9/8/2006 - World Trade Center, the movie

9/8/2006 - Club Regent Casino

9/8/2006 - Royal Canadian Mint

9/8/2006 - First impressions of Winnipeg

9/8/2006 - Montreal

9/8/2006 - London Heathrow

Although it said on the papers from my travel agency, that the flight would take over an hour, it couldn't possibly have taken even so much as 45 minutes, and the plane even had to take a longer route to get around a thunderstorm. The rest of the time was needed for the plane to find a gate to dock with. Heathrow is a very busy airport, which serves the strangest destinations throughout the world, so it's just a fact of life that planes sometimes have to wait.

When we finally did get off the plane, there were complimentary newspapers waiting for the passengers. I naively took one. 200 yards ahead there were preliminary security checks where people weren't even searched yet. Just their liquids, books, papers, etc. were taken away from them before they joined the waiting lines for the real deal.

When I joined the lines I happened upon the two passengers I had met at Schiphol, who were headed for Thailand, so we started talking again. It was mostly jokes about the situation we were in. Jokes about how these inspections were pointless, etc. I mean, the biggest danger to airline passengers isn't even terrorism, but drunk passengers bursting out in air rage. Not being allowed to take liquids on board doesn't mean the airlines don't. And what if a passenger buys a bottle of Bacardi during the duty-free sale, drinks it up, goes berserk and smashes the bottle? You'd be dealing with an armed and dangerous madman, courtesy of the airline's duty free booze.

Other things we commented on were the apparent girl scouts who had been hired to carry out the security checks. I swear, they were very young women in girl scout uniforms... I wonder if they knew that at Homeland Security in DC.

Just when we were about to go to the security gates, one of the guys who were traveling to Thailand, a thirty-ish guy who organized sailing adventures worldwide, and was now going to do so in Thailand for six months, discovered he still had his cell phone with him, containing all of his contact phone numbers in places all over Thailand. He could of course not give it up, so he was told to go back into the terminal, find his airline there and check in his phone. He would also have to go thru the whole waiting in line again. I hope he made his plane, because according to the screens in terminal three it took off right in time.

For the rest of us, the entire process only took about 45 minutes or so, but of course it was only early morning in London. I later heard that by 12 noon, people were stuck in these lines for hours and hours. I could easily have made it onto the plane I had originally been booked on. Oh well, I now got the full Heathrow Experience. Fortunately there wasn't another security check upon entering Terminal 3, from which my plane to Montreal would take off.

It wasn't a bad place to spend a few hours. Water was sold abundantly, the shops were interesting enough, news papers were lying around everywhere. For a couple of hours I was OK. But then my feet started killing me, and by 2 PM I just had to sit down, and from there on I was simply bored. Fortunately around 2.30, my plane was assigned to gate 26, so with my feet screaming bloody murder I made my way there. It even seemed as if they would board the passengers immediately -they even said they would only be fifteen minutes- but by 3.45 we had only been guided into a waiting room, that looked as if it hadn't seen a fresh lick of paint since the first world war. In fact the building looked as if it had been built in Medieval times. It turned out that even the pilots were closely scrutinized before being allowed thru.

We were let on board around 4.15, but they really should have kept us in the waiting room a little longer. Many passengers were still stuck in the security proceedings, and the crew decided they would wait until every last on of them was on board. I  had been assigned to an aisle seat with no leg space, and for the next hour I kept wondering if someone would show up for the window seat next to me, so even with the agony I was in I didn't feel at ease sitting back and relax occupying both seats.

Fortunately after that hour, we were complete, and no one did show up for that window seat, so the flight turned out to be quite comfortable. We were stuck on the runway for another twenty minutes or so, however. Ahead of ours I could see about sixteen planes lined up, all waiting for clearance to leave. A funny sight, I must say! 

9/8/2006 - Schiphol Amsterdam Airport

For weeks I had been looking forward to my Canadian vacation, and what do I see when I turn on the TV on August 10? London Heathrow has been closed for incoming traffic because of a terror scare! Two days before I would pass thru there. Worried my vacation might be canceled over it, I of course went to my travel agency, asking if they knew anything. They reassured me that in two days this sort of things usually return to normal.

