Photos -- Batik Making

Wooden Stamps

Eunice teaching Sylvie how to apply the wax

Eunice's creations

Dying the material

Letting the dye set

Washing the wax off

Drying

Photos -- Home life in Ghana

Our Home in Hohoe.  Sylvie with her new friends

Doing Laundry

The paper cutting begins

Sleeping nets

Hanging out on the porch

Story time

The tenuous water supply

Liberation Day

May the 5th is Liberation Day in the Netherlands. The mood on the streets is something between Remembrance Day and Canada Day: lots of tributes to soldiers and talk of sacrifices made during the war on the one hand, lots of sunshine and drinking on the other.

To atone for the sin of refusing to wait in line to get into Anne Frank's house, we went yesterday to visit the Resistance Museum. They try give visitors an idea of what the average Dutch citizen endured during the German Occupation leading up to their liberation on May 5th, 1945. It was a complicated time, to say the least. Many went along with the Germans ( and for their part the Germans largely treated the Dutch with respect at the beginning of the occupation, trying to avoid hostilities) and except for a few pockets of resistance, it seemed to take a while for a large movement to get underway and start undermining their overseers. They had quite a good section on the effect the occupation had on the city's Jews. In one corner they had a replica of a door that was used to hide a little room for people to hide in. Particularly effective was the large front door with four doorbells beside it. When you rang each one they all gave excuses as to why they could't take someone in even for one night.

The strangest part of the museum for me, however, was the room devoted to the Dutch colonies of Indonesia and Surinam and their roll during he war. Now to fair I didn't devote my full attention to the room (it came at the end and by that time Sylvie had had her fill of museums and was resisting in her own seven year-old way) but it seemed to focus on resistance activities towards the Germans and the Axis in these places. Now I don't doubt that this is important, but it seems too rich in irony not to at least acknowledge that there was also resistance in these places to the colonial Dutch occupiers!

I felt a twinge of the same conflict this morning at a May 5th breakfast we attended (once we got out days straightened out...). Overall it was a very classy affair: full catered breakfast (and I mean full), a live gospel choir, and what I imagine were interesting speeches that were delivered entirely in Dutch. The reception was in a wing of the Anthropology Museum and is walking distance from the apartment we've rented. But again, standing in this museum that was originally called the Kolonial Museum among a crowd of people that looked a lot more like me than the make up of the neighbourhood even a few blocks away (the neighbourhood is very multicultural with lots of residents, businesses and restaurants reflecting the colonial past as well the global village present). Even the American gospel choir, as great as they were, seemed to be a way of avoiding the diversity all around.

On the way out, though, they gave us free tickets for the museum proper. Never ones to pass up a free pass (the whole breakfast and concert, it should be noted was also gratis) or to avoid inflicting another museum on our daughter we decided to pop in. From the very beginning it was clear that this was a museum that was not going to hide from the complexities of the past and present and instead was going to put them front and centre. The first thing you see getting off the elevator is a statue of a black man from Paupau holding a white baby. The accompanying literature tells you that it is their policy to solicit and display contemporary art from the countries explored in their exhibits. They have a large section on Africa that given our recent experiences there seems to reflect the places pretty accurately (nothing is going to be perfect, and I imagine that non-Ashanti Ghanians would bristle at the attention that that culture is given; but that would be nothing new for them because Ashanti culture is often conflated with Ghanian culture even in Ghana!). They also seemed to do a great job integrating video and computer technology to make the exhibits more relevant and more interesting, but without being intrusive or gimmicky.

The two hours spent the museum seemed to right the imbalance I had been feeling the last couple of days. History is complicated and we're never going to get it all right or be able to tease out every last complexity to everyone's satisfaction, but here was a national museum willing to try and be up-front about its complicated past and welcome dialogue. It created, for me, a new context in which to view the other parts that make up the official narrative of Dutch history.

Lost day

After almost eleven weeks of setting our own schedule, our lacksidasical relationship with calendars finally caught up with us. In our rush to see family and friends we had somehow skipped ahead a day (or perhaps there is some strange time/space continuum in Amsterdam which might also help explain why we've been having such a hard time orienting ourselves and figuring out our way around this confounded city of canals!)

