Home sweet home

 The constant taking on and off of all those layers, removing them inside the overheated cinema or hall, or workshop – and layering up again to go out into the biting wet wind left me with a killer flu.
But I was continually amazed by technology and felt like the proverbial country bumpkin in the big city. The conference centre boasted intelligent energy saving escalators that only started to move as your foot touched the first step. We couldn’t figure out the intelligence of the enormous revolving doors at the entrance – keeping the heat in and the  cold and wet out – but they did stop and start at will and certainly didn’t like being   pushed!
I encountered a room which on one day was set up as a lecture theatre with tiered seating for 80 people – and on the next all the seats were folded away and it had become a round table workshop. The tiered seating got concertina’d and packed away neatly under the technician’s sound and light window – gliding on quiet rollers. A room like that could be very useful here.
E tickets rule. The Film Festival uploaded tickets onto your pass which is scanned at the cinema doorway. Only electronic check-in is available at Schiphol Airport where you pop your passport into a machine, punch in your destination and the  boarding pass is automatically printed. I am not sure how much time that saves though. There is need for smart human staff to make sure the techno-challenged can operate the blue automatons – and then you still have to check-in the baggage – which requires showing said boarding pass and passport to a live human and getting the baggage label printed.
I loved the wide streets with designated lanes for cars, trams and bicycles as well as expansive pedestrian boulevards with little kiosk restaurants of many nationalities. The tiny mainstreet Vietnamese kiosk (seating for about 10) had its space saving kitchen underground. Service was super fast even though we had said we weren’t in a hurry. Huge bowls of steaming broth were filled with rice noodles and a choice of meat or chicken. I didn’t really like the beef balls which came in mine – they tasted very processed – but enjoyed the fresh mint, basil, chopped chillies and crunchy bean sprouts for extra flavour. Just the right kind of food for a cold night before doing all the wrapping up again to go back outside.
On a couple of mornings an enormous market sprouted on one of the spacious boulevards near the railway station. On sale was lots of fabric, woollen goods, cheeses, fruit, fish and flowers. I didn’t see how the market materialised but it was rather like the magic room with probably more human effort and less automation. People arrive early in the dark with their vans and set up tables and awnings, stalls, ground covers and lights to display their produce to the best. Even in the snow and wet the stall holders come out. I loved the cheese stall with its giant wheels of different cheeses and bought one piece of Dutch edam wrapped in wax paper to bring home.
The flowers are amazing and even mid-winter offers different flowering bulbs – amazing tulips of course, as well as narcissi and delicate daffodils in pots to brighten up windowsills to get through the rest of the cold, northern season.
I am happy to live in the warm South!
– g.jeke@yahoo.com