Our Christmas

We took advantage of the fact there was no where we could go, and slept in. After a lazy morning, we left the hostel, prepared to wander around the city, which we assumed we would have to ourselves. As soon as we entered the streets, we realised we were missing the party! There were people (mostly families) everywhere, and all headed to the town square.

Krakow has what's considered the largest town square in Europe, and is the host to a huge Christmas market. We assumed that like last night, the market would be closed, and again we were wrong. It seemed to be the thing to do! Everyone was drinking mulled wine, bartering for goods, riding in horse-drawn carriages and listening to the accordian quartet play "Flight of the Bumblebee " every four songs. By now, we've probably heard "Flight of the Bumblebee" forty times. It was quite a nice treat for us, as we didn't have the Christmas to ourselves like expected. Later on in the day we overheard some carolers.

We headed to the old Jewish city, which we assumed would be open today, and wanded amoungst the 500 year old cemetary, and through the streets "Schindler's List" was filmed on. This city is stunning. Sometimes it's impossible to tell what year it is, and I mean this in a good way.

We have had a very memorable Christmas, and hope all of you do, too. Now we're going to drink some vodka. . . after all, we are in Poland.

Krazy for Krakow

It's 8:30pm on Christmas Eve and we're currently sitting in the lounge of our (surprisingly nice) hostel in Krakow. You might want to know why we are sitting in the hostel at such an early hour on Christmas Eve, but truth be told, Krakow is not the most metropolitan place we've ever been and the city completely shut down around 5:00pm. That's ok with us though, as the historic city's charm that we came for is present at every corner.

So far I've been dragging Grace from Christmas market to Christmas market. It works out well as she gets to browse through the handmade Christmas ornaments and I get to eat. And I am glad to say that there is as much to eat as there is to look at, which makes me a very happy traveller.

The food is very hearty, consisting mainly of meat (duck, pork or sausage), stewed cabbage, and potatoes. For this reason it is a perfect remedy from the chilly weather and one of the reasons why I think travelling to this part of the world at Christmas was such a great choice. And if the food doesn't warm you up, there is a never ending supply of hot mulled wine to be consumed, which makes me an even happier traveller. Oh, and then there's my new favourite drink, hot rum, or Grog as it is called in Czech culture.

Enough about food. We arrived in Krakow early this morning after an overnight train from Prague where we spent the first three full days of our trip. Prague is even more beautiful than it is made out to be, and at Christmas time the entire old center is packed with christmas markets. As well, for a city that is commonly said to be frustratingly over-touristed, the cooler weather seemed to keep a majority of visitors away and at times we felt like we had the whole city to ourselves.

The weather has also been better than expected, with temperatures hovering around zero and no snow (though, I secretely wished to see Prague covered in it).

In two days we're off to Budapest then to Vienna for the remaining three days of our trip. One of my classmates has booked a flight to meet us in Vienna for New-Years which will be a nice treat.

Hopefully everyone at home is enjoying themselves. It's certainly a different Christmas for us, but one that we hope to hold on to for years to come.

Merry Christmas!

And we're off

Tomorrow night, we will be in Prague. After that, we will be in Kraków, Budapest and Vienna. We might be able to to post over our holiday, but maybe not. If not, we'll see you in the new year.

Merry Christmas.

Twenty-First Century Christmas

The sky is clear and blue, the sun is shining, and it's 3° outside. Yes, it's Christmastime in The Hague. The prospect of snow isn't a reality, as everyone knows it rarely snows in Holland anymore, due to global warming – at least this is what we've been told. At first Ross and I were somewhat surprised that the general public acknowledges global warming so frankly. After all, in North America "climate change" is something that people are aware is likely happening, but the topic is always followed by examples of unusual weather patterns in the past. Not in Holland, people. Al Gore has won a Nobel Peace Prize, and we're having a Globally-Warmed Christmas.

This doesn't mean White Christmases are a thing of the past. There are still efforts to re-create the effect, however most of this is made of plastic. I've seen many Christmas Trees with cotton, or stuffing on their branches that almost looks like real snow if you're standing on the other side of the street and squinting.