We had arranged to attend a breakfast and gospel concert to mark Liberation Day, which is May 5th in Holland. The directions we had said that we were to go to a side door of the Anthropology Museum. When we got there the doors were locked. We went around to the front to ask if we had got the location wrong. No the May 5th Breakfast was good to go -- on May 5th.

You would think that finding an extra day in a city like Amsterdam would be like finding a twenty dollar bill in a jacket you had not worn in a while. The whole thing was a little disorienting, though. To be completely wrong about the day of the week and the day of the month (especially when you have a trans-Atlantic flight booked for a specific day and time) is unsettling.

We tried to make the best of it. It helped that it was another beautiful day. We took the ferry to North Amsterdam, had a (windy) picnic and then visited the resistance museum before feasting on Surinmese takeout for dinner. All in all not a bad way to spend a "found" day.

And now it is actually May 5th (we think!) and we're off to the gospel breakfast, more or less back on schedule.

Biking

When we arrived in Amsterdam I was thrilled to see the masses and masses of bikes and cyclists making their way through the city. I wanted to be immediately on a bike and using one of the hundreds of dedicated bike lanes. This seemed to be biking nirvana! What also was fantastic was Sylvie sharing my enthusiasm to find some bikes to rent and start exploring the city.

Sylvie is a pretty good cyclist and showed she was up to some longish rides when we had the canal boat and we could bike beside the canal on nice, not to busy, paths and meet up with the boat at a lock. However, after a short period of time just walking in Amsterdam, it was very apparent that biking was not a completely leisurely event, where one could stop when you felt like it and adjust a helmet or just be seven and have a very important question about an imaginary dog be answered immediately while taking up the entire bike path. Nope biking in Amsterdam is about getting places (not fast, ) but definitely biking with a purpose on a three speeder. I was apprehensive about having a seven year old (or our 7 year old) out on her own on Amsterdam streets. Also Scott and I had taken advantage of the Velibe, bike lending program in Paris and toughly enjoyed it, although somewhat dismayed to find ourselves spit out onto the Champs d'Ellysee and all it's traffic at one point (not ready for the Tour de France yet!). With our Paris experiences we thought it was best for Sylvie not to be riding her own bike around Amsterdam.

Initially we thought that this would not be a problem as in Amsterdam kids are transported by bike in a multitude of different fashions (all without bike helmets) and there are many different bike styles modified to moving kids around (even a bike 'bus' that a daycare was using). With all these options visible on the street and a couple of on line leads for bike rental companies that had tandem bikes modified for kids, or buckets in the front of bikes for kids to ride in, we thought this would be easy.

Well not completely so .... It turns out that these tandem or modified bikes are considered 'novelty' bikes and the companies actually have very few in stock. Day one of trying to find a suitable bike was unsuccessful and although I was very enamoured with Sylvie's enthusiasm to bike in Amsterdam I did not think it was going to happen. However, day two was met with success and we got a tandem bike where Sylvie sat in the front and could peddle, but I had control of the steering and brakes in the back. Sylvie loved it and very quickly took to being a 'front' seat driver, where I struggled to maneuver a rather unwieldy bike through Amsterdam streets. It was fun but challenging. I quickly realized that although everyone does seem to bike in Amsterdam, there is a bit more anarchy occurring in the bike lanes and streets than at first appears. For starters, bike lanes seem dedicated to anything with two-ish wheels, this includes scooters and motorbikes and tiny tiny cars that make smart cars look like SUVs. Also traffic signals like red lights, including those specifically for bikes seem to 'suggested' stops for cyclists. So here I am in an oversized bike that has a turning radius of the Titanic and to actually get anywhere I need to throw caution to the wind and put the front of the bike (where Sylvie is sitting) out into traffic and hope for the best. Well it seemed to work okay and Sylvie was very disappointed when we had to return the bike the next day.

So although, it is is definitely 'the thing' to do in Amsterdam, I think I am going to put my bike rides in the Loire valley and sauntering along the canal trail as more pleasurable than cycling in Amsterdam.

