Miscellaneous Photos: Holland/Belgium, 1996

     Here are a few photos I found interesting from Holland or Belgium.  I can’t remember much about them or where they were taken, but I found them interesting.   Obviously, the one above is me trying out some stocks.  Despite my smile, I don’t think being sentenced to time in the stocks, would have been a very pleasant experience.

    The photo below show a “Pollard” tree.  Pollarding is a specific way of pruning trees.  The upper branches are removed, which causes growth of dense heads of foliage and branches.  The practice was started by the Romans, and has been used in Europe since medieval times.   It is used to keep trees at a determined height, or to create ornamental trees.  It seems like torture for the trees, but they survive and look really interesting.

    The photo at the very bottom gives an indication of just how popular bicycles are in Holland.

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1996: Brussels' St. Micheal's Cathedral

    On our way back to the Brussel’s Central Station, we spotted St. Micheal’s Cathedral, and climbed a hill to explore it.  My wife, with her life-long interest of medieval cathedrals, told me that it wasn’t a very big one, but I had never experienced an old European cathedral before, and found the massive structure and its ornate vertical interior with it’s high vaulting, a total wonder of design and architecture.  The construction of St. Micheals started in the 11th Century and was completed in the 16th Century.

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Our 1996 Visit to Brussel's "Grand Place"

      The next day we got up at 6:00 to travel to Belgium.  We walked to Amsterdam’s Central Station, and caught the train to Brussels.  Crossing the border into Belgium was a non-event.  The train just continued on to Brussels, and we got out there.   

    Our first impression of Belgium was not very positive, in fact we found the Brussel’s Central Station depressing.   We departed our train underground, whose decor was black walls with dirty yellow trim.  It didn’t help that that the gloomy surroundings were inadequately lit with fluorescent bulbs that didn’t put out much light.   Hopefully, Brussels’ Central Station is more cheerful-looking these days.   Upstairs in the main part of the station, things seemed much more welcoming, until we were charged 10 Francs to use the washrooms.

    It was a day of smells.  The woman that sat next to my wife on the train had body odor.   The dark area where we got off of the train smelled of urine, and there was the smell of sewage seeping up from the grates on the streets later when we were walking around in Bruge.

    We weren’t very well prepared for Brussels and so we found it very confusing to us at first.  We didn’t know where to go when we left the Central Station.  Both the map displayed on the sidewalk and the map in our tourist guide didn’t help us at all.  We decided to just follow the other tourists, and that worked for us.  We eventually found the Grand Place.  I was pretty skeptical about anything with a name like that, but found it very impressive.  I hadn’t realized that “Grand Place” was just a French term for a square.

    The Grand Place is designated as a World Heritage Site.  It is a  large square surrounded by 17th Century Baroque, Gothic, and Louis XIV buildings, with fancy ornamental stone facades.  There were preparations going on for some festival.  Workers were busy marking out a design that would be used for covering the large surface of the square with colorful flowers.

    After being impressed by the architecture of the old buildings surrounding the square, we wandered out onto a street, not knowing where to go or what to do.   We came upon a statue of a little boy peeing.  It was surrounded by a huge crowd of tourists, busily snapping photos.  I managed to restrain myself.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

1996: Our Day in Holland's De Hoge Veluwe National Park

      The next day we made our first use of our EuroRail pass by taking the train outside of Amsterdam to visit De Hoge Veluwe National Park.  We were quite impressed with the comfort and efficiency of the European train.  I became even more impressed after showing the conductor our EuroRail pass and he told us we should be up in a First Class car instead of the Second Class one.  We moved, but even the Second Class car was plenty impressive to me.

    After about an hour, we got off the train and waited for the bus that would take us into the park.  The Hoge Veluwe National Park was not exactly what we had expected.  Back home we live close to the Mountain National Parks in the Canadian Rockies, and we were spoiled by the spectacular views and wildlife of those internationally known parks.  In comparison, De Hoge  was a let down, but we nevertheless enjoyed seeing it.  Its landscape was flat, partially heath and partially treed.  I guess they have herds of Red Deer and other wildlife, but while there, we didn’t see any.

