Netherlands Day 4

leaving Amsterdam

The girls in the hostel for some reason decided to all wake up at six am and rustle around their sheets and blankets and nylon duffel bags and zippers and unlock and open and close their lockers. Also they all thought it would be a good idea to walk back and forth across the room.

Which meant that I had to get up too, even though they weren't serving breakfast until eight. While I was changing into the tank tops and jeans I've worn for the past three days, I watched one of the early risers comb her eyebrows with a brow brush. Or whatever that thing is called. Then she put on eyebrow pencil.

When you are travelling around with a heavy backpack and sleeping in dormatory hostels, isn't an eyebrow brush the sort of thing you leave at home? I mean, I had to think SERIOUSLY about whether or not to bring a hairbrush. (I didn't, in the end.)

We ex-nayed breakfast at the hostel, walked to the train station, left our luggage in some lockers (I love that about Europe, that you can leave you stuff in all sorts of places), and bought a chocolate croissant. On to Alkmaar and the cheese market!

Alkmaar

The train to Alkmaar is pleasant and quick, just like every other train ride in this country. We pass many green fields with sheep and cows, and I try to take pictures of them through the window. Farmland is cut across by small channels of water, mini-canals, it seems. The land is so flat, and so empty; the sky looks so big up above. And always, there are clouds, big puffy clouds and flatter smooth clouds, moving fast across the blue-gray. We count windmills as we pass them.

When we get to Alkmaar, it is drizzling. We walk out of the station and pass the huge grote kerk, the "big church" that is central to every village and town in this region. This particular church is covered in a greenish moss and is surrounded by a tree-lined courtyard. We pass a cheese shop with my last name and I proudly stand under its signage to take a picture.

Alkmaar is famous for its cheese auction, held every Friday morning April through October. The cheese auction is called for ten o'clock, and we are several minutes early. Already, the central plaza is roped off with metal barricades to keep the people away from the cheese. In the center of the plaza are long piles of cheese. At least I assume they are cheese; each pile is covered with a white tarp, and signs sticking out from them read, "Gouda," and a price. We taste some sample cheeses from one of the carts lining the square. I'm not so into Gouda, I have to say, it's too soft and bland for me. But the cheese lady (one of many) also has goat cheese, which I love, so we buy a whole slice of that and gobble it up.

It starts pouring rain, so we quickly hide under the shelter of an overhang at the edge of the plaza. I'm not sure we're allowed where we are standing, but there are several other people with us, and besides, they still haven't started yet. Inside the building beside us is a huge scale, the kind that hangs from the ceiling, is made from iron and could probably hold a standing cow on each balance. After some minutes, a cheese official shooes us out and we have to join the hordes who are standing behind the barricades, some with their own umbrellas, some under restaurant umbrellas.

This is what happens at a cheese auction:

1. A lady talks into a microphone for a long, long time. Most of it is Dutch. Her accent is so thick that even when she speaks English it is hard to understand. So I have no idea what she talks about. Perhaps she comments on our overall enthusiasm level, which is a bit lacking other than the row of cheering children near the front.
2. Men in white lab coats walk around with clipboards. At each pile of cheese, they stop, lift the tarp, take a wheel from the pile, and cut it up. They taste one piece and give some to the crowd. Then they write down stuff.
3. Young women in traditional Dutch dress walk around the plaza next to the barricades doing not much other than looking like traditional Dutch cheese maidens. I think that's what they're going for. They have white Amish bonnets, red neck scarves, blue apronish dresses, red socks, and wooden clogs.
4. Cheese Guilde Men cart wheels of cheese, eight at a time, on a special wooden harness stretcher. They carry them to the big scale in the front, and then they carry them back to a wheelbarrow, which is then wheeled to a cheese truck out of view. the Cheese Guilde Men wear all white except for their hats, which are like little straw play bonnets, only painted yellow, red, green, and blue, and tied with a coordinated ribbon. The Head CGM wears an orange hat to show he is in charge. (If he showed up in America dressed like that he would for sure be beat up.)
5. CGM continue to cart the cheese to the scale and to the truck.
6. This goes on for more than an hour.
7. Most people leave the square as it has become quite boring.