The following day however, just before I went on my way to the Ibis Hotel at Schiphol Airport (my flight to London departed at around 8 AM, and getting there in time on Saturdays is very tricky if you have to rely on trains), someone from Uniglobe showed up at my front door, with a new ticket, which gave me a much wider window to make my connection at London, as the news was just too damn' irrational and there were all sorts of conflicting messages about the security policies that were put in place. 

Around 1 PM I left home, and took a train to Amsterdam Sloterdijk. At Sloterdijk I exchanged my money, half of it to Canadian travelers cheques, and the other half to Canadian cash. Exchange rates at the airport are downright prohibitive, so I usually exchange my money in Amsterdam. Not much later I was on a train to Schiphol, only ten minutes or so out of Sloterdijk. 

At the airport I found out I had to take a hotel shuttle, as the hotel was about a fifteen minutes' drive from the passengers terminal. I had been led to believe that I could walk there. Oh well. My room on the fourth floor was very basic, but it did have digital TV... I didn't watch much of it though. I had set the wake up call for 3.30 AM, so after a half hour of digital boredom I closed the curtains, turned off the light and took to sleeping. Or at least I tried. Actually I didn't sleep at all. I looked at the clock every fifteen minutes or so. At 3 AM I just couldn't take it anymore. I got up, took a shower, and ate up the deli sandwiches I had brought for a cheap breakfast. The first shuttle to the airport departed at 4.15 and I was on it. 

Upon arriving at the passengers terminal, I immediately made for the check-in row. I had been led to believe that checking in would commence at 5, but no one from British Midlands showed up until 6.15. Fortunately there already were a lot of other passengers to chat with. I talked to a family who were going on a tour of Ontario and Quebec with an RV, and a few passengers who were headed for Bangkok, thru Heathrow, and Manama (Bahrain). 

When BMI personnel finally did show up, checking in took only three minutes, and it took another five minutes to get thru the security gates. Pretty quick, eh? Well, there was one annoying detail: I had to take off my shoes and my belt, and then put them back on. Especially the belt was annoying. Otherwise I never slide it thru those loops while actually wearing my pants. 

The first thing I did in the controlled zone was drink, drink, drink: smoothies, water, cappuccino... I also browsed some of the shops, but they sold nothing I couldn't buy within 300 yards from my house. Ten minutes before my plane would commence boarding, I discovered I was only in the Schengen Treaty zone of the airport, a treaty in which the UK are not included. Therefore, I had to go thru a passport inspection, which took another five minutes of my time. 

Before going on board, I bought another cappucino across the hall from the gate, and was surprised to find that I was actually permitted to take the paper cup with the liquid on board. On a plane to London. Perhaps for the better, as I would have had to pay prohibitive prices for drinks on board. My plane left precisely on time, just before 8 AM.

 

8/30/2006 - Sorry about my absence.

3/31/2006 - an introduction

Dear reader:

Welcome to my weblog. I'm a 25-year-old male from the Netherlands. My name is Sietse Logger. My first name sounds somewhat like the English word seats. Or? sort of rhymes with pizza. Whichever you prefer is fine with me.

If you've read my profile, you'll have found that I'm planning to pollute the information super highway with a jumble of loose memories. Hopefully, by increasing their number enough, it'll give you a detailed biography of me. I'll try to be frank at all times, and not withold even the most embarrassing things I've ever done or the worst sh*t that ever happened to me.

I must warn you here. I do feel a lot of sh*t has happened to me, and if you don't like people nagging on about that sort of stuff, steer well clear of my piece of internet. Not all has been doom and gloom, though, so for those simply interested in other people's lifes there should be enough interesting stuff for you to read.

Another thing I must warn you about, is that it'll be very unwise to print my weblog. I plan to regularly update all entries that I feel I must update, so everything you read here is subject to change! Also, I think that by the time I have used up whatever my memory could throw at me it'll cost you over 100 pages. Maybe I'll even add detailed stories of my vacations in North and South America, which may amount to another 150. It may take me a year to get there, though, so don't worry just yet.

