men whose bodies were never found are inscribed on the marble walls of the cemetery. Below one panel, we found a note:

James Smith Graham:

We are sorry that life was taken from you so early and that we never
had the chance to know you.

From your grandchildren,
Hugh, Alison, and Jean.

It reminded me of the notes you see at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington.

The cemetery was built in this location because a first-aid station was set up in a cottage (the Tyne cottage) and they had to bury the bodies nearby. Today, the memorial is built around the cottage. You can still see one of the walls through a gap in the wall of the memorial.

There were several Royal Flying Corps pilots, just 18, lieutenants at that age, shot down over the battlefield.

One of the reasons I go to the cemeteries is to say that I remember and to say “hello” to the guys there. They died a long way from home and I’m sure there are many who have never had a visitor from home. I know they’re dead, but if there is an afterlife, and if they are watching us, I want them to know that even though I disagree with war, I recognize what they did and the sacrifice they made, and how they suffered, and in the long run, the life it bought for me.

(There were also two German buried there. I made sure to tell them hello as I expect they don’t get many visitors in this cemetery full of Brits, Canucks, Aussies and Kiwis.)

It was also at Ypres that Canadian field doctor John McCrae knocked off a few lines of poetry while he was sitting on the bumper of an ambulance. He didn't think much of them and he tossed the piece of paper away. But one of his friends picked it up and sent it to Punchwhich printed it--without a byline--on December 8, 1915. McRae's poem was printed at the bottom of page 468, right after an ad for "The Little Dentist.--Entire outfit, including minature Forceps, Gags, Gasbags, etc. Will keep an entire nursery happy for hours. Help baby with his teething. 5s 6d."

It was called "In Flanders Fields."

Today, in the museum at Ypres, there is a small glass display case devoted to McCrae and his poem. I particularly appreciated the fact that it included a "refutation" from artist Brody Neuenschwander who had tried to prepare a calligraphic interpretation of the poem but who had found himself unable to do so. "It was not difficult to make backgrounds that suggested the grayness of the Flemish skies," he wrote, "and the deeply depressing aspect of the mud and the death of the trenches. But everytime I placed the words of the poem over the background, I read the words, 'Take up our quarrel with the foe,' and I saw that it did not work.

"John McCrae's own handwritten copy of the poem has become an icon of the famous text. We see it, we know what it says, we accept it. But do we stop to ask what the poem actually says? Do we want to know why so many young men were so willing to follow their comrades to the front? Do we have any idea of the social and politcal pressures, propaganda and un-critical patriotic enthusiasm that allowed the leaders of the time to commit this vast slaughter?"

On the way home, my eye was caught by a sign not far from Dirk and Magda’s house that said “452 Sq. RCAF Memorial” and pointed down a little side road. We did a u-turn and turned down this short dead end. On the edge of the lawn of the farmhouse at the end of the road was a marble marker commemorating the crew of an RCAF Halifax that crashed nearby in 1944.

Memories of the war(s) are everywhere in this part of the world.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

On Wednesday, we finally said goodbye to Dirk and Magda and moved on to the tiny village of Tiegem where our hosts were Jan Glorieux and his orange tabby Leo Russo, the cat-athlete.

As I said in my last post, Jan is one of the neatest guys I have ever met. Bright. Fun. Educated. Loves to discuss anything, including politics and religion. He and I got into some great discussions about Catholicism. He was one of the few people I know who would go head-on with me about the church. I loved it.

Leo loved Terre, meanwhile. She would carry him around while he purred so loud we thought there was an earthquake going on.

Thursday, September 22, 2005

Lazy day. We walked in the countryside then to a park where we came across the chapel of St. Arnold of Tiegem, the local saint. Terre was shocked to see her first relic (other than the one to which she is married). At the front of the church was a glass display case containing the arm bone of St. Arnold. At special times of the year, the devout kiss the display case to show their devotion.

We decided that what we need in North America are local saints, someone from the neighborhood whom we could venerate, whose finger bone we could keep under glass somewhere to take out once a year and kiss, and who could do miracles for us, like give the BC Lions a winning season or help the NDP win another provincial election this century. We are open for nominees.

Friday, September 23, 2005

We went to Jan’s school in Oudenarde in the afternoon as surprise guest teachers for his English class. Terre, of course, was a brilliant teacher, devising a lesson plan as she sat in the staff room. I, of course, winged it.

Jan asked those students who thought they were pretty good in English to hold up their hands. They came with me to another room where, of course, I talked about Canada.

Terre got the other students. She engaged the less confident students by asking them to tell her what she should experience in Belgium. It'a always easier to talk about what you know. (Terre says that why I talk too much - I know too much about everything and don't know how to shut up and let someone else speak.) The students talked about Belgian french fries (French fries were invented in Belgium and should be called Belgian fries), Belgian chocolates, Belgian beer, and the famous Belgian statue of a pissing boy, the Mannequin-Pis, which one of the kids was kind enough to draw for her on the blackboard. The students wanted to move to Canada until they learned that the legal drinking age is 19 in Canada. In Belgium, it is 16. In fact, we ran into many of the students when we stopped off for a drink at an outdoor pub after school in the town square.

It was my birthday* and they bushwacked me with a delicious box of Belgian chocolates and all the kids sang "Happy Birthday" in English. They sang quickly but with big smiles on their faces because the bell had already rung and it was Friday, last period, and they wanted to GO! However, so did we. In fact, we beat them to the pub!

*56 if you must know.

Saturday, September 24, 2005

We started to go on this tour of some abbeys in the region, but all of us, Jan included, copped out after the second one. Sorry, but booooring.

At the first one, the good sisters regaled us with a 50-minute presentation (in Dutch) on the history of their Order. I’m sorry, but I didn’t take notes (It’s hard to do so when you are nodding off) so I can’t really share with you any of the thrilling highlights here. Suffice it so say that a bunch of women decided to live together and be nuns. The End.

At the second stop, we saw the school that the King’s son used to attend. This should have been a warning, because, half an hour later, we were in the cafeteria for lunch. “Oh no, Jan. This one is on us,” I said. The three of us had sliced turkey loaf with gravy, nuked frozen veggies, fries, and a dessert. Total: $54 in Canadian funds (or 36 Euros for cafeteria food!) Ouch! They have got to be kidding.

That evening, Jan and I played dueling keyboard artists. He won. Terre and the cat left the room whenever I started to play.

Sunday, September 25, 2005

Jan insisted on taking us for lunch at a very nice Italian restaurant in Oudenarde. He knew we couldn't afford the high Euro prices to dine out but he really wanted us to experience a good meal in a restaurant before leaving Belgium. Suffice it to say, the food was delicious - much better than the cafeteria—and even more expensive. Thanks, Jan. It was a real treat for us and so very kind and generous of you.

Jan doesn’t like long, drawn-out goodbyes, and neither do we, so we walked back to the car, I shook his hand, Terre gave him a hug, he climbed in his car and drove away. We climbed in ours and were very, very sorry to see him go.

I started her up and headed for our next stop.

Week 7 - Wevelgem Adventure

by Tim Perrin

Yes, I know we've missed week 6. Terre is working on it. Meanwhile, we're finally out of Holland and in Belgium.

We're in another tiny place called Tiegam in Belgium, East Flanders to be more precise. Our current host, Jan Glorieux, teaches English, German, Dutch and religion at a catholic school in a nearby town. He is a 48-year-old bachelor who lives alone in the old family home. He inherited his one-third and bought out his two brothers' interests when his parents died. Basically, he's lived in this house his entire life. He's brilliant, eccentric, and a lot of fun. He'll probably never marry at this point, which is too bad, because I think he'd be a great dad. But I doubt he could adjust to living with someone else, and he is quite conservative religiously so I don't think shacking up is an option. He is a great guy.

Tomorrow, we are going with him to a bunch of abbeys in the area, seven in total.

We are here until Sunday. After that, it's up in the air. We have some emails out to people around Brussells but no takers yet. We do have a spot at the beach for October 3-6 and an offer for the 10th for two nights, but we may have moved on to Paris by then.

Terre wants to get to Giverney and Monet's garden before they close at the end of October. We will spend a week or two around Paris, probably staying on the outskirts and training in, or perhaps leaving the van with a host on the outskirts and then taking just a few things into a host or two in the city. Then we want to head out to the Calais region to visit Dieppe where the Canadians were involved in a disastrous raid early in WWII, then to Normandy, Brittany and south toward Spain, shooting to get there around the beginning of December. We plan on Dec-Jan in Iberia, Feb-Mar across the Riviera to Italy, then Apr-Jun in the UK and Eire. We used to think that was plenty of time, but I don't know anymore. We are now in week eight of 48. It is going real fast.

Before this, we stayed three nights with a couple of PE teachers who just came back from a year of cycling in Cuba, Baja, Australia and a few other places, a total of 20,000 km (12,000 mi). He is 18 months older than I am and retired. She has another 18 months to go to retirement. Then they will ride, ride, ride. They are biking nuts. We loved being with them. Great folks named Dirk and Magda.

They saved us from a bad night. We didn't have a place on Sunday night so we were going to camp. We drove by Antwerp and spotted the gothic cathedral spire but weren't going to stop. We were going to head out to the beach and find a campground, about a 40 minute drive. This was about 5:45.

But Terre seemed to want to see Antwerp, or at least the cathedral. But it took a bit longer than anticipated to enjoy our first genuine Belgian French fries (why aren't they Belgian fries? They were invented here.), see all the guild halls on the city square and get lost in a two block area.

We ended up back at the van in the dark looking first for a campsite, then for a bank machine because we didn't have any cash to pay for the campsite, and doing this in the dark. Our GSP navigator kept sending me to bank machines which would not give me any money but kept wanting me to go to a bigger city.

Finally, I was driving to said, bigger city, when Dirk and Magda called offering us a place.

This however, was just the beginning of the adventure. It was an hour's drive to their place and it was already about 9:00. We programmed in the address, Wagenmakersstraat 2, Wevelegem, and off we went.

Fifty minutes later, we arrived at this rather dodgy looking street right off the main drag where there were a few seedy-looking clubs. There were no apparent homes, just a KIA dealership. Not the kind of place we wanted to leave the van. In fact, Terre at one point didn't want to get out of the van.

And there was no number 2. There was a 2A and a 2B, but not 2. We rang 2A. A gentleman with muttonchops and a handlebar mustache in a uniform answered. Terre, with her suitcase in hand and pillows under her arm asked, "Were you expecting us?" He looked at her puzzled. This definitely isn't Holland where everyone speaks English. In Flanders, the first language is Dutch, but in Belgium, the other language is French so she switched to French and we were able to ascertain that this was definitely not the place.

We called Dirk and Magda. It turned out that there were two Wagenmakersstraats in the region.

Dirk gave me directions. Take the A17. First exit. Past the traffic lights. Church. Cemetary. Left. First right. Second left. Third right. Second left. Piece of cake.

Nope. We ended up on the A19. Shit! Shit! Shit! I was tired. I was grumpy. I wanted to go to bed. It was after 10. I just wanted it to be OVER.

Our navigation system was going to be no help in this case. Our maps were of such a large scale, they didn't even show the tiny town we were looking for. We were on our own.

I decided to take the next off ramp and consult the map to see how to get back to the A17. As we neared the top of the off ramp, Terre spotted the sign for "Wevelgem," our destination. Horseshoes up the ass, or what? So, we turned left and away we went.

Now, we could have been coming in from a completely different direction, but, no, there was the traffice light, church, and cemetary (hard to spot behind a fence and a hedge at night, but hey, we did it), so we start counting lefts and rights.

But then it goes to crap again. We are coming up to where we should be finding that last "second left" and it's not going to happen. Corn field. No left.