So that's a cheese auction, now you know. We left after forty minutes to go to the local Beer Museum, called the Biermuseum in Dutch, which was cute, but not terribly exciting. I watched a number of humorous Heinekin ads and learned how to brew beer, which I kind of sort of knew about from my bartending school days. (Calling it bartending school is a bit generous, I know.) When we left the museum, the CGM were still carting cheese.

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Amsterdam --> Middleburg --> Domberg --> castle

At the train station, I got the most delicious lunch, which was pasta with fresh basil pesto and sun-dried tomatoes and a round of goat cheese that was sweeter than anything I've tasted and must have had a piece of heaven inside. Waaaay better than Trader Joe's or the Silver Goat chevre, and I eat that stuff like it's candy. (But mostly because it tastes so damn good with TJ's balsamic vingrette.)

WE ALMOST DIDN'T MAKE IT!!!!!

The train from Amsterdam to Middleburg is a little over two hours, and there were several stops in between, most of which we were only somewhat aware of since the conductor spoke only in Dutch. At one stop, he talked for an awfully long time, and then a few minutes later, the lights in the cabin went off. Remember how we don't speak Dutch and understood not a word. Maybe he was giving us stats on that day's gas mileage. I got a nagging feeling that something was wrong, and voiced this to my mom, who was blissfully unaware, deep in her book. At that moment there was short, shart lurch in the direction opposite from where we were travelling. As if our car was moving backwards. We jumped out of the train and saw that they HAD DETATCHED OUR CAR FROM THE FRONT OF THE TRAIN AND WERE ABOUT TO LEAVE US AND THE STATION BEHIND. Boy did we run with our bags to the front car, where a conductor was waving his hands like, dude, hurry up, get with the program.

At Middleburg we had to take a bus to Domberg, and then walk some hundred meters to our hostel, which was . . .

(drumbeat)

A CASTLE!!!

A CASTLE WITH A MOAT AND SOME TURRETS AND A COAT OF ARMOR IN THE LOBBY!!! (And a head of deer in the dining room.)

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resting in our castle, aren't you jealous

We pounce on dinner as though we haven't eaten for days. It is DELICIOUS: steamed brocolli with molasses sauce, green salad, rice, potato soup that may or may not be made with a meat base but I didn't ask and they didn't tell, spinach potato cheese casserole, pineapple yogurt with whip cream. Also there is a deer's head on the wall of the dining room. Obviously.

Seriously, this castle hostel is the best idea ever. All I want to do is sit and think about how I'm sleeping in a castle tonight. But instead, we go to the beach.

I know! The Netherlands has a beach?!!? Duh, it's totally on the north west coast of Europe. From our castle, we walk through a patch of woods and then over some grass-covered sand dunes and then *poof* there is the ocean! It's the North Sea, so a part of me thinks that it doesn't really count. I have to constantly remind myself that the North Sea is actually CONNECTED TO THE ATLANTIC and is therefor not a lake but SALTY WATER WITH WAVES.

It is very cloudy and totally the opposite of Santa Monica. We are two of five people out as far as I can tell. The beach is empty of trash and towels and umbrellas and sunbathers -- just sand and surf. It is, of course, overcast and a mite drizzly. Round wooden logs stick up out of the ground in sets of two lines. These are old pier pilings, and they have started to get green with moss. It is very windy, and after each wave pulls back into the ocean its foam is left behind on the sand, which is then blown away, so that the ground is filled with flying specks of white foam. Where the waves don't reach, dry sand hurls past so fast it stings my legs.

After the beach, I read Elle and Elle Decor in Dutch on the couch in the castle lounge. A little girl sitting opposite me asks her father if that is my bed. I guess the Dutch don't lie down barefoot on their furniture. I take a hot HOT shower with a push-button faucet and our castle roommate goes into the forest to look for bats. Obviously.