If you have found my weblog by doing a Google search on my name, please first look at the entry/entries for the years that we knew each other, as I might have written about you. If that's the case, do let me know what you think, and um... see if you know other people whose first names I've mentioned. If you recognize anyone, tell them about my blog as well.

I will try to write down my memories in chronological order, starting in the year I was born, 1980, and finishing in 2006. I have left some empty chapters for future installments, such as 2007. Otherwise everything sounds sort of final. I'm only 25, going on 26 today, and I'm planning to add some years to that total.

Finally for those who are wondering about the mysterious Elke, the truth about her is revealed in my installment for 1997. I'll make that one of the first entries I write, so you don't have to wait until I reach that point. It may take me a few months to get there, and I don't like to keep impatient people waiting.

3/31/2006 - 1980-1983

I was born on August 4, 1980, in a small wooden house in the town of Oosterend, on the island of Texel. I came a month prematurely, butt first, and my weight at birth was five pounds and one ounce. I am the first of three children. My first and middle name are Sietse, and  Jan. Sietse after a great grandfather, and Jan after my grandfather, my mom's dad.

My dad's name by the way was Peter, and he was from Hamburg, Germany, where he was born in 1957. He was born Dettmer, but took on his stepfather's  name to acquire Dutch citizenship. That way he could fulfill his military service in the Netherlands, instead of Germany. At the time of my birth he worked in road construction, and he was a parachute enthusiast, and an amateur magician. My mom's name is Joke (not a joke, and it's pronounced somewhat like yoka), and she was born in the coastal village of Petten, in 1958.
 
When my parents met, in 1979, they both worked at a youth hostel on the island of Texel. They decided to move in together within three months, renting the smallest space available on the entire island, and six months after that they got married. They both believed in getting married fast, and to build up their married life together from the bottom up.

Among my first visitors where my mother's parents, who lived on the mainland, but not too far away from Den Helder, where the ferry to Texel sails from. They had just been on a Swiss vacation and had brought my mom a pretty silly gift: a Tissot wristwatch, so she wouldn't been late when it came to feeding me. Isn't a cry baby all the clock you need? Let's face it, I was just that. No reason why my parents would have lied about that.

During those first few days my entire family came by for a visit. Most of the gifts they brought me involved cuddly toys, but one aunt, Nirana, brought me some cutlery with my initials engraved in it. I haven't seen any of it in 20 years, so I suppose it mostly served the purpose of feeding small children. Someone else brought me one of those fire trucks you can sit on, but I couldn't play with that for another year. Oh well, at least that one served me longer than just a couple of months.

I have no memories of my first few years, so all I can do is refer to pictures and written entries in my photo album. On September 20 for instance, my parents wanted to go out and celebrate their moving in together a year earlier. A good thing they couldn't find a baby sitter as I became critically ill that night.

On December 10, it says, I peed all over the doctor from a distance of over two yards. A pretty cheeky entry follows in January 1981. Apparently I tried to pee all over that poor devil all over again, but this time he knew me a little better, and I failed. I can't remember exactly what it was about that man that ticked me off. Weird.

I saw my first snow in December 1980, right there in Oosterend, my first teeth were discovered on March 27 and 28, 1981, and I had my first haircut in March 1982.

In 1981 we moved from Texel to North Amsterdam. My dad moved there ahead of my mom and I. He had found a job at the Netherlands Railways (Nederlandse Spoorwegen), and first went looking for an apartment suitable for a young family. A few months later my mom and I joined him on Den Helder Street in the Nieuwendam district. In December 1981 my brother was born in an Amsterdam hospital.

3/31/2006 - 1984

A clear memory of Miss Brenda's class comes in the weeks before Easter 1984. I was sick for a week or so, running a fever, leading up to Easter. I came back to school on the last schoolday before the Easter break. It might have been a Thursday. I don't remember if Good Friday was a holiday in those days. The main event that day was a procession of sorts around the school property. All the kids had an egg with a sticker on it, and since I had been sick all week, I didn't know the first thing about why they had those eggs and where they came from, I just knew I had to get me one as well. I saw fit to solve that problem by mugging another kid, saying hey, that's my egg, and then taking it. I got away with it, only to find out that if I had been more patient, I would have gotten my own egg from one of the volunteers.

That summer I went on my first foreign vacation. My parents had left my brother and sister with my father's parents, and took me with them on a train to Freiburg in Southern Germany. My dad was working with the Dutch railways, so he had family coupons for free travel throughout Europe. We didn't exploit them nearly enough in my opinion. Anyways, in Freiburg we took a tourist bus to the town of Simonswald, where we moved into a vacation camp, consisting of wooden cabins about twice as big as the thing I was born in.

All I can provide are a bunch of loose memories of the trip. I remember a lot of walking through hills and mountains, learning to say hi, thank you, and more of that in German, a swimming pool that was crawling with hornets, and on the campground there was a small water hole for all the small kids, such as myself, to play in. The only problem with that was, that there was a tractor travelling back and forth thru the water hole every ten minutes or so. We always had to step aside. I don't know this for sure, but the tractor driver must have retired at an early age and then moved into a mental institution.

My most vivid memory of Simonswald involves apple juice. During the fortnight we spent there, my parents had me drink a lot of bottled apple juice. Then on the final whole day of our stay, they had bought a bottle of cider, that looked exactly like those apple juice bottles, and on top of that, they had forgotten about getting me my apple juice. What happened next should be pretty obvious. I wanted my juice, and couldn't have it. When I saw the bottle of cider I kept persisting I wanted that, and my parents kept trying to convince me it wasn't apple juice. In the end my perseverance paid off, and I got my first experience with alcohol. YUK! It probably has nothing to do with it, but I still don't drink more than a quart of alcohol every three months or so!

After the summer I ended up in the part of the school known as Timotheus, in Miss Astrid's class. During that time, my life sort of went downhill. At four, and also at seventeen by the way, I still wet my bed, and other kids were slowly losing that habit, so in the end I was the smelly one. I wasn't without friends, but I did get beat up a lot. I was no longer happy at school.

I also developed an autistic obsession with a certain jigsaw puzzle depicting a cottage with a bunch of cats. In the end I could complete it within two minutes almost with my eyes shut. The source of the obsession must have been the fact that no one else was interested in jigsaw puzzles, so I would be left alone.

The following story I think happened in the fall. For some reason I liked to pull hair from my head. My dad kept telling me to stop it, but I didn't, until one night I had gone so far as to pull out all my hair from the right half of my head. I stopped clean down the middle. It was hilarious, really. Parents of other kids informing with my dad, whether it was some new kind of fashion, etc. Only two months later enough hair had grown back to get the other half cut to the same length.

3/31/2006 - 1985

In 1985 the number of friends I had kept dropping further, but there was one kid I still hung out with. His name was Machiel. Maybe in this case I should give you his last name, which is Van Veen. There is a black and white photographer who goes by that name, and he could be the same person. His pictures are very interesting, so if you have some time on your hands, why not google him.

I don't remember much about him, but he seemed a smart and thoughtful kid. We played at eachother's houses a lot, and he also slept over a couple of times. He never bothered me about my bedwetting. His parents were divorced. I remember I was once invited to his mother's house. She was a redhead if I remember correctly, and lived on the southern tip of North Amsterdam, on an address recently used in an episode of the British crime series 'Dalziel and Pascoe'.

The camp consisted of about ten large tents on a small grass field just past the National Park entrance. Breakfast and lunch were served there, and games were played there when it rained, but most activities took place on a large stretch of sand hidden behind a row of trees. Those activities consisted of digging holes, and games like hide and seek, etc. Other features included a nearby Medieval castle (partly ruins), Brederode, a petting zoo with deer and peacocks, and an annual trip to the beach town of Zandvoort where we visited Dolfirama, a Dolphin show. On the final day of camp an Italian ice cream vendor came over to present the children with free ice-cream.

There was no camp on weekends. Fortunately there was a big, gated, playground nearby, de Duinpan, that offered an impressive range of swings, climbing frames, slides, etc. They also tried to create a maze, but I've never seen it finished.

I remember driving my dad insane going there. To get there I had to cross a dangerous road, IJdoornlaan (laan translates as Avenue). My life was never in any danger, though. I got up really early in those days, and morning traffic on weekends, especially before 9 AM, was virtually non-existent. By the time he got up to collect me, and usually my brother as well, traffic was pumping, but under his supervision there was very little that could have happened.

Getting up early... I mean what do parents expect? If you send your kid to bed by 7 PM, it's only 5 AM ten hours later. Another thing that drove him mad, was that by 6 AM, the time the cartoons started on Sky Channel, a British station, my brother and I had already been waiting in front of the TV for at least an hour. Dutch stations never provided anything before 2 PM, and they still don't, so we watched Sky Channel a lot. On weekends there was Fun Factory with Andy Sheldon and a bunch of puppets who presented the cartoons, and on weekdays there was the DJ Cat Show with Linda de Mol (a Dutchwoman) and a cat puppet who presented the cartoons.

My favorite cartoon shows in those days where He-Man, and Transformers, but I've also always been a fan of Emily, a very simple cartoon I haven't seen in ages.

I don't remember a lot of the birthday presents I received throughout my life, but on my fifth birthday I remember getting an Indian headdress and two revolvers with holsters. I can't remember what I did with those or how long it took me to take the revolvers apart. I was really destructive when it came to toys.

My birthday was spent at the Efteling, a fairy-tale theme park. The Efteling was voted the world's best amusement park twice during the mid-nineties. It consists of a fairy-tale part where visitors can look at Snow White, Cinderella, the Sleeping Beauty, etc., etc., and a part with all the rides you'd find at the average Six Flags facility.

The day was great fun, although my chief memory of the park itself only involves bees trying to get into my can of cola. At around 4 PM there suddenly was a huge cloudburst, which inspired most of the guests, including us, run to the exit to catch the next available bus out.

It was a time when there was a lot of talk on TV about poison candy and child molesters. I probably watched too much TV in those days. On the bus from the Efteling to the Tilburg railway station, there was a nice elderly lady who tried to offer me a roll of candy. Werther's Original for those who know it. I of course refused to take it, and if I'm to believe my parents, I caused a helluva scene on that bus, crying and screaming and shouting, and saying I wasn't allowed to take anything from strangers, followed by accusing the woman of trying to poison me, and even going so far as to call her a child molester to her face. I had no idea what the word meant of course. I don't think I ever got the candy, which is a pity, I really loved Werther's Original at the time. Right now I could care less.

After the summer I was still in kindergarten, and again Ms. Astrid was the teacher. There were two kindergarten teachers, and they would each have their classes for the full two years. In Miss Astrid's class we did have another teacher for Wednesdays. I can't remember her name, just that she must have been at least fifty years old. She always brought a sticky bun or a piece of pie to school, which she then gave to a kid who could guess the correct number below 31. That's not entirely the right way to deal with five-year-olds. There always were like five kids in a row who would say the same number, and very few kids could come up with two-digit numbers. In my memory the treat always went to the same part of the classroom.

3/31/2006 - 1986

1986 easily ranks first among the worst years of my life. It started at some point in the spring. I was walking along the street I had to cross to get to school, Markengouw, and some approximately 16-year-old guy who lived down my street walks up to me and asks me casually if I know the meaning of the word neuken (to f*ck). I didn't have a clue, so he pulled down his and my pants, and started penetrating me from behind. It hurt a lot, and I also remember clearly a sticky wetness. Several cars drove past. I don't want to get into any more detail about that. I let it happen to me about twenty times over the spring and early summer, usually in the stairwell of the apartment building he lived in just next to mine. I don't know what caused the bastard to stop.

