Dutch on Ice

How cheesy can it be? It’s a few days below zero and everybody suddenly wants to skate. And so do I, how Dutch. And even if I did not have skates, and even if I did not skate for years I managed not to fall down at all.

It’s Saturday morning, early as I biked through the streets of The Hague, on the way to a friend of mine where we would gather up.

It’s minus five I guess, but I’m prepared (with Mongolian trousers included). And my skates of course, found and got them within a few hours on the online market place, picked them up for a dime in Delft on the way home from Rotterdam yesterday. It’s hard to find skates now, and on the news they are even mentioning traffic jams all over the place because of the sudden immense interest to ice skate.

“It might be your last.”

And how lovely, a few hours later we were on the ice, somewhere on the fields outside of the big city, where the Dutch landscape truly comes alive. We passed the old farmer mills and children selling coffee and hot chocolate on the docks, hundreds to thousands people were on the ice.

On the way we stopped in a village, ice skating through its channel. We heard folk music and saw a lot of people gathering up in the centre, where everybody was on the wooden flounders entering the local bar.

The smell of hot stew (yes, the famous pea soup) combined with thick hot dogs was nearly unbearable, as I sat eating saying: “I hope they’re not going to play Frans Bauer…” But they that the moment I said it, a tune of him, one of the most famous and traditional Dutch folk music artist, started.

I guess you just have to love it. I did.