Dutch Class

Here’s a really cheerful visual summary of the Netherlands. Enjoy !

At just over 9.5 minutes, this is quite a long YouTube clip but well worth the patience if you’re considering a trip to Holland and not sure what to expect. The travel-brochure style photos are great, especially set to the rather catchy tune with Dutch lyrics.

This presents Holland with pride, omitting to mention some its more modern yet less stylish associations. There are plenty of other YouTube clips about “coffee shops”, questionnable areas of Amsterdam, and so on! Watch this for the clogs, windmills, national costumes, coastline, canals, tulips, and many other features of Dutch life.

It looks like the Holland America’s Line’s new ship the Eurodam which I wrote about yesterday is to be named tomorrow and it has its own news website and a pretty brochure site too. The picture from yesterday’s article is below. For once Dutch Class has the jump on Wikipedia as they don’t have a photo yet.

It was also featured on the main Dutch evening news today.

Just for balance we’ll include a picture of an appropriately named slightly smaller ship moored not far away. In its own way it looks just as nice.

Parking space in the centre of Rotterdam is a bit limited, as with most major cities. When I visited there today I shot the below picture of some rare off road parking space.

The ship in the background is the Eurodam, a ship of the Holland America line. It is actually hard to do justice to the sheer size of it in either words or pictures but have a look at the one below. The two skyscrapers to either side are not exactly small…

While British Football supporters are without an obvious team to support for Euro 2008 (the European football championship held in in Switzerland and Austria during June 2008), there is no such split loyalty in The Netherlands.

The Dutch national football team are playing in Euro 2008 and thousands of supporters are expected to follow their team to their games. Although over-land travel to the venues is possible from The Netherlands, news reports say the Dutch Football Association’s official transport company, OAD has chartered 100 flights to fly Dutch fans to the European football championship matches.

There are plans for OAD to transport 15,000 football fans a day for the first three matches. These are: Netherlands vs Italy on 9th June, Netherlands vs France on 13th June, and Netherlands vs Romania on 17th June. All three matches take place in the Swiss city of Berne.

Most flights will leave the Netherlands on the morning of the game and return to Schiphol and Rotterdam Airport after the match. “Orange Parties” will be held for Dutch supporters ahead of the matches.

As noted in the previous post Oxford’s twin town in the Netherlands is Leiden and it is similar to Oxford in the sense that it is an old town with a prominent University distributed all over the town.

There are however also differences between Oxford and Leiden. One obvious one is that Leiden is one of the Dutch towns that has many canals running through it so that going from one place to another usually entails crossing at least one bridge. The picture below shows a canal view shot from a bridge on a somewhat sunnier day.



Leiden really does have this “picture book” Dutch look about it. There is even a windmill in the centre opposite which you can buy Dutch pancakes. All that is missing to complete the picture is a herring selling cart and some seagulls although, some to think of it, you could find those too…

Leiden is the twin town of Oxford. In many ways Leiden is quite similar to Oxford. It is a picturesque medium sized town with an ancient university in it and just like Oxford the university is distributed all over the town.

I will be writing more notes on Leiden and how it compares to Oxford but for now I would like to reflect on cloudy skies being a very Dutch thing. If you have seen a few of them in Holland you will know what I mean. All countries have clouds but the Dutch get clouds. The below is an example. I took this picture with a camera phone while staying in Leiden last year.

The picture was taken in the centre of Leiden. It was a remarkable metereological effect even by Dutch standards. The sky went from fairly clear to heavily clouded in the space of a few minutes with the clouds moving rapidly and swirling into existence.

It was almost like an apocalyptic special effect out of a movie. I have never seen anything remotely like it here in Oxford.

As the largest airport in the Netherlands, Schiphol Airport is the destination of many flights to/from Holland. This is also the European terminal of the first transatlantic “fast lane“, via which Dutch and American citizens may cross the borders of the Netherlands and US by automated border passage. 

This recently announced (19/05/2008) scheme called “The International Expedited Traveler (IET) Program” is an Initiative of the Dutch and American governments, which links Schiphol Group’s Privium program with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Global Entry program. The program will be executed in the Netherlands by the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND), the Dutch Border Police (Koninklijke Marechausee), and Dartagnan (a wholly owned subsidiary of Schiphol Group).

Further information is available from the Schiphol Group, operator of Schiphol Airport.