Yesterday I was riding my bike down a popular shopping street, and suddenly it started snowing!


It was coming from this machine on a lamppost.


It was a kind of foam, but it didn't disintegrate. It was very popular with everyone on the street, who took photos in the snow, and tried to play in it. The snowball fights were as successful as throwing a handful of feathers at someone. Whatever the snow was made of, I'm certain must be terrible for the environment, and possibly one of the reasons there will not be real snow this year.

In a different part of town, a public skating rink is set up. I read about it on the city's website, and marked in in my calendar as something Ross & I should do. I was expecting a big open rink, kind of like the one at Olympic Plaza in Calgary, or the one in Central Park you see in movies. We saw the rink yesterday, and it's basically a frozen-over kiddie pool.


As we stood there watching five kids barely move, Ross noticed something strange about the ice – it wasn't ice. It was white plastic. This means there was no chill, no shine, no ice-smell, no sounds of blades scraping, no snow-plow stops, and kids could comfortably do things like this:


I since removed this activity from my calendar.

Inside our home, this is as Christmas-y as it gets. Since we're going away in a few days, we don't have a tree. It's been kind of fun getting all our presents and cards in the mail. We're opening them later tonight over Skype with our families.


Merry Twenty-First Century Christmas, everyone.

Sometimes it's nice to have breakfast for dinner

I decided I wanted to make pannekoeken for dinner. For those of you that have never been to De Dutch Pannekoek House (play the music), a pannekoek is kind of like a crêpe in that it is much larger and thinner than the pancakes we know. They are topped with savory or sweet toppings, like ham and cheese, or nutella. They are also served with stroop which is a thick, sweet, molasses-like syrup.

On my way home from work I picked up the necessary ingredients (pannekoek mix, eggs, cheese, ham) and headed home to start panne-cookin'. When I was one block from my house, my groceries (that were hanging off my handlebars) got caught in the front spokes of my bicycle, and abruptly stopped! I was luckily going slow enough that I didn't fly over the handlebars.

I looked down to see what's happened, just as a puff of pannekoek mix settled. There was egg yolk dripping through the bag – which now had a collection of holes in it – onto the sidewalk. I decided it was probably safest to walk the rest of the way home.

Here's the damage:


My bicycle wheel destroyed this carton of eggs. I don't even know where the part of the carton that was torn off went. You might think five eggs were broken, but it was actually only three. Eggs here come in sixes and tens – not a dozen. (Small fridges, remember?)


It also ripped into this box of pannekoek mix. Luckily the mix was in a bag inside this box. Unluckily the pressure of my bicycle spokes caused both ends of said bag to burst open.


But not everything was destroyed. Luckily the Kerstboom-shaped cheese I bought survived relatively unharmed. (This was the only item I really cared about anyways.)

Despite all the adversity, I still managed to whip this up:


Holiday Pannekoek.

PS: I learned to not do that again.

Even underwear is confusing

Ross & I are going to be spending the Christmas holidays in Eastern Europe. That's correct, we have chosen to go to the coldest part of the continent during the coldest time, just as we chose to go to Spain in August. We live for extremes, people.

For this holiday, we needed to get some long underwear. Wherever we travel, we always spend lots of time on foot, so we figured we had better bundle up. We went to Holland's equivalent of Wal-Mart, Hema. Hema isn't exactly like Wal-Mart in that it only sells the store brand. For example, you can't buy Maybelline make-up at Hema, you can only buy the Hema brand. Hema also seems to be classier than Wal-Mart, kind of like a mix between Wal-Mart and The Bay. Anyway, we went there today to buy our long underwear.

