10/24/2007 - Saint Nicholas

10/24/2007 - St. Nick

It is because of things like that, that I dislike America so much, not only do Americans as a whole overeact to stupid things in thier own country, but then they want to dictate thier supposed it "vaules" to everyone else.

10/24/2007 - Hi

I'm still mulling over your post and trying to catch up :)
I watch a show called "Seconds from Disaster". Two episodes chronicled plane crashes with Dutch connections. One was the worst in aviation history,that happened in the Canary Islands. The unfortunate Dutch pilot that was involved had such a stature at KLM Royal Dutch Airline, that he was even shown in a print media ad. The other crash involved an El Al (sp?) Israeli cargo plane crashing into an enormous apartment complex. It was so chilling. It moved all of us.

10/26/2007 - Dutch air disasters

Yeah, I've seen both episode of Seconds from Disaster myself. Of the PanAm disaster as we call it in the Netherlands, a bit hypocritically perhaps, I know very little, other than what I've seen on the show, as it happened before I was born. There's a big memorial service every year. I know that...

The Bijlmer disaster, as the El Al cargo plane crashed in the Bijlmer district of Amsterdam, is something I remember very well. The date was October 4, 1992, so it was 25 years ago this year.

In the daytime I've been hiking with my dad and my two siblings in the dunes of Castricum. We got lost and it took us two hours to find our way back. We were home just before seven, just in time for the soccer highlights.

The highlights were shown just the same as usual, but the TV in the room next to the one I was in (we had like a double living room), was trained on the news, which was all about the airline disaster that had happened about half an hour before we got home.

The disaster led to all sorts of speculation on terrorism (El Al being an Israeli airline), but also to an immigration mess.

The Bijlmer is an area of Amsterdam where a lot of immigrants live, and a lot of them are branded 'illegal'. The government decided that this disaster must have traumatized the people who lived in the two appartment blocks that the plane crashed into in such a way, that you just couldn't send them home, so the government promised legal status to every victim of the disaster.

Thing is, the addresses of 'illegals' aren't registered anywhere, so how can you tell who lived in the building, and who didn't? Thousands of illegals from all over Europe flocked to the Netherlands to get legalized here. It took years and years for everything to be sorted.