Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

This has to be shaping up to be one of the wettest Dutch summers on record. It seems to rain every single day and not just a little bit, either. It regularly comes down like a monsoon and is frequently accompanied by thunder and lightning.

The quantities of precipitation have been such that we’ve had some water in our cellar on a couple of occasions now; nothing too bad, but any water seeping into your home is unwelcome water. Still, this is Amsterdam and there’s not much you can do. Life here is a constant battle against water, as it is in most of the country.

Anyway, Sunday just gone offered a rare period of sunny skies in between predictions of doom and gloom on either side. Normally, we’d avoid any popular weekend destination in favour of a midweek getaway, but one can’t make any assumptions about the weather at the moment, so we took the car up to Enkhuizen yesterday to visit Sprookjeswonderland.

Sprookjeswonderland is a children’s park with fairy-tales forming the underlying theme of the various attractions. Children can enjoy everything from boat and train rides to mechanised fairy-tale figures twitching to piped music. Some of it was a lot of fun; other bits are a bit naff and showing their age. That didn’t stop the crowds from descending in droves, however.

In general, it was a great day out, because Eloïse loved virtually every minute of it. In fact, we had a hard time getting her out of there at 17:00, when the park was closing. She’d run around so much that we felt certain she would fall asleep in the car on the way home, but she amazed us by remaining alert not just for the ride home, but also well into the evening once we got inside.

I hope we can do a couple more day trips over the coming days, but the weather forecast is looking pretty dire again.

A week ago on Sunday, we seized a dry, sunny moment and drove over to the neighbourhood of Oud Osdorp, a lovely area of rural tranquility on the outskirts of Amsterdam and not at all representative of what comes to mind when one hears the name Osdorp these days.

The reason was the organic farm De Boterbloem, where Eloïse got to pick her own delicious strawberries from the vegetable garden. While we were there, we were also able to pick some flowers to brighten up the home.

It was lovely to be able to offer Eloïse the opportunity to pick her own fruit, thereby giving her her first indication of where the stuff actually comes from. It doesn’t just magically appear in the supermarket and it’s good for her to understand that a lot of time and effort goes into the stages of planting, cultivating and harvesting before she can pop a strawberry into her mouth.

And how pleasant that all of the produce is organically grown. The farm has a calming atmosphere about it, with a nice wooden barn in which the shop is situated. It reminded me a bit of the dog sleigh farm in Maine that we visited last autumn.