Not surprisingly, this proved to be twice as complicated as it should have been. We found the Hema-brand long underwear divided into three categories: Men's, women's and children's. They were packaged in sealed boxes, and we scoured the box for a size. After we couldn't find anything, we decided it must be one size fits all and bought a ladies top and bottom and a men's top and bottom as well. Almost immediately after paying for these, Ross noticed in tiny letters on the back of his box (in the barcode) that his top was a XL and his bottoms were an L. Anyone of you that has ever seen Ross knows this is a bit excessive.

So, back to the section we went and tried to find something more appropriate. I had a S top and an L bottom, when I think an M would have been best for both. After looking through all the boxes, it became obvious that Ms do not exsist. In Men's sizes, nothing other than Ls or XLs exsist. We concluded all the underwear was unisex, and the smallest size was labeled as "children's", the two biggest were "Men's" and the middle two were "Women's". The fact they went to the trouble of differentiating by gender made it twice as complicated as it should have been. Why didn't they just label it as "Adult, S, M, L & XL"? We exchanged our purchases, and both ended up getting "Women's" Ls for both top and bottom.

When we got home, we thought we should test out their warmth, and realized we accidentally bought three tops, and only one bottom. Will the adventure ever end?

A cause for celebration

For the first time since the end of July, I have worked a full work-week.

I now work my regular job on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and my new job on Thursday and Friday. I really feel it is quite an accomplishment to be working full-time in my field, in a country that speaks another language. Finding work was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. Everyone can expect the job hunt to be time-consuming and a kick to your pride, but the extra step of translating every piece of info I could find was a huge necessity that I didn't account for.

Job#2 is with a small group of people and run by a husband and wife team from a studio in their home. The husband is the founder of a very well-known and successful graphic design studio, and the wife is an established interior designer. Their intentions with this new (yet to be named) studio is to bring together the two disciplines and offer a service that doesn't just create commercial spaces, but also provides all the graphic material that accompanies it. For example, a new store opened today that the studio designed both the identity and the interior simultaneously. A very good idea!

I'm quite excited because I've wanted to try some environmental design but didn't know how to get into the field. Well, here I am, and I still don't know how I got here.

Working in Holland is not as easy as I thought it would be. I'm not talking about my qualifications, I mean just being at work is harder than expected. In Job #1, it's just the owner and I and – when she's not on the phone, or no one is visiting – English is the language spoken in the studio. Even then, sometimes it's really challenging to express ourselves and have one another understand. In addition, all the projects I have worked on are in Dutch. One of the first thing we were taught at school is to read the text before you design with it. Well, I read it, but understanding it is a whole separate task. I can't take anything for granted; every minor detail takes an effort to understand. (One day when my boss was in a meeting, I spent easily ten minutes trying to figure out how to send an email, and discovered it only after translating all the menu choices.)

At Job #2, there six or seven people and obviously they all speak Dutch. It's quite isolating to be the only one that doesn't speak a language because I am left out of every conversation that is occurring from large, important discussions, to asking if anyone wants some coffee. (FYI: Usually I can understand the later, but it takes me a few seconds to comprehend and by the time I turn around to answer, the asker has scurried off to the kitchen.) Obviously, I don't get any of the jokes.

I don't mean to sound as though this is traumatic or depressing. Obviously it gets kind of lonely, and I'm frustrated at myself for my lack of contribution. It's a new experience for me, and I don't think it's a bad one. I don't expect everyone to speak English just because I'm around.

On a brighter note, my comprehension is definitely improving. Now I can usually understand what people are talking about, although the specifics are lost. I've learned that Dutch-speaking people, just like English-speaking people, also have plenty of meaningless conversations. This might not sound like breaking news, but for the last 3 and a half months, I have listened to every conversation around me so carefully that each deserved to be quite profound. Well, it turns out all this time people were talking about rush hour, their cat, and stupid movies.

How nice it is to hear this! I'm sure this might not sound like anything too exciting, but I haven't overheard (and understood) someone else's conversation in all this time. As a result, I haven't joined in on a conversation, either. It's a small thing, but it wasn't until I couldn't that I realized how important it is.

I'm not joining in, yet. I usually just sit there and listen, and listen, and don't speak unless I'm spoken too. I feel bad interrupting a conversation to speak English. (Think about it, I have no verbal cues to know when is a good time to change topics.) I am looking forward to that day when I can actually contribute something worthwhile. I imagine my audience will be as surprised as I will.

The Dates Have Been Marked.

If ever life over here gets tiring, lonesome, drab, etc. I have something to look forward to with great anticipation.

The series of dates I referred to above are May 2 - 18, and, as many of you may know, these days mark the first time ever that the World Championships in Hockey will be taking place in Canada.

Why is this so important? Well, as some of you may also know, I have become quite a hockey fan in the past couple of years and since I cannot watch any games over here, I have made it a routine to check my NHL hockey scores before moving forward with any other aspect of my day.

Unfortunately, this morning routine usually causes the day to get off to a bad start as my team – the Calgary Flames – are, well, not doing so well (as I'm sure any of you Canucks fans most certainly know).

But alas! Just when I was beginning to lose faith in the sport as a whole, I found myself in the middle of a conversation with an Austrian and a Slovakian about the greatest country in international hockey. At first I was delighted to be able to talk sports with someone and not have it be football (though this is also very interesting). However, the more the conversation unraveled, the less apparent their reverence towards Canadian hockey became.

This was not something I would let go. Their reluctance to admit the true dominance Canada has on hockey became an issue of Canadian pride. And this I had to defend.

Luckily the issue was resolved (it was always friendly, of course) and we are now invited to the house of a Slovak national to watch the World Championships take place in Halifax and Quebec City. The only problem will be getting through the remaining 148 days until the first puck drops.

In the mean time here's some riveting tid-bits on Canadian hockey:

1) Canada has 552, 040 registered hockey players. Compare that with Russia who only has 77,000

2) Canada has over 3,000 indoor arenas. Compare that with Russia who has only 142. I wonder how many 'ponds' we have?

3) We rank first in total overall medal count (44) in the World Championships, and have won the highest number of gold medals (24).

4) Women's team won gold in all but one (where they won silver) World Championship tournament between 1990 and 2007.

5) 50.2% of players currently playing in the NHL are Canadian. The next highest representation is from the States with only 17.7%. From there it drops off dramatically.

5) 2006 was a shameful Olympics for Canada, yes, but 2002 was great!

Pakjesavond

It's December 5th, meaning that tomorrow is none other that Sinterklaas' birthday (it's the reason he comes all the way from Spain, you know.) Tonight is the traditional night for exchanging gifts delivered by Sinterklaas and the Zwart Peiten. The way children let Sinterklaas know they would like some gifts is to sing Sinter-songs loudly up the chimney. Ross & I don't know any, so I don't think he's coming to our house tonight.

But he did the other day! From the time he arrives in late November until December 6th, he can leave little treats in your shoes for you to find when you wake up in the morning. And on Saturday morning Ross & I found chocolate letters in our shoes!


Chocolate letters are a Sinterklaas tradition. Usually you receive the first initial of your name, like I did.


So far, Pakjesavond is quite balmy. I'm only mentioning this because I know you're all freezing, but it's currently +12°C, and it's 9pm! Who needs presents when you've got beautiful weather?

ribbon b

This is a first attempt at using the ribbon program I wrote (remember those colourful squiggles from a few days ago?) to create actual letters. You can start to see where I'm taking this. Ultimately I'd like to have alternates for each letter that connect with other letters to form continuous ribbon strings, but that is likely a very long time away.

Grace Speaks Dutch?

No, no I sure don't. But I am committed to studying.

I found this site, Laura Speaks Dutch that full of themed, five-minute-ish podcasts I can download to learn Dutch. Originally it was created by a man to teach his girlfriend the language. Isn't that nice? What's even nicer is that it's useful for anyone. His pronunciation is very clear, and he repeats words often so you don't have to keep stopping and starting it.

Me, I've downloaded some lessons and practice while Ross is writing calligraphy. Doesn't our house sound like so much fun?