I never really told anyone about it. I do believe I have told one or two penfriends, but only sort of matter-of-factly. It did bother me a lot at the time, but the true magnitude of the events never registered until I was about eleven or so.

Another reason why I may not have told anyone may lie in the fact that his two younger brothers were two of my chief bullies on my street. In school I hardly had any friends, but my most serious problem there was name-calling, such as Stinky, and Skunk, and during recess children didn't want me around, because I supposedly had fleas and I would get them all over them. On my street however, I got beat up on a daily basis by a mob of about ten kids, at least half of whom were much older than myself. I consider myself extremely lucky I was never hospitalized.

There's also been a spell where they would force me to eat mud and sand all the time. This resulted in two intestinal worm infections, with hundreds of tiny little white worms crawling all over my cr*p. I had to take pills, but three weeks or so after the first infection was over, the second one came along.

They also declared half the street off-limits to me, so I had to take a detour to walk to school, if I wanted to get there in one piece.

I always wanted to stay inside and play in my room, but my dad never let me. He said I that if someone kicked me I should simply kick back. Easier said than done if you're up against ten kids... I had only one way of eluding my persecutors. I went all over the Nieuwendam area to play at playgrounds where no one knew me. This of course only annoying my dad more.

After a summer again spent at Duinrakkers, I went to what is called basisschool in Dutch. The Amstelmeer School was located right next to the Kindergarten I went to, so it was only logical that at group 3 level (the two Kindergarten years are referred to as group 1 and 2) I should end up with the same kids I went to Kindergarten with. My teacher's name was Christa Liedermooij. She took great pride in her name, and also in the fact that she lived in Marken. Marken is a really quaint Zuyderzee town, a former island now connected to the mainland by a road across the water, where life must indeed be nice. I can't really say, as I never lived there.

I learned to read and write with the help of textbooks about a dwarf named Pim. The teacher also wrote every word we had learned on the blackboard, and left them there for months, until everybody had reached a certain level.

Another 'traumatic' moment happened in November. Around elevenish at night I woke up to go to the bathroom, only to find my mom putting a marzipan frog in my shoe at the balcony door. That's how I found out the horrible truth about Saint Nicholas, the man who supposedly delivered presents to children across the Netherlands, every fifth of December.

3/31/2006 - 1987

During the eighties there were a lot of protests against the positioning of American nuclear missiles in the Netherlands. I believe 1983 saw a rally in The Hague with over half a million angry demonstrators. I wasn't there, so I don't know if I have even got the year right. In 1987 the protests even came to the Amstelmeer School, though. I remember one morning when my class was taken to the school's basketball court, where we walked in circles crying no to nuclear cruiser missiles. Pretty pointless, but the Ms Liedermooij probably felt powerless and felt she had to do something, anything...

Rumor has it that the nuclear missiles did come after all. There are supposedly twelve of them at an airforce base in the south. I don't know which one, but apparently over 15 years after the end of the Cold War, they're still there.

My final memory from Group 3 was the teacher's birthday. Ms Liedermooij had bought tons of candy, and she had deviced a game to distribute it. The class divided itself into groups of three kids. Mine consisted of Machiel, a kid named Rick, and me. We had a sheet of A4 paper with four circles on it. In each circle we had to put a piece of candy, and two kids would decide on a circle, and the third would have to get the candy without taking it away from the circle the other two had selected.

We were surprisingly fair when it came to which circles we'd picked, never cheating once. Machiel and I did notice fairly quickly though, that Rick always went for the blue circle first, so we always picked the blue circle. We both ended up with about three times as much candy as poor Rick, and we certainly didn't share afterward. What an evil game...

Another summer spent with Duinrakkers. Everything was the same as it had been in previous years. There was one new thing: a walk to the Kennemer Dunes Visitor Information Center. They probably did that with all the six year olds. The walk took over an hour, and then of course we had to walk the whole way back again. The VIC had one interesting feature by the way, a small version of the park with small lights to highlight several interesting walks.

