Tag: amersfoort

Went for my first haircut in 4 months, putting an end to my ‘mad professor’ style. As I do after every pandemic, I changed hair dresser. The barbershop I went to is located on a former industrial site, that now has a range of small shops and companies. I was a bit late, but this time I had proof of the age old Dutch excuse for turning up late for school: the bridge was open.

After my haircut, enabling me to show myself in public again, I noticed a pleasant looking place right across from the barber. I had coffee and their great looking home made dade/orange/nuts cake.

Then I cycled home through the Schothorst park. A pleasant morning outside after a mostly grey and rainy week.

First train trip in three months. The last one was on March 12th to Utrecht. Today I’m going to Amsterdam for a meeting that needs to be done face to face. Face masks are mandatory on public transport, and the railway stations have added signage for it.

Curious to see how busy or not the streets in Amsterdam will be.

Wednesday we went to a nearby store to look at some garden furniture. Now that it is likely we will spend most of the summer at home, and for certain will not be camping somewhere else in Europe, we wanted to have comfortable seating on our waterside terrace.

The store is on the edge of our neighbourhood looking out over the highway. We spotted something that has been very rare the past 10 weeks: a traffic jam!

Today is King’s day, our national holiday. Normally it turns the entire country into a giant orange colored street festival and fleamarket, but this year we’re all at home. It’s been dubbed Woningsdag, or ‘houseday’, which differs from Koningsdag, King’s day, in its first letter only. In my head King’s day is the start of ‘flag week’, as April 27th is followed by May 4th Remembrance day, and May 5th Liberation day, the only three days in the year the general population flies a flag. The Netherlands isn’t at all big on flag waving.

This year it seemed there were more flags visible around our neighbourhood than last year, regularly with the telltale folds of newly bought and unpackaged flags visible.

When Y woke up and came downstairs we unfurled the flag together and mounted it next to the front door.

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Today E and I concluded we have a cool event space right around the corner. While we were thinking about whether or not to do an unconference this spring (we decided not to, in the car to France two weeks ago), I realised a building around the corner from us seemed to have new occupants. Until then it had only been in use on Sundays by a local church community.

The building itself is from 2007, when this area was newly built, and it was intended to serve as theater and community meeting and event space. A few years later it went bankrupt, and since then it wasn’t used except for Sunday services.
But late last year it has re-opened, under the name De Kamers (the rooms)

We visited today and saw how it is a very informal and warmly decorated place with lots of daylight. With a number of different spaces, a professional kitchen and large outside area. Perfect for unconferences like ours, where creating a relaxed informal atmosphere is important, and very close to our home, almost like it is an extension of it. It left us imagining what we could do with it. It would be a shame to not use a beautiful facility like that. We will receive an indication of costs soon, to help us guide our thinking as to how and when we might put that venue to good use.