M is for My Monogram

It's still a bit flimsy in some areas, but it's getting there. I also made a version that strings together to form a series of repeating shapes. The string version could be used to make things like traditional printers borders.

Crossing Borders

Last weekend we attended the third annual Crossing Borders, a poetry and music festival held in The Hague. The theme of the week-long event is bringing together artists whose work blurs the definitions of music, poetry, art and performance, to celebrate and create dialog about the intersections of what are usually categorized as distinct genres. The most obvious example is the poetry of songwriting, but as we found, there are many others.

Some of the guests who's names you might recognize are: Rufus Wainwright, Salomon Rushdie, Chuck Palahniuk, The New Pornographers, Vic Chestnutt, and many, many, many more. Some artists sang, some read their poetry, some did both. Most of the poetry readings were followed by an interview, which was a really nice touch.

With Brian, we bought passes for the Thursday and the Saturday. The pass gave you access for any of the scheduled events for that particular day, meaning you kind of jumped around from room to room at your pleasure.

The first reading we attended was Richard Hell, who is best known as a former member of the the band Television. He read some articles he's recently written for a paper in Colorado I think it was, which discuss his aggressive thoughts on God. After he sat down for the most awkard interview on earth.


This photo is not really accurate as it suggests those two were somewhat relaxed with one another, and it kind of appears as though the interviewer is almost actually looking at Richard. The interviewer seemed only interested in discussing the one thing Richard Hell did not want to: Television and the birth of the New York Punk scene. Richard compromised by charismatically telling funny party stories from that time. It was cute, but I'm glad this was the first thing we saw.

After we listened to Gerard Malanga read some of his poetry. Gerard is a poet and a photographer that is best know for being Andy Warhol's right-hand-man in the days of The Factory. As a photographer he specializes in portraiture. As a poet, he does the same.


He was such an engaging reader that immediately following, we ran down to the bookstore and bought one of his anthologies. We asked him to sign it, and he took it upon himself to edit the mistakes!



We then saw Akron Family play probably the funniest and least-pretentious show I've ever seen. Their set ranged from hippie-folk to freestyle rap, and even included a children's song about a bear getting honey from an enchanted forest. Super fun.

Saturday we went early to get seats for one of the the most talked-about performers of the festival, Patti Smith. She was entirely captivating. In her incredibly thoughtful performance she read poems by Sylvia Plaith, Allen Ginsberg, and paraphrased Hamlet's soliloquy "To be or not to be". My most favourite part of her show was when she acoustically sang Lou Reed's "Perfect Day", with us – the audience – joining in for the chorus. It was very reminiscent of Buffy Saint-Marie's impromptu "Up Where We Belong" at our graduation ceremony.


After Patti, we saw Andrew Bird, who is probably the most talented human I've ever been in the same room with. His performance consisted of himself recording and playing back his music, and playing again with the recording, and recording that, and playing it back, etc. Using his feet to control the recording and play-back, he builds a song that is layered and gives the impression that there are many musicians on stage, when it's really just him. Not only is he an incredibly talented song-writer and musician, his timing is impeccable, and his whistling abilities were out of this world. And, on top of it all, he had a fever!

Please, buy tickets if he comes to a town near you!

I should mention

that I got another job. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, I'll be at my current job. Thursday and Friday I'll be working as a designer at a different studio.

Yay! Full-time employee!!

Also, here is a kalender I made for a bookstore.

Warning: this post will bore some readers.

Just in case some of you were getting anxious to see some of my latest squiggle drawings made with Python, I thought I'd make a post dedicated to it.

I realize that an entire post dedicated to programming probably isn't that appealing to a wide range of our audience so, just for you, I've added this special introduction:

I've never been all that interested in the whole LOLCats (type in lolcats into Google if you don't know what I'm talking about) thing, nor have I ever found it remotely funny. That is, until now.
Erik van Blokland introduced us to LOLCat programming language, a functional language some guy created to write functions and programs for his computer. Here is a sample showing some LOLCat programming language. Keep in mind that this actually works as a functioning language.