In September we moved to the town of Blokker, Municipality of Hoorn. My dad had himself transfered from Amsterdam Central Station to the station of Hoorn. That's a 40-minute's train ride north of Amsterdam. We rented a place on Golden Delicious Lane. All the lanes in the area were named for apples, such as Cox, James Grieve, Granny Smith, etc. Streets in other parts of the village were named for World War II resistance heroes, and elements you would find in a convent. If you're visiting my country on your vacation, don't waste any time on Blokker. There's nothing to see or do.

The school my parents chose for me was called De Bussel. A Bussel is a type of fruit basket. Before we moved there, Blokker used to be the site of a number of fruit orchards, but I've been told that by 1980 most had disappeared. Anyhow, the school was named after an important item from those days long ago. The Amstelmeerschool had been a Catholic school with Bible readings every morning, de Bussel was a public school with no religious education whatsoever. A weird change, and one that cost me all my religious beliefs. It felt the same as discovering that Saint Nick doesn't exist.

I didn't have many friends in that school either. After a few weeks I did start to hang out with a kid named Maarten, so he would have been my first friend there. If I read my school report from those first months I must say that the teacher considered friendship something very special and hard to come by. It says there: Sietse is playing with another boy a lot. Could it actually be a friend?

3/31/2006 - 1988

1988 started with a scare. At some point the teacher announced, that shortly before the summer break we were going on a three-day school trip. I, being a habitual bed wetter, was so scared of my secret being exposed, that I simply said I refused to go. My dad and I ended up talking to the teacher after school. In the end she did convince me that it was safe to go. I don't remember exactly what made me change my mind. The trip itself was a success of sorts. I did not wet my bed at all. I faintly remember being awakened three times a night to go to the bathroom. Could've been less, could've been more.

The trip took us to Lage Vuursche, just to the east of Amsterdam, in an area with a lot of nature, known as Het Gooi. That's also an area that is densely populated with filthy rich people. John de Mol for instance. The name of the youth hostel was Koos Vorrink House. I can't for the love of me come up with a single thing that happened there. I only remember there was a lot of nature and we slept in three-bed rooms.

1988 is also the year I learned to ride the bicycle. It's a pretty embarrassing history is well. As y'all know my first name is Sietse, while the Dutch word for riding bicycle is fietsen. Which, I needn't really explain, rhymes with my name. After my first parent-assisted attempts half the town called me Sietse-kan-niet-fietsen, which means Sietse can't ride the bicycle. Learning to ride the bicycle at seven or eight is really much too late in this country. Bicycles are a source of national pride in Holland, and it is essential that by the time your children go to kindergarten they already know how to. Especially if you have named your child Sietse or Wietse, I might add. Or Sietske, if it's a girl.

My parents were pretty annoyed that I simply never managed to learn to keep my balance on our national means of transportation. After months of them trying to assist me by holding on to the bicycle while I was trying to move forward, my dad told me one afternoon that I was going out with my bicycle, and that I wasn't to come back until I learnt. Not having my parents around worked like a charm. Within 30 minutes I learnt the trade, hehe.

Somehow Easter Monday 1988 just came back to me... It was the day the Netherlands got a third nationwide TV station: Netherlands 3! They started at 8 AM, I believe with an episode of Sesame Street, and my entire family sat down in front of the TV. After the first two shows, I think, we left the house because we had other plans for the day.

The day was pretty gray, but that didn't keep us from spending the day at our administrative (not the official) capital, The Hague. First off we went to Madurodam. That's a theme park, that sports scale models of seemingly every important building in the Netherlands. If you visit The Hague, make that your first priority! After Madurodam we went to Scheveningen, which is the beachfront suburb of The Hague. We spent a lot of time on the Pier. If you live in an American city with its own pier, you can skip that one, it's no different from what you know. 

We spent my birthday at Hellendoorn, another amusement park, someplace in the northeast of this country. They were very actively advertising their park in those days, so we decided to give them a shot. We invited the kid I hung out with in those days, Maarten, along. Of all the amusement parks I have been to in this country, and overseas, this was by far the most boring! In their commercials it all sounded incredibly adventurous and spectacular, but of course, it wasn't. They didn't even have a half-decent rollercoaster.