I turn on Ken. (That's our navigation system. Ken is its voice. He from Australia. "Turn roit. Take the motorway." You know.) Anyway, Ken has the streets maked on his map so we can see there is no left turn up ahead.

At the risk of repeating myself, shit! Shit! Shit!

But Terre says, "Turn right here. I think we miscounted right turns."

So I do. What the hell, I've got nothing to lose. And lo and behold, there on Ken's lovely face, two blocks up, is Wagenmakerstraat, a tiny cul-de-sac with one entrance.

Double horseshoes up the ass.

How we got there, I'll never know. Someone was guiding us, and for once it wasn't Ken.

That is the first seriously bad steer he's given us. Up to now, it's been a completely reliable system. But, for today, Ken is in the dog house.

That's it for today.

Tim

Canadian Street Gangs

by Tim Perrin

Thanks to those of you who've privately sent me notes regarding my post on "Those Damn Morroccans." I don't want to leave anyone with the impression that we don't have ethnic problems in Canada. We do. And our street gangs are tough... really tough.

Thanks to Ineke

It takes courage to correct other people's writing. I know because I do it for part of my living, and I know how thin-skinned most of my students are. But my attitude is that good editing only makes me look better and saves me from stupid mistakes.

Ineke had that courage and has saved me from a large number of those mistakes. Her local knowledge, her willingness to look up names and place names that I didn't look up because I was lazy and mostly writing late at night--those are my excuse, anway--have improved my work here considerably.

Thank you, Ineke.

Tim

Those Damn Morroccans

by Timothy Perrin

In Canada, we talk about ourselves as a “multicultural” society and we hold little multicultural fairs every Canada Day. We all eat perogies and chicken tika masala. The local MP makes a speech about how tolerant we are and we pat ourselves on the back.

In Europe, they have to live tolerance on a day-to-day basis or they will start to kill each other again.

It’s that simple.

We were at a party on Saturday evening attended by about two dozen people. We counted at least a eleven native languages represented at the table: English, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Ukranian, Hebrew, Spanish, Arabic, Farsi, Swahili and Hindi. The guests had been born in Holland, Canada, the US, Surinam, Poland, Ukraine, Argentina, Iran, Tanzania and Egypt. There were atheists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and at least four colors of Christians – Catholic, Orthodox, Dutch Reform and Baptist.

Among the older attendees, one man had spent three years in hiding to escape the Holocaust; his son, a computer engineer; his daughter, a judge; and his three grandchildren would not have existed at all had he not survived. Another was Iranian-Kurdish-Jewish, a member of a double minority in a strongly Muslim-Persian country. He spoke Farsi, Kurdish, Spanish, Russian, and English, all of which he had learned of necessity in a life of adversity and challenge. He was married to a Jewish woman from Argentina. They now live near the Golan Heights in Israel, still in a world subject to war.

But most of us had been born since 1945. We were heirs to the legacy of peace our parents had left us. Some at the party were active in preserving that. In particular, one guest was a mediator for NATO working with nations to help them find ways to resolve their differences short of arms.

The phenomenon of modern Europe runs against all sense. Political units do not surrender power to a central authority unless they absolutely must. It took the United States three tries—the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and a vicious civil war—to settle the issue of just how much power the states had ceded to Washington. In Canada, Quebec keeps the debate in the daily headlines as it strives to maintain and even expand its powers. Yet this spring, ten countries were eagerly waiting in line to give up vital areas of sovereignty and join with 15 others in the European Union, a creature that defies logic. Just 14 years ago, political centrifugal force spun the Soviet Union into its constituent parts and again sparked ethnic bloodshed in the Balkans. But here were countries like Poland and Hungary saying, “Let us in!” Turkey is almost begging to get into the EU, asking what else it has to do to qualify.

This miracle, this marvel, is primarily the work of two former bitter enemies, France and Germany, who, after tearing each other to shreds twice in thirty years, realized they could not live through another war, one that would be even worse than the two that had just killed off two generations of their sons. So, they have been the driving forces behind the EU. In the face of resurgent nationalism, they have remained resolute and determined to make the EU work, despite their differences, which are many.

The new EU constitution failed to gain ratification earlier this year. I pray that will not stop the movement toward a united Europe. Like Quebec, I hope that they will keep asking the question until they get the answer they want.

I just read Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel. It attempts the answer the simple question of why Eurasians have so much more wealth than Africans and Native Americans. Why did Cortez conquer the Aztecs and not Montezuma come to Spain and conquer Ferdinand and Isabella?

In the book, he talks about the evolution of human societies from simple bands, where everyone knows everyone else and is probably related to them, to tribes, where you still know everyone even though there are probably several hundred people in the tribe, to the larger chiefdoms, where the population becomes too large for you to know all your neighbors by name. That’s when dispute resolution starts to become a real problem. Diamond tells how in New Guinea, where he has done much of his research over the years, when two people who didn’t know each other met on the road, they would engage in a long dialogue discussing their ancestors and relatives in hopes of finding some relationship so that they did not have to fight and try to kill each other.

In Europe, today, they are working at finding those relationships, the ways in which we are all the same, instead of the ways in which we differ.

They don’t really have much of a choice.

Bosnia showed us just how quickly things can go down the crapper and just how long old prejudices can hang around.

But what I find really interesting, and more than a bit upsetting, is the blind spot I’ve noticed in some of the people I’ve met. They are marvelous folks, let me be clear, but more than once I have heard someone make a comment about how horrible Hitler was and decry the holocaust, yet not three sentences later, the same person will say something about “the damn Moroccans.”

Moroccan immigrants are the underclass in Holland and other parts of Europe. As with every immigrant group—even my group, the Irish, in their day—they are not wanted, ghettoized, and dishonored. But it scares me to hear such words from people who live within 80 kilometres of the deportation camp used to send thousands of Dutch Jews to their deaths at Auschwitz, Treblinka and Buchenwald.

We are all bigots at some level. I know I’ve got my blind spots. At least, I assume I do. They wouldn’t be blind spots if I knew about them. But I try to be open when someone points one out and not to defend for too long.

But I have friends who lost their families in the camps. I expect that every one of us knows several Jewish people, and I can just about guarantee that they lost dozens of family members in the Holocaust. It was not long ago and far away. It wasn't just Germany in the 40s. It was Armenia in 1915. It was the Soviet Union in the 30s. It was China in the 50s. It was Cambodia in 1975. It was Rwanda in 1994. It was Bosnia in 1995. It was right here. It was yesterday, and it will be tomorrow.

And “they” didn’t do it. Good, upstanding, right-thinking people who "knew" they were doing the "right" thing—people just like us—did it.

And it all starts with saying, “Those damn Jews,” "Those damn Tutsis," "Those damn Bosnians."

"Those damn Morroccans."

-30-

Week 5 - Utrecht and Middelburg

by Timothy Perrin

Utrecht - August 31-September 2

In Utrecht, we stayed with a lovely woman named Marion Beltran. She is Terre's age and works as the department head at a local college in a program to train arts managers. These are people who aren't artists themselves but who manage galleries, theatre companies or the like.

She took us on a long bike ride for some great apple pie by the river. On the way there we went by a house where Napoleon's brother used to live. On the way back, we went by the Schröder-Schräder House designed by Gerrit Rietveld, an architect friend of abstract artist Piet Mondriaan that looks like a Mondriaan painting, all primary colors and straight lines. It was completely out of place on a street of conventional brick Dutch homes.

Rietveld started out as a carpenter, only later becoming an architect. Along with Piet Mondriaan, Bart van der Leck, Theo van Doesburg and others, they founded the De Stijl movement, an abstract integrated style.
The style quickly spread beyond Holland and was picked up by people like El Lissitzky in Russia and Vilmos Huszar in Hungary. There were connections with the German Bauhaus style. De Stijl was more than architecture. It was a style, a way of approaching design, and was used for paintings, furniture, carpets, even book design. (Thanks to Ineke for the background on Rietveld, Mondriaan, De Stijl, and for the links.)

Terre also came up with a great title for a piece on Holland: "Bricks and Bikes." Now all I need is the story.

More Camping - September 3-9

After leaving, Marion's on the 2nd, we did our first big stretch of camping down on the coast in Zeeland, the southwestern province of Holland.

What we did do while down there was do some test riding of another tandem recumbent bicycle, an M5 tandem. Now this is a beautiful bike. We have also tried out an Altena tandem but, on the whole, we prefer the M5. We took it for a 20 km ride to a nearby town. Now, we are trying to figure out how to afford it (€3500 - CDN $5600 - US $4200). Right now it is out of the question. (The Altena is even more expensive, €4200!)

We are camped tonight (Sep 8) on the Lek River about 30 km up river from Rotterdam, the largest seaport in the world. There is a steady traffic of barges and river boats. The picture of Yoda in week 4 is actually the campsite on the Lek.

Tomorrow we go to Almere on the New Polder. (A polder is land reclaimed from the sea). It is the youngest city in Holland, only 25 years old. We spend the weekend with Ineke and Benno again eating up their leftovers from the party and going to a fruit and vegetable parade. (Don't ask; I don't know. Talk to Terre on this one.)

Then we will spend a few days in Rotterdam, Pick up Jonnie for a day or two in Amsterdam and Haarlem doing museums, then, only three weeks behind schedule, on to Belgium.

At this rate, we'll be home in time for the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. But as we like to say, we don't really have a schedule. We are in no rush to get no where. With rare exceptions, we don't have commitments other than to ourselves.

Talk to you later.

Tim

A Good Place to Be a Canadian

by

Timothy Perrin

“You’re Canadian?” The man asking—he told me his name was “Bob”—must have been in his seventies. He was a guest at a party my wife Terre and I were attending in a small village in Friesland, the northernmost province of Holland.

“Yes,” I said, “from British Columbia.”

“I remember the first time I saw a Canadian,” he said. “It wasn’t five kilometers from here.”

I smiled and said, “And he was in uniform.”

Bob nodded, and smiled back. “He was on a motorcycle, on a reconnaissance.”

From the late summer of 1944 until the final victory in Holland on May 5, 1945, Canadian troops under the command of 30-year-old Brigadier Henry Bell-Irving, also from BC, swept through the Dutch lowlands, pushing back German troops, liberating one town after another.

And “liberate” is the word the Dutch use. They tell me of the day the Canadians “liberated” their town, their city, their village. They tell me of the food brought to them after weeks of starvation by the sons of farmers from the prairies and the sons of fishermen from the east, loggers’ boys from BC and shipyard workers’ kids from Ontario and Quebec. Virtually every Dutch person we meet who is old enough to have lived through World War II has a story to tell us about “the Canadians” and the impact they had on the lives of everyone in the Netherlands during the closing months of the war.

There was a woman I met on Thursday night at a neighborhood party in Eelde, near Groningen, only 50 kilometres from the German border. Groningen was one of the last German holdouts in Holland, the site of vicious fighting in the last days of the war. “I was five years old when the war ended,” she told me. “We were hiding two Canadians in our house.” At five, she didn’t understand the risk her parents were taking. If discovered, the Canadians would have been sent to a POW camp; the Dutch who were hiding them would have been sent to Auschwitz—that is if they weren’t killed on the spot as an object lesson to their neighbours. Even though I wouldn’t be born until four-and-a-half-years after the end of the war, she wanted me to know about it because I’m a Canadian and, in Holland, being a Canadian makes you special.

Our hosts in Eelde took us not 150 metres from their house, to a small local cemetery. There, in a special plot gratefully maintained by the people of the local community, stand the gravestones of six British fliers and one Canadian. He had been flying as part of a British RAF bomber crew. He and his buddies lie side by side—pilot, navigator, radioman, bombardier, gunners—in a small town that hasn’t forgotten why they died. You will find these small gravesites throughout Holland, in churchyards and city cemeteries all around the country.

But the cost to our country of what our troops did in 1945 isn’t really clear until you visit one of the Canadian war cemeteries like that one we went to at Groesbeek. There, more than 2,700 Canadian soldiers lie beneath simple marble markers bearing their serial numbers, ranks, names, units, and dates of death. Sometimes the marker has an age, and many bear inscriptions from the families.

There was a set of three, in particular, that pulled at my heart, three boys from the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, all killed on March 2, 1945. On the marker of D.O. Guerin, 27, his family had added “He never shunned his country’s call but gladly gave his life for all.” The parting message to 23-year-old Priv. D. Montgomery from his parents—by now also long gone—reads: “You were your mother’s treasure and your father’s pride.” But the most poignant was the marker of Priv. R.F. Hume which simply said “Bobby.” That was all, and it was enough to make me cry.

On the large war memorial at the cemetery, tucked into a bunch of wilted flowers, I found a faded photograph of a good-looking young man in uniform. On the back it said, “Cpl. Edward Miles Hughson, Lincoln and Welland Regiment, Royal Canadian Infantry Corps. January 1917-28 February 1945, age 27.” I couldn’t help but think how this man, just two years older than my father, should have been home thinking about his great-grandchildren as my dad gets to do rather than lying in a field in Holland.

But the tombstone that had the greatest impact was that of 35-year-old Private T.F. Jordan of the Toronto Scottish Regiment. It was simply inscribed “Beloved Husband and Father.” Here was a man who, at 35, certainly didn’t have to go off to war. But he volunteered, survived boot camp and infantry training, and kept up with soldiers literally half his age as they slogged across Europe. His family waited and waited for him to return, only to lose him in the final months of the war.

To me, he stood for Canada.

As a country, we also didn’t have to go to war. We were safe behind a 4,500-km-wide moat called the Atlantic Ocean. There was no direct threat to us or to our way of life. But we did it because it was necessary.

In 1980, I was privileged to go to Cyprus to do a story on the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry battalion then on peace-keeping duty along the “green line” between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots. Under the UN flag, Canada had been involved in peace-keeping on Cyprus for many years. We’ve been peace keepers in Egypt, Bosnia, Rwanda, and just about anywhere else the Security Council has asked us to go.

I’ve always been a believer in the saying, “Choose your battles.” Canada has done a good job of “choosing its battles.” We have made our reputation as a country that helps keep the peace. We’ve turned down the call to unnecessary battle, even from our powerful and coercive neighbour, but when it was necessary, we have not shirked the duty to fight, and we have thousands of plain marble headstones across France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands to prove it.

The Dutch remember what Canadian boys did.

Holland is a good place to be a Canadian.

* * *

Tim Perrin carefully chose his battles as a Vietnam era war protestor and draft resistor; not all wars are just. A native of California, he has lived in Canada since 1974 and been a Canadian citizen since 1978.

-30-

Copyright © 2005 Timothy Perrin
All Rights Reserved

Week 4 - Culemborg, Eelde, Ineke & Benno's Party, Camping at Sondel

by

Timothy Perrin

Culemborg - August 24-25

August 24-25, we stayed with a couple in Culemborg, Trijntje and André, who lived in a "green" housing project, one with solar heating, ponds to treat their own "grey" water, serious recycling, and as much environmentally friendly technology as they could design into the buildings. Trijntje was nice; André didn't seem to want us there. He would read her funny stuff out of the paper in Dutch and not share it with us, etc.

They had two darling boys and a great little kitten named Pippa. The housing project was fascinating. She said many of the locals considered the folks in the housing project crazies.

Eelde - August 19-21, 26-27

Before and after Culemborg and Bredevoort (August 19-21 & 26-27) we were in Eelde with Jan and Jitske, the nudists. (See my post "Nearly Naked in the Netherlands.") We went back up to catch the airshow on Saturday August 27 and they took us to a neighborhood party bar-b-que.

Jan colored Terre's hair! He said he always did Jitske's hair but he did hers in the nude. Terre wore a shirt. Jan wore his pants.

Jan and Jitske are an extremely nice couple, but we never did get to see them naked. (Damn!) And, no, no one rode their bikes naked as everyone seems to have supposed from my piece. That's against the law here, too. But there were a couple of naked folks around the pool at the club. But it was a miserable, rainy afternoon by the time we got to the club -- drenching rain -- so most people stayed inside fully clothed. (Damn!)

Ineke and Benno's Friendship Party - August 28

Sunday-Monday, August 28-9, we attended a 25th anniversary party for two total strangers, Ineke and Benno. It was the anniversary of their friendship, not their wedding. As Ineke commented, "We will never celebrate that institution!!! We arranged the wedding only because of the advantages we could get that time as a heterosexual couple!!" She has strong feelings on the subject.

The weekend was fascinating. A great guest list. They had lived in Warsaw and Saudi Arabia and Spain so the guests came from far and wide. There was a university prof from Warsaw who was great company. An Israeli couple who had come from Iran and Argentina who were going to Nuremberg. Arie said he wants to understand what happened. "I hate Germans," he told Terre. "Why?" she asked. "Because I am a Jew." That was enough. I spent a lot of time talking to Hans van den Berg, Benno's brother-in-law. He works for NATO in dispute resolution at a very high level. He's been at the head of the table in the Cyprus peace talks. He was a very interesting man and seemed to find me reasonably interesting as well. We're seeing this couple (the anniversary couple) again next weekend (Sep 9-10) and I'm hoping Hans and his wife -- a family court judge -- will be there again.

Camping in Sondel - August 29-30

We camped two days after the party, our first two nights on our own. We were really ready to spend some time without others around. We stayed in a little place on the coast of Friesland called Sondel.

We learned a hard lesson about keeping the secondary and primary battery systems separated when we ran the starting battery down to nothing and needed a jump start from a nice German guy who didn't speak English. I was ready to give up and push start but he kept bringing out better cables and a spare battery and a battery tester until finally Yoda -- that's the van -- started.

Nearly Naked in the Netherlands

by

Timothy Perrin

“Imagine,” I said to my wife Terre after dinner on Saturday. “All these people have seen each other naked.”

“I know,” she said. “I like it.”

* * *

It had all started on Thursday when we had called two complete strangers, two people whom we had never met, and asked if we could stay at their house on Friday and Saturday night. Not surprisingly—at least not to us—they said, “Yes.”

I mean, isn’t everyone’s vacation like this? Doesn’t everybody in Holland treat strangers this way? It seems that all the Dutch we had met do.

* * *

On Friday, Jan and Jitske welcomed two unknown travelers from another continent into their home, gave us a key to their house, and then took us for a tour of the area.

After several hours, we ended the tour at the Bruin Café De Amer, a blues café in the nearby village of Amen, a tiny dot in the northern part of the Netherlands. Many of the finest blues musicians in the world seek out this obscure venue to play before an audience of just 100 people “not for the money,” as the owner puts it, “but for the emotional money.” It is not so much a gig as a pilgrimage. Perhaps then, it is not by chance that the village is named “Amen.”

* * *

Later, at dinner, Jan dropped the bombshell.

“Tomorrow, we are going on a bike ride with our club,” he told us, “and we’ve arranged for you to come. It is 24-kilometres, and then we will have dinner at our clubhouse.”

“Oh, thank you,” Terre said. “That would be lovely.”

“But there is one thing you should know,” he added, studying us carefully for our reactions. “We are nudists, and there may be some naked people walking around.”

Oh.

I looked at my Baptist-reared wife who smiled and said, “Sure. That sounds like fun. We’re in.”
If I hadn’t already been sunburned, I would have turned red.

* * *

Admittedly, not everyone stays in the homes of the locals, getting private tours, being taken to people’s secret swimming holes or favorite pubs in unknown villages in minor provinces, or for bike rides with the nudist club. Most vacations follow the same tourist big-city litany.

But for us, the life of a country is in the people of the towns and villages as well as in the big cities. That’s why we joined an organization called SERVAS (www.SERVAS.org), an international group that operates on the premise that the world would be a better place if we all sat down over dinner and got to know each other. So, people around the world have offered to host travelers who have been pre-screened by SERVAS volunteers. In each country, the local SERVAS organization publishes a directory of hosts that is only available to SERVAS members. The directory includes the languages the hosts speak, their ages, occupations, interests, pets, whether they smoke, if they are anxious for more visitors and other factors to help you make an appropriate choice.

Then you write, e-mail or phone to see if they can accommodate you. You stay no more than two nights unless invited. You bring your own bedding, contribute to the household chores, do some of the cooking and shopping and generally pitch in. This is someone’s home, after all, not a hotel.

In return, you get an insider’s look at life in a country, one you would otherwise never have received and, as we’ve already discovered, find some marvelous new friends, most, but not all, fully-clothed.

* * *

Two days earlier, our previous SERVAS hosts had taken us bike riding as well, but it had been Terre’s first time on a bike in three years. Our hosts had been overly ambitious. What was for them a normal 50-km ride was, for Terre, way too much. It wasn’t that she couldn’t pedal that distance. She just couldn’t sit on the saddle that long. By the end of the ride, she was almost in tears.

The Saturday morning of the ride with the nudist club dawned gray and cloudy, perfect bike riding weather: cool but not cold.

Terre fitted her borrowed bike with a gel-seatcover she had brought from home and gingerly sat down, gently shifting her weight from side to side. Then she smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “I think I can do this.”

* * *

The first leg of the ride would be the real test. An unknown 24-km of roadway and bike trails stretched before us. Would we fall behind all these experienced Dutch cyclists, people virtually born with pedals attached to their feet? Would we get lost in the endless maze of bicycle trails in the woods and moors of northern Holland?

With trepidation, we set out, carefully keeping the cyclists in front of us in sight, trusting that we could keep up until the first rest stop where we had been promised that, if necessary, we could switch to a car. One minute went by. We were okay. Then two minutes. Still no problems. Then three minutes, and Jitske called out, “Coffee break!”

The first fearsome 600 metres of the trip were behind us.

* * *

At the second stop, a club member commented that Terre and I were the only two people wearing bicycle helmets. I explained that bicycle helmets were required by law in Canada. I would never think of getting on a motorcycle without a helmet, and I often rode my bicycle as fast when going down a hill. (Dutch readers may have read about “hills” in books or seen pictures. We have them in Canada, very large ones called “mountains.”)

“When I first started to wear a bicycle helmet,” I said, “it felt very strange to me. But now, I feel naked without it.”

I managed to say this with a straight face.

* * *

At dinner that night, Terre had only one question about the nudist lifestyle. “When you fry bacon, do you do that in the nude, too?”

* * *

For the bike ride and dinner with the nudists, I had decided to leave my camera behind. I thought it might be inappropriate to bring a camera to a nudist club. I didn’t know how these people would feel about an outsider possibly taking pictures. So I just left my camera at the house.

But then we stopped at the windmill in Eenrum where Terre and I were invited into the very top of the mill, a section normally off limits. We were given the cook’s tour of the inner workings of the 143-year-old mechanism. It was a travel writer’s feast, a photographer’s banquet. And I was without cutlery.

* * *

Twenty-four hours earlier, Jan and Jitske had taken us to Camp Westerbork, a Nazi deportation camp for Dutch Jews.

Now, on Saturday evening, we were at a nearby nudist camp where being different is okay; in fact, it is celebrated. Everyone is simply who they are. There are no pretenses, no hiding, no flattering dress lines, no vertical stripes to make you look thinner, no control-top panty hose, no under-wire support bras, nothing to cover your stretch marks or your beer belly.

