ooops, almost forgot...

...to tell you about our weekend in Amsterdam last week. It's been a bit stressful at work this week (trying to book all our group trips to Nepal and New Zealand for mid December is a bloody nightmare!) and it slipped my mind. Anyway, we stayed with Pete & Cal in Amsterdam Saturday night. I know them from Melbourne a few years ago. Actually I used to work with Pete at Oxfam (then CAA). He is Dutch and Cal is Australian, and they have been living back in NL for about ten years now. They have two great daughters Laura (14) and Nina (10). We spent Saturday afternoon/evening catching up, sipping wine and trying to catch some rays of sunshine out in their back garden by the canal :-)

They live right next to the Bijlmer area so we went for a bit of a walk before dinner through the local neighbourhood, and to see the memorial to the Bijlmer aircrash disaster. For those of you who don't remember, back in October 1992 an El Al cargo jet lost two of its engines and crashed into an apartment block in the Bijlmer, killing 43 people and destroying dozens of apartments. It is rumoured that many more people lost their lives in the accident, but there were so many illegal immigrants living in the area, so many "invisible" people, that it was virtually impossible to give an accurate death toll. It has also been rumoured that the plane was carrying some kind of illegal cargo (ie toxic or radioactive waste) because many residents began complaining of ill health soon after the disaster, and on the morning after the accident some people reported seeing "men in white suits, unable to speak Dutch, removing evidence from the crash site". There has never been an admission of guilt or any compensation for the victims. Maybe if the accident had occurred in a more affluent, predominantly white neighbourhood the story would be different, who knows!!?? The memorial itself was quite eerie, with local school children using many objects - mostly fragments of ceramic tiles, but also keys, coins and various knick knacks - found in the rubble after the disaster to make mosaics which are now inlaid in the ground.

The local neighbourhood itself was almost like walking through another country. I don't think we saw one other white face during our stroll, and the streets were full of people sitting in small groups chatting, kids playing street football or people just generally hanging out! Coming from Melbourne, where black faces are pretty rare even in such a multicultural city, it was a strange experience.

On Sunday we did the proper Dutch thing and the 4 of us went on a cycle ride through the lush green polders to the nearby, and very picturesque, village of Abcoude for coffee and apple cake :-) (see photos above). The sun was shining, and it being a Sunday, meant it was quite busy out on the bike paths but we had a lovely time cycling through the typical Dutch country side. We stopped at the obligatory windmill, watched the shipping traffic pass by on the Dutch Rhine canal, passed an old fort, and even managed to avoid running over a big fat water rat!!

Alli xxx