Maarten's birthday was twelve days after mine, only just within the bounds of the summer break that year, and of course I was invited to his. First off we went to a children's theater show in Enkhuizen, the city I live in today. The play was about a ventrilloquist's dummy who got caught up in the body of the ventrilloquist. After passing thru a multitude of organs, the doll saved the ventrilloquist from a frozen heart, and subsequent cold feelings for the poor doll.

After the show our party, I think there must have been four more kids, went back to Maarten's place where all we really did was goofing around with all sorts of action figures, Transformers mostly, and watching episodes of GI Joe.

In the fall of 1988 I managed to persuade my parents to giving me, and my siblings, an allowance. How I did it? Well, I simply stole ten guilders from my dad's wallet, and used it to by a GI Joe action figure. He was stark raving mad after he made that gruesome discovery, and grounded me for a week. It did make hime see, however, that I needed to learn about money, so I got a 2.50 guilder allowance, while my brothers and sisters got a guilder each every week. I don't really know what the exchange rate of the guilder was, but throughout the nineties, it has hovered around $0.40-$0.60 a unit, I believe.

Another memory of 1988 involves soccer. One day in late June, all of a sudden all the kids on my street came running out of their houses all dressed in orange, screaming, shouting, chanting, and what have you. I decided to join the party, but I only learned what the ruckus was all about in the summer of 1990, when my grandad gave me the papers from the following Monday: our national soccer team had won the European championships in Germany. Being the soccer fan I am today I really hate having missed out on the game back then.

I only started playing soccer in the fall of 1988. My dad finally came to the conclusion that my brother and I had to start playing a sport. We were actually
late to join any clubs, so the 1988-1989 was nothing more than an hour of soccer practice with De Blokkers soccer club every Wednesday afternoon.

After the summer break I went to group 5. The teacher's name was Master Johan (male basis school teachers are addressed meester, which translates as master). He was a really tall man, with a moustache to match. I think I'm taller now, at 6ft7, but at the time his dimensions were almost intimidating. He was probably the funniest teacher at the school at the time. He had hilarious ways of answering childishness on our part with childishness of his own.

He had a joke about his tallness, by the way. He lived a couple of miles away from Blokker in the town of Hoogkarspel, right next to a railway line. He always said he got up at five in the morning to wave to the engineer from his bedroom, so he knew he was on the right track in the early morning darkness. Unfortunately for him, my dad was a railway conductor who traveled that line almost every working day, and he knew this claim was absolute nonsense.

3/31/2006 - 1989

A couple of weeks before the summer vacation we had our annual three-day school trip. That year we went to Hattem, in the east of the country. This was a really cool place. The main feature was a big sandy hole, about 25ft deep. It was the perfect place for eight and nine year olds to play all sorts of games. One not so good thing was the fact that the teachers decided to bake pancakes in the open air for all of us to enjoy. We all know the joke about how someone mistook white paint for pancake dough, eh? Well, they even made them taste like white paint without having any around.

After an uneventful summer break I went to group 6. The teacher was Master Rene. He was a regular guy, not someone who would stand out. Also he was Jewish. I didn't know that at the time, and without meaning to, I offended him really badly one day.

There was this World War II mini series, War And Remembrance, that was shown in Dutch television at the time. I picked up a lot of words from it, and in a dreamy mood, I wrote some of them on one of my textbooks, words like SS, Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, Razzia, and that sort of cr*p, I think. He was shocked, offended, and frankly, very saddened by this. Some members of his family had been imprisoned in concentration camps during the war. He forgave me after I had apologized.

Also during the summer I had finally really joined De Blokkers. My team was E7. E-teams are for under-tens. At the start of the season we first played two one-day tournaments. We lost five games, and tied one. During the season that didn't get any better. Only with the help of someone who really played at D-level we won a grand total of one game, beating De Zouaven 8-3.

I really hated the team. I was really a lousy player,