“That’s what I like about this place,” said Terre. “Everyone can be themselves. They bare everything, and it is accepted.”

* * *

So what did I learn this day?

I learned something new about my wife of twelve years.

And, I learned to never—ever—leave my camera behind, even when going for a bicycle ride with the nudists.

* * *

Timothy Perrin is a Canadian writer on a year-long sabbatical in Europe with his wife, Terre, a middle-school teacher. They live, usually fully clothed, in Westbank, British Columbia.

-30-

Copyright © 2005 Timothy Perrin

All Rights Reserved

Week 3 - Drouwenerveen, Bredevoort

by

Timothy Perrin

Drouwenerveen - August 17-18

Next were Chris and Dina in the tiny hamlet of Drouwenerveen (August 17-18). They took us for a long bike ride to Dina's secret swimming hole; even Chris didn't know where it was. The ride, however, was a bit too long for Terre's bum, which hadn't been on a bike seat in three years. Fortunately, it was a tandem and I was able to do most of the work for the last third of the trip and Terre could stand on the cross bar and relieve the weight off her bum. The peddles were set too long for Terre and she couldn't stand on the bumps so every one went straight to the bone. Ouch!

But what did happen was Terre realized that she loved riding a tandem and we've been shopping for one ever since. More on that later on.

Eelde - August 19-21

This was our first stay with Jan and Jitske in Eelde. I'll get to them in next week's summary.

Bredevoort - August 22-23

August 22-23, we stayed In Bredev0ort with a city councillor, Joop Wikkerink, and his wife, Dinie, a very talented photographer. Bredevoort is near the German border and a small medieval fortress. Their tourist schtick is bookstores, 27 in this tiny town, but most sell junk. A few are good, specializing in certain types of books.

Dinie's work is really extraordinary. She gave us some of her work and I had tears in my eyes. The only problem with staying with them was that Joop smoked as did their daughter. On the plus side, they had two nice cats.

There was another couple in the town, Henk and Renske, who had also wanted to host us and with whom we had dinner. Unfortunately, Henk smoked even more than Joop, so I'm glad we chose Joop and Dinie to stay with. We would have had a real problem with the smoke despite his best efforts to be courteous and to blow the smoke up into the air. We've been more careful about choosing non-smoking homes since then.

Renske's dinner was spectacular. A vegetarian feast built around the theme of orange in honor of the House of Orange, as in William of Orange, Orangemen, etc. That's the Dutch royal family.

Henk, by the way, runs one of the good bookstores in town with a marvelous collection of art and architecture books. It's small but the collection impressive.

Week 2 - Den Haag

by

Timothy Perrin

Den Haag - August 11- 16

We went from Jonnie's to Den Haag (the Hague) for six days with three hosts.

First up were Bob and Rosie Harle. He is a computer geek with an international agency, the European Patent Agency. She is a very talented writer. They live in a little cottage on a canal in a suburb of Den Haag which backs on to a sheep field. Behind that is a golf course. All very rural and beautiful but really only a long walk--3 km--from downtown Den Haag. Rosie made incredible scones, the recipe for which she shared with Terre and with which we will grace on our friends when we return.

By the time we left 48-hours later, Rosie and Terre were nearly in tears at parting: twins parted at birth, you would think.

See you guys soon.

Adnan and Angie are a very interesting couple. He is also a computer guy with an international agency--the chemical warfare inspection agency. He is Turkish. Angie is about 15 years younger, completely different in personality, a psychologist by training, and Greek. Wow! They are a great couple! Fun, interesting, fascinating, full of stories from two very different cultures.
Adnan is a true diplomat in practice as well as legal fact. He treated us beautifully and always kept us well plied with food and beverages. (Oh, I think I need to loosen my belt another notch.)

Angie has a marvelous Greek temperament and gets wound up about things. Adnan is quiet and soothing. He tells the story about coming into Athens. He is on a Turkish diplomatic passport. She is using her Greek passport. "Now don't go getting all wound up. You're the wife of a diplomat," he tells her. "I won't, if they aren't idiots," she says. Of course, they ask too many questions or something and before long, Angie is wound up. "Why are you asking that? What does that have to do with anything?" Adnan says he just stood back and hoped she didn't get herself arrested.

By the way, Angie--who so far has kept herself out of jail, thank goodness--makes the best bar-b-que east of New Mexico. You can come use my grill anytime, Angie girl.

Interestingly, their official home country is Canada and Angie is the vice president of the Canadian Women's Association. They were living in Ontario working near Ottawa when Adnan got this job in Den Haag. Angie can't wait to move back to the great white North. We can't wait to have her.

Again, Terre bonded with Angie instantly and leaving was hard. I really liked Adnan as well and I am greatly looking forward to seeing them again, hopefully before we leave.

Our third family in Den Haag were Margreet, Kent, and Christy Foster. Kent is originally Canadian and he met Margreet when she was a pretty young Dutch girl traveling in Canada. They ended up married and moved back to Holland. Christy is their smart, perky, fun 13-year-old who took us to the fireworks competition on the waterfront. What a show. The Polish team had fireworks coming right out of the water off the beach.

Kent works for the International Criminal Court, not to be confused with the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal. The Yugoslav tribunal was set up by the UN just to handle cases arising out of the former Yugoslavia. Once they've tried all those cases, they are done. The International Criminal Court is a permanent body. It is the one the US refused to participate in so that it is free to commit war crimes without international sanction.

The Fosters live in a magnificent old house owned by Margreet's mom. They have the second floor. Mom has the first. There is an apartment on the third and another in the attic occupied by two women who also work at the ICC.

Christy goes to the Montessori high school--she just started high school the day after we arrived. Terre wanted to visit her classroom but it was the first day and just too soon to do something like that. We hope to squeeze it in before we come home.