Lining up

It wasn't until we got to Paris that we began to realize the degree to which people willing to line up for attractions, and by contrast how unwilling we were to line up for most of them. There are very few tourist attractions in Ghana and the ones that most people want to see (the slave castles and National Parks, for instance) are big enough to accommodate large crowds (not to mention that Ghana doesn't attract nearly the same number of tourists as the European countries we've visited). Our travels in France prior to Paris we mostly in small places (and in the case of the places we saw while on our canal boat trek, tiny) and still in the shoulder tourist season (it was clear that Saumur was a much bigger tourist draw in July and August and it could very well be that we would have had to line up for attractions had we scheduled our journey a few months later in the year).

But in Paris the crowds were everywhere. Want to go up in the Eiffel Tower? Be prepared to line up, even if it's 10 o'clock at night. The Louvre? Half-hour minimum. Neither of these bothered me particularly because I had little interest in either one. The day we went to the Musee D'Orsay, however, and were confronted with a line up as long as the one at the Louvre was more difficult to accept. What were all these people doing wanting to get into the same place I wanted to go! We dealt with this line by avoiding it and finding something else to do (Paris is great for that -- we rented bikes and made our way up to Montmartre and Sacre Coeur, where we could have visited the Dali Museum if we had felt so inclined, no line up).

It's been in Amsterdam that we've had a much harder time avoiding the lines. It started with the Anne Frank House. I has been there before when I took students on a trip to Europe. My recollection of the visit is just walking in, no waiting (which for the record, is my same recollection of visiting the Louvre on that same trip). What I have come to realize, however, is that tour groups get special privileges and generally don't have to wait in lines with the rest of us ( that realization has made me a little contrite about the many disparaging things I've said about tour groups over the years...). After asking around we were told that the crowds die down after six; we decided to come back then. When we returned at 7 the line up was the same length, if not longer (at which point Alice quipped that it was ironic that there were so many people trying to get into a house whose occupants during WW II would have given anything to get out of...). We cut our loses and went home thinking we might try first thing in the morning.

Today we thought we'd try the Van Gogh Museum. Apparently more people want to see Sunflowers than the house of the Holocaust's most notable diarist. We gave up on that line too (with considerable less guilt, I might add). Sylvie really wanted to see the zoo and when we'd been by the day before, there was no line up at all. It's amazing, though, how much difference it makes being a beautiful Saturday morning, compared to an overcast Friday afternoon. We'd reached a point, though, where we couldn't avoid any more line ups without Sylvie getting frustrated (the zoo, after all had been her choice). So we duly lined up with all the other families (it does seem like you only come to the zoo if you have kids) and the line up moved relatively quickly. We also got a lot more out of this attraction than we probably would have at the others -- Sylvie was still raring to go four hours into the zoo visit, while half an hour to forty five minutes is her maximum at an art gallery (given the heavy nature of the content at the Anne Frank House, I can't even begin to estimate how long we would have been able to spend there).

I am sure that we will have to line up at the KLM desk on Monday to check in for our flight, but hopefully that will be the last one for a while!

Amazing Race

More than once during our ten weeks (it seems hard to believe that it's been ten weeks already) we've compared ourselves to contestants on the Amazing Race. It's one of the few "reality" shows we enjoy and one of the things that keeps us engaged is wondering how you would do in similar situations. In the comfort of your living room is easy to think that you would make better choices than the teams on screen. Having travelled through four countries including one in Africa, I don't think I'm as cocky as before.

(As an aside, it would make a fascinating season of the show if they made parents do the race with their seven year-olds -- it would add a very different dynamic to the show as teams had to stop what they were doing in order to avoid complete meltdown. I can tell you that given the choice between keeping the family peace or winning a million dollars, I would more often than not choose the family peace!)

Although we experienced much that would have made great fodder for Amazing Race situations in Ghana, the truth was that we were much more cautious during our five weeks, and were much less likely to set out to do things without planning them in advance (this, of course, did not mean that we avoided getting scammed by an unscrupulous taxi driver in Tamale -- "when I told you the price to drive you to Mole Park was 250 cedis all inclusive, I though it was clear that that was only one way; it's another 250 cedis to return -- or that Alice didn't get dangerously sick).

Our first 24 hours in Amsterdam I think shine more light on how we might fare on the show. Every time we start to feel that we've got this traveling thing down, something happens to melt a bit of the wax holding the feathers in our wings and we fall back to earth. Sometimes it's adjusting to the rhythm of others and sometimes it's underestimating the differences between countries, even in a place as supposedly unified as Europe.

We took the train yesterday from Paris and arrived in Amsterdam around 4 pm. We had been warned that it was Queen Day, which was particularly significant since Beatrix was abdicating the throne the following day to allow her son to become king (interesting trivia: Beatrix and I were born at the same hospital, though for my birth there was no need to annex my room to the Netherlands so that the future sovereign could be born on Dutch "soil"). We new we going to be entering something akin to Canada festivities, so we weren't surprised to be greeted by mildly drunken groups in the train station or to see young men and women dressed up as foot soldiers, standing on pedestals with giant orange inflatable hands and megaphones they used to yell things in Dutch at passersby (ok, the latter was a little surprising...)

We thought we had written down all the information we needed to get to our rental apartment. It's probably important to point out right about now that although we've managed to divest ourselves of some of the things we brought with us ten weeks ago (either by giving it away in Ghana or by giving it to family who stowed it in their suitcases after their visit with us) we are still a family of three on an extended vacation with clothes for multiple climates and school work for our precious charge. This translates into two large suitcases, two smaller suitcases and a medium size backpack. We don't move anywhere quickly or stealthily, but we generally get where we need to go without losing anyone or anything.

Thinking we need to get to the metro we make our way through the train station (this was after sometime spent looking for a phone -- ha -- public versions of which appear to be completely extinct in Amsterdam) we carry our luggage down stairs, through hallways, down more stairs. We wait in an enormous line to buy metro tickets, we get ourselves through the metro gates (not designed for families with a lot of luggage and a child a bit skittish in large crowds...) only to find that we had misunderstood the directions and we needed to be on a train and not in the metro (isn't the metro a kind of train?!?).

You can picture how this would be shown on the Race. Scott, Alice and Sylvie standing in the metro bewildered and increasingly frustrated surrounded by crowds of orange clad partiers. Sitting on your couch you would be shaking your head -- "they should have been more careful reading the directions. Tsk, Tsk".

So back up the stairs, across the square of partiers (all of whom have special dispensation from the powers that be to drink openly in the streets on Queen Day, and I have to say by this point a can of Heineken is looking really appealing) and into another line to buy another ticket because the trains are not the same company as the bus, tram and metro so the tickets we have won't help us. Get the new tickets and a printout of the next available trains. Run (ok hurry with our bags though the crowds) past the track that our train from Paris came in on three quarters of an hour ago, all the way to the wrong track. "You want 14b, this is 14a". Off the train heading to the airport, to the right train, just as the doors close.

We arrive at the apartment about 45 minutes later than we had said. Cut to Gordon/Hutton family dejectedly figuring out that they will be the sixth team leaving, an hour and a half after the first team gets to go at the crack of dawn. "At least it wasn't a pit stop and we're still in the game," they tell themselves.

I won't bore you with our escapades today, but our ability to figure out the Amsterdam transit system didn't seem to improve with some rest as we tried to rent bikes (we should have chosen the other detour and loaded the gooda truck and made deliveries around town. Is it too late...?) Amazing as it is we managed to fail at renting bikes in the most bike friendly town in the world (I keep telling myself it's because everybody hear already owns their own bikes, but it's somewhat cold comfort!).

What I've realized about the Amazing Race is that not only is there manipulative editing but the teams are constantly kept off balance by being put constantly in new situations; they never have a chance to find any kind of equilibrium because they're always in a rush or being rushed off to another country. Although today didn't go completely as planned, many of the things that I found frustrating yesterday because I was tired, rushed, slightly overwhelmed were a whole lot easier today once I had had a chance to get a better understating of the overall situation and inner workings.

We're in the final let, with only five more days before the final sprint for the finish line. Don't know whether we'll get the million dollars but the trip will have been worth it!