Back in 2012, I went on my first solo international trip to visit my friend in his home country of the Netherlands. That was also back when I was on facebonk, so naturally I uploaded all my pictures there. I didn’t think of writing a blog post about it.

But I’ve quit faceborg, and the details of this trip really should be here along with all my other trips, so here we go. This having happened an entire decade ago, things are a bit hazy, especially the order that they happened in. Also my old camera was having a few issues, so if you see any weird glitchy things happening in a photo, it’s the camera’s fault. I didn’t take as many pictures as I would now, because I only had a limited memory card. At least I didn’t have disposable film cameras, can you imagine!? Only having 24 (or whatever) pictures before the camera’s full?

I went for 4 weeks in August of 2012. Which is a bit excessive, especially considering it was in the middle of my Master’s degree, but 1) I’d never been to Europe before, and 2) I wanted to spend a lot of time with my cool relatively-new friend.

This post contains the beginning of my visit, some trips to small towns (mostly around North Holland) where I played pipe organ, arranged by Tharash’s parents.

While in Purmerend, Tharash’s dad took us to the archives there and showed us a document he had looked up – the first record of the city hiring an organist. It was so cool to see this many-hundred-year-old document, that a real person wrote about another real person just in the day-to-day flow of life, especially about something I’m interested in. That kind of thing is just fascinating to me, I guess because it’s finding a sort of kinship with people no longer here. It’s easy to reduce famous people to characters, and to see the past as an abstract story instead of something that influences the present. Harder to do with normal people, even if we know less about them.

This was also the day I first had a croquette, and it was delicious, but they wouldn’t tell me what was in it like it contained unmentionable animal parts or something.

I’m sure I didn’t take any pictures of it, but we did go to an organ concert in Haarlem at some point, and Tharash’s parents bought me a poster of the organ there (which I still have in a tube somewhere, but while I lived in London ON it was proudly framed on my wall (cheap poster frame though, it was always breaking)). I recall thinking it was not a great concert to introduce people to classical music/organ, because there was some crunchy stuff on the program, and sure enough Tharash didn’t really enjoy it that much. We’ve been to quite a few organ concerts since then, though, and he’s come to like them not just because I get excited, but he likes the timbre of organ music. After that, we went to a café in the town square outside the church, and I asked for “thee, alstublieft” and was praised for it haha. (My Dutch has only progressed to children’s picture books since then, despite years of off-again-on-again Duolingo : P )

I’m also certain that we went to see several museums in Amsterdam, including the Dutch Resistance Museum (where a highlight was a poster warning good Dutch girls to stay away from those sexy Canadian soldiers), the Amsterdam museum (where I learned that there’s been a dam on the river Amstel for 700+ years and it made me and my country feel very baby), and the Rijksmuseum. The Rijksmuseum was under renovation, so there were only a few exhibits available, and even that took all afternoon. I remember a room full of dollhouses, because apparently there was a dollhouse fad for rich people in the 19th century; there was an exhibit on Delftware that I found very neat; and of course they still had The Night Watch on display in a special room dedicated only to it.