    De Hoge Veluwe Park was a bit of a strange mixture.  It was initially created by a wealthy couple, the husband of which was an avid hunter, and the wife, a passionate art collector.  They bought up the land to create the park hoping to bring both nature and art together for the public.

    Once we got off the bus, we got ourselves a map and climbed on the free white bicycle, to begin our exploration of the place.   The area was very flat, so biking was a lot easier than in the Robson Valley.  

    We biked down Trail One, which led us to a sandy area which held the hunting lodge.  It mysteriously emitted “machine gun” sounds (?).  The Hunting Lodge was an architectural interesting building which featured a high tower. (Photo below) It certainly didn’t look like any hunting lodges I had ever imagined.

    More to our interests was an art museum that surprisingly, had paintings by Van Gogh, Surat, Pissarro, and Picasso.

    After a lunch at the museum, we got back on our bikes and took Path Two.  There were a lot of other bikers on the trail whizzing by us in both directions.

    It was a long bike ride to the Park entrance, and we were quite dismayed upon discovering that we had ended up in a different entrance that the one we arrived on, and that our return bus ticket, weren’t valid at this other entrance.  We ended up hiking out of the park, and buying another bus ticket to take us to Arden, where we used our EuroRail pass to get us back to Amsterdam.

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I Am Going to Run Out of Spring Projects

     Our BC winters normally give me a lot of slack days, enabling me with a lot of time to think about what outside projects I will do when the weather gets warmer in spring.  However this winter, with its unusual warm spell that melted the snow, has enabled me to do a lot of those spring projects already.

    One of those projects I was planning to do was to replace the coroplast skylights I had on the barn roof.  The very sunny summers we have been getting had caused the plastic coroplast sheets to turn brittle and deteriorate.  Taking advantage of the mild temperatures (11°C, 52°F), I was able to get the job done yesterday.

    I have a lot more respect for working at heights, now that I am in my old age, so I wore a safety harness and made sure the ladder was secured the barn. 

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Our Unusually Mild Weather Continues

     I couldn’t think of any other thing to blog about today, so as I often do in such situations, I have fallen back to our weather.  We are still sitting in a very unusual warm spell for the first part of what is normally a frigid February.  The temperature was 11°C (52°F) yesterday, and is expected to be 10°C today.  

    Yesterday afternoon, I spent an hour bucking up the big cedar that had fallen a couple of months ago.  That was a job I thought I would put off until spring, when the snow had melted, but since the snow was already gone and it was just “jacket” weather, I thought I might as well take advantage of the situation.

    This morning I took a walk around the pond for a bit of exercise.  There is now water sitting on most of the ice, and as you can see in the photo, there are even a few small bits of open water around some of the cattail stalks.   I am sure the ice is still at least five inches thick over most of the pond, so even if our mild weather continued, it would take quite a while for the ice to disappear. 

    I must say, so far our February sure feels like spring.

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We've Got Spring Weather, What's Going On?

     While a lot of my friends and family are suffering under unusually frigid weather where they live in more southern climes, the Robson Valley residents are shaking their heads wondering what happened to winter.  The 8 inches of snow we had on the ground, which suggested that we were finally going to get a normal winter, has melted away after we received a spell of above freezing temperatures and rain, making it really feel as is Spring had arrived.

    Today it is forecast that our daytime temperature will be 11°C (52°F).   Back in my hometown in Southern Indiana, today’s temperature is -2°C (28°F), and they have a foot (30cm) of snow on the ground.  Things sure seem to be mixed up and unreliable these days.

    On the positive side, the BC’s snow pillow equipment that is up in the mountain alpine and measures the amount of snow and precipitation, is showing that things up there have finally returned to normal after a record breaking low accumulation last winter, which was below historic normal readings.  That is a positive development.

    Time will only tell how the rest of our winter season will pan out.  I don’t really mind the unusually mild temperatures, but would certainly prefer snow to rain.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca