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For some reason whenever I come to the Netherlands important cultural persons die. Last time fim maker Theo van Gogh was brutally murdered (his murderer got a life scentence yesterday, but that won’t help) and today Holland’s most important comics author, Rotterdam born Marten Toonder, died. Fortunately he died in a more peaceful way, in his sleep, at the age of 93. He was the creator of the “‘Tom Puss and Oliver Bumble'”-comics series and today I walked past a statue that was erected a couple of years ago in Rotterdam in his honour. Somebody laid flowers, although they were a bit dry already.

Here is a longer article about Marten Toonder, with samples of his work and a bigger photo of the monument.

My mother was happy to see me, on this surprise visit.

I hadn’t told anyone because I wasn’t sure if I was going until one day before departure. I still had a return ticket that I bought in November 2004 that I hadn’t planned on using. But because my wrist wasn’t well enough to work yet, I decided to use it anyway.

My mother moved to a new home and has a room on the top, eight floor, with a balcony overlooking the whole city of Nijmegen. Unfortunately it’s also very windy and she can’t wheel her wheelchair out by herself, so she’s not admiring that view very often.

She looked well, although she claims she hardly sleeps because of the pain in her paralysed leg. She is tired however, and kicks me more or less out after an hour with the announcement that she is going to watch TV.

This is Door 16.

“Unaccompanied baggage reclaim” is an euphemism for “here you can get your luggage the next day because the bastards at Heathrow Airport managed to lose your suitcase even if you had a 5 hour layover.”

My flight to London was doomed. Not because of the recent terrorist attacks, but because we had a VIP on board. Dressed in a white futuristic suit with excessive padding on the shoulders Mr. RaÎl himself was on the plane. He, for the uninitiated, is the founder of the RaÎlian sect, known for their supposedly first cloning of a human. And he claims he is in regular contact with the aliens who will be coming to earth to save us. Or something like that, I’m sure they have a web site where you can look it up yourself. I can’t because I’m at London Heathrow at the moment, waiting for my connecting flight to Amsterdam. But I’m ahead of the story.
About the same time I saw Rael boarding I found out I didn’t have my boarding pass anymore. A sure sign of the alien overlords taking over. I probably lost it when they swiped my computer in search of explosives. They handed it back to me, but since I also got my computer back I probably put it down for a moment. I asked the guy at the check-in desk I had to go down all the way to the luggage check but he said “No problem Sir, I’ll just print a new boarding pass for you.” And so he did. And he told me I could get a new boarding pass for the second leg of my trip in London. So far so good. After an uneventful flight (I even managed to sleep almost three hours!) I got that boarding pass indeed. But when I boarded my delayed British Midland flight to Amsterdam they refused to let me on board. I needed a ticket coupon, which was also lost because it was in the same So even though my name was on the passenger list, I had miraculously flown to London and I had a valid boarding pass, I couldn’t come on board. “You’ll have to go back to the ticket desk and buy a new ticket.” I nearly exploded but managed to control my anger. They didn’t need another explosion here.
After going through the almost 30 minutes long line for the luggage check for the second time in two hours, I went to the British Midland desk were they directed my problems to the British Airways support desk. After I explained the situation over and over to several people they agreed to issue a replacement ticket, but they had to charge me 25 British Pounds. Even though I didn’t want to I caved because I was sick of the whole situation.
Printing the new ticket took a log time because the British Airways clerk had to retype my ticket info (about 80 characters of gibberish) over and over again because it gave an error whenever he made only a 1 character mistake, and he could start over again. So charging 40 euros for the new ticket was actually very cheap. But it caused me to miss the next flight as well, so I’ll spent in total more than 5 hours in Heathrow. And I hated Heathrow already. But since British Airways is the only company that has the kind of tickets that I want for a reasonable price (tickets were the different legs of the trip are almost a year apart) I’m afraid I’ll come here more often in the future. Unless I totally refrain from visiting my relatives and friends in the Netherlands. Which, as I sit here in this shopping mall turned airport, seems almost a nice idea.

Epilogue: Of course my luggage was missing when I arrived in Amsterdam. So instead or going to my mother I was forced to go to a friend. There I had supper and after that slept pretty well.
Today (wednesday 26) I’m heading for Schiphol to get my suitcase (Yay!) and then to Rotterdam to drop it off and then to my mother.

They’ve put a new mother board in my laptop, replaced the hard drive for the second time in two months and now it doesn’t ‘see’ my camera’s memory card anymore. So I can’t easily transfer my pictures.

I’m getting so tired of this….

So now I’m frantically looking for the cable to connect my camera to the computer. So far with no results.

It has been a couple of strange days. I’m following a French course again so I’m not home during the day. And almost every day this week something had happened during my absence. Tuesday there was a big rain storm – we saw manhole covers being blown in the air by the accumulated pressure in the sewers- and our toilet had overflown so the bathroom was full of very dirty water. I’ll spare you the details.
Wednesday I came home to find the whole kitchen covered in a fine dust. The neighbour had his house sandblasted and ‘forgot’ to tell his neighbours. Our kitchen window was open and the very fine dust of the bricks had spread everywhere, helped by a strong wind blowing right into our kitchen. The garden was brown instead of green, and our car had the same colour. A guy came to clean the (outside) mess but after 5 minutes waving around a hose (our hose BTW, that he took without even asking) he left again. I had to hose down everything again and mop the kitchen. And still we’re finding dust everywhere.
Today I came home to find a big puddle next to the dog bed. At first I thought Poupoune had peed, taking revenge for my prolonged absence. But then I saw the big spot on the ceiling and concluded it was a leakage. But the upstair neighbours weren’t home so I couldn’t even get rid of my anger. And when they came home later they said it wasn’t their water since everything was dry on their end. So it might be coming from the second floor and leaking through the walls. Very hard to track down when it happened a couple of hours ago. We’ll have to wait for the next leakage…

I’ve been experiencing some computer problems lately (Failing hard drives and a replacement computer that stopped working as well) so the feed is a bit low.

In the meantime let’s just rewind to two years ago, and see what happened on Canada Day 2003.

In order to celebrate our anniversary, we went to Sutton to do some hiking. But when we arrived there the wound on my foot hurted so much that we decided to just sit next to a river and enjoy the coolness of the water. This was also much apreciated by Poupoune, who gets a lot of swimming these days.

I went to Mary (and her cottage) another time. I still can’t do much, and today I didn’t have physiotherapy, so I could escape the heat. Poupoune can’t get enough of fetching the stick. She’s totally wasted after the day. I was only slightly sun burned. And I scraped my foot over a sharp underwater rock while I was swimming. But apart from that I had a really nice day.

The temperatures in the city are soaring again (over 30 ?C) and we decide to invite ourselves to Mary who stays at her family’s cottage in the Laurentians. I call her and before I can say my name she yells in the phone: “Come on over!”

And so we did. Except Pepe, who can’t behave himself in cars and has to stay home.

Mary is all alone at the cottage, but a couple of hours later we are joined by her brother and his wife and 1 year old baby and a friend with het 2 year old baby. We sit in the sun, swim, barbecue hotdogs (them) and salmon (us). Poupoune also meets Mary’s cat Squib (again), and manages to send him high up in a tree. Fortunately we don’t have to get her out of there but he manages to get down himself. After that he hides onto the roof, not leaving Poupoune out of his eye sight.

When we come back into Montréal we really find out how lucky we were; It’s very, very hot in our house.

No idea what moth or butterfly this is, all I know is that it’s big, very bright green and was hiding under Mary’s cottage roof.

A Dutch friend made this work of art (and coined the term as well).

I bought it and he sent it in a box to Canada. Through the miracles of the postal system, it arrived after only 5 days. It must have been shipped with a speedy boat.