It was Christy's 13th birthday the week before we arrived but she had been at camp so she didn't get her presents until after we arrived. She had an earring from her Canadian grandmother that had been damaged in transit. I dug out my trusty soldering iron and fixed it making myself the hero of the night.

Margreet turned us on to the Den Haag Rose Garden. For those of you who don't know, perhaps my favorite photographic subject is flowers. (Remember, my degree is in botany.) I was in heaven. The sky was overcast meaning the lighting was perfect. I spent hours and hours taking pictures. This orange rose is the best shot of the lot.

Week 1 (revised Sep 14) - Arrival, a tiny bit of Amsterdam, Eemnes, Spakenburg, Laren, The Hidden Garden

by

Timothy Perrin

Typically for me, I keep wanting to make everything perfect and only post my best stuff. As a result, I've been delaying putting up anything. That is ending here.

This is a summary of what we've been doing since we arrived, based on e-mails to various people, edited and spliced together here with lots of additions.

Arrival

I arrived on August 3, 2005, on Air Canada. Terre wasn't set to arrive until the next day since we were traveling on different point systems.

We are staying most of the time with hosts who are members of SERVAS, an international peace organization based on the premise that the world would be a better place if we all sat down to dinner and got to know one another (http://www.servas.org/). So, people who are willing to host travelers for a night or two list themselves in a directory which is available to screened travelers. Then you call or write or e-mail and ask if you can stay. More often than not, the answer is "Sure."

The first thing I did on arriving was check in with Donna Turner, the woman in Utrecht from whom we were buying the van (http://www.dutchcampervans.com/). Donna met a nice Dutch boy in Cleveland in 1971 and, well, you know the story.

I took my vastly excessive load of luggage to Utrecht on the train, dragged it the length of the train station and Donna picked me up. I left virtually all of my stuff in the van and then took the train into Amsterdam for the night burdened with just an overnight bag and my computer bag -- what I should have brought in the first place. I e-mailed Terre to leave everything behind and travel light. (She still brought 90 lbs of stuff, but that was better than the 200 she had planned to bring.)

Amsterdam - August 3-4

Our host in Amsterdam those first two nights (one night for Terre) was Sharon Belden, an exceedingly nice lady, formerly from Oregon but now some 30 years now in Holland and a Dutch citizen. She teaches English for a living in a country where virtually everyone knows at least a little English and most want to get better at it. (Next to bicycles, English seems the second most popular pastime in this country.) She lives on a small "plein" or square (actually a triangle in her case) with the old trolley repair barns on one side. Now some developer wants to turn them into an entertainment center which, not surprisingly, has the neighborhood in a tizzy as they don't want their parking mess to be even worse, plus the crowds and the noise.

I went to Schiphol Airport on Thursday, August 4, to pick up Terre. When we finally spotted each other, we hugged and hung on like it had been one year instead of one day since we'd seen each other. Our reaction surprised both of us, but it was very strong. I was very glad to see her, and she me.

Eemnes - August 5-10

We stayed six days, August 5-10, in the village of Eemnes with Jonnie Reinders, a great lady who would probably have liked us to stay permanently. She was very good to us but she can't give directions for shit. She would always leave out something like, oh say, a city or a river or a country, something minor like that. You had to take her directions as merely being like "over that way." It was always, "Oh it's easy. You can't miss it." But we always did because she always gave lousy directions. (Sorry, Jonnie.) Maybe it was because she didn't want us to leave. She would never say "north" or "east." "The Dutch don't know the directions," she tried to convince us.

We got real tired of being lost--and not just from Jonnie's directions. After we left Amsterdam and took the train down to Utrecht and actually picked up the van, we got hopelessly lost getting out of Utrecht. We ended up going 20 km on the wrong freeway, had to double back, fight our way through the Utrecht rush hour traffic to the right freeway, etc. And this was after I had gone to MapQuest.com, downloaded the directions and printed them out, turn by turn. We were so frustrated that we bought a Tom-Tom, a satellite navigation system. It was actually Terre's idea since she is not a good map reader or navigator and hates the job. (I point this out since I am usually the techno junkie.) Now, the system does the navigation for us, telling us exactly where and when to turn, and takes us right to the door of places we've never been in complicated medieval cities with short little streets that twist and change names every 50 feet. It's really quite amazing. We love it. So far, it's only given us one or two bad steers, and then it was able to quickly compensate. If you miss a turn or for some reason take another route, it just adapts, calculates a new route on the fly and keeps going. Now, this is useful technology.

Spakenburg

Near Eemnes, we visited the town of Spakenburg during their annual festival. This is a fishing town on what used to be the Zuiderzee but what is now a freshwater lake. The folks there dress up in traditional costume, the main street gets closed down by street vendors, and there are many too many people around. But the harbor is beautiful. And we found a good electronic scale for €1.00. It was part of our acclimatization to getting around and learning simple things like driving and parking and communicating in Holland.

Laren

Laren is on the other side of the freeway from Eemnes and is an older town. Eemnes is a modern suburb created in a traditional style. Laren, on the other hand, has been around a while. Not three or four hundred years like many of the towns in this part of the world, but a while.

Every summer, in a grove of huge trees on the town green outside the church, a waffle house sets up shop in a temporary building that goes right around the trees. They use traditional methods of making waffles on an old fashioned machine that is the size of a couple of upright pianos back-to-back but all shiny and metallic. The cooks work busily pumping out the waffles as fast as they can because the place is very popular.

The Hidden Garden

Jonnie also took us to what we came to call “The Hidden Garden.” This is a lovely tea house by a stream that came about by accident. Apparently, the owner inherited the property from his father. While the father had lived there, the rules had changed and the son could not. So, what to do with this beautiful property? While he couldn’t live on it, he could run a business on it, so that is what he did.

His wife cooks the pastries. He builds—gazebos, fanciful dollhouses, whatever his wife tells him it needs—and he does the landscaping, which is breathtaking. The result is a breathtaking oasis with incredible food.

What more could you ask for?

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