HAI CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
UP VAR!!
1 VISIBLE VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10?
KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
K THXBYE

I bet if I told you that Python (or other programming languages) will play a critical role as a tool for design innovation (and innovative design), you'd probably laugh at me. However, I am absolutely certain that using programming as a tool is already (and will continue become) an incredibly valuable tool for designers, both in terms of generating form, as well as within the design process itself. For instance, take a look at this:
To make this in a program like Illustrator would be near-impossible (if you think you can do it, I challenge you to). However, after writing a simple code (with the help of Just van Rossum), each of the images above can be generated in a fraction of a second, and are totally unique from one another. The final result of this will eventually be a typeface that uses python to generate continuous ribbons in the form of lettershapes.

At the conference we attended in Antwerp in early November, one of the key lectures was on the role of Python as a design tool. The presenters developed an interface/interpreter called Nodebox (http://nodebox.net/) which can be used to make things like this:


This is a typeface which can be customized to varying degrees of 'evilness' and was made entirely in Python.

Here is another example where they wrote a code that creates a 'mood-board' like collage drawing images from Google based on specified key-words. The relevance of something like this to visual research is quite obvious I think as the placement and scale of images are all determined by the relevance of the image to the key-word entered.


A final example by the same group creates colour charts based also on key-words specified by the user.

Sorry, people . . .

Way back when I first posted our mailing address, it turns out that it was wrong! Eek! I know, I know. But that's mostly because we were very confused and many things on our mind, and didn't understand what our address even meant, let alone were able to identify that there was something out of place.

So, this is our correct address:

2e Schuytstraat 31
2517 XC The Hague
The Netherlands

If you have sent anything to us, I'm sorry to say we have not received it (and if we had, we'd be jerks to not aknowledge it anyway). So, update your address books!

Brian Went Dutch

Ross' brother was visiting The Hague from Oslo for the past five days. Here are some of the things he did:

He went for coffee at the Kicking Horse Café, Holland's only outlet of the Canadian coffee company.


He tried on some wooden shoes.


He saw the Noordzee.


He went for Mexican food in Delft. You might think that was an usual choice of restaurant, but when you haven't seen a burrito or a piña colada in three months. . .


He played with his brother in Rotterdam's most dangerous playground.



He went to the fun-but-complicated Comic Strip Musuem in Brussels, Belgium.



He sampled Belgian beer. Here he is trying to decide which to taste first.


And so much more!

In fact, he may even write about it on his own blog, Your Way to Norway. While you're there, I'm sure he'd appreciate it if you clicked on the ad so he can afford his final two weeks in Oslo.

A Smiley Face?

You should all be relieved to know a small goal was achieved this afternoon: I've now seen the Bryan Adams space on the Rotterdam Walk of Fame.

It's live . . .

Here is a website I made at work for a Dutch photographer. (I don't like the photo on the opening page, but it was the photographer's choice.)

It's my first website! How exciting. And no, I didn't do the programming. I think it's better to leave that to the pros ( . . . Abi).

Great news!

An employee from the cable company came by today to fix our TV. We actually didn't know there was something wrong in the first place. Because we only received a few channels and they were all in Dutch, we haven't watched any TV for the past two and a half months. But then we got a new neighbor in the apartment next door, and she thought there was something wrong, and we should be getting more channels.

The main hook-up for the entire building is in our apartment, so we've had people from the cable company coming by lately to figure things out.

Anyway, to get to the point, we now have 38 channels of Dutch, French, and British television! It's so great! I watched Sesamstraat (Sesame Street – supposedly it's the best way to learn the language), Food Poker – a British show that combines two of Ross' passions – and what I'm most excited for, the Dutch version of Project Runway, Project Catwalk. I don't know what they're saying, but juicy drama is a universal language! I'm hooked!

Sinter-chaos

I have a really funny video of the mayhem before the Sinterklaas parade, but Blogger is having problems posting it. So, I'll just give you a play-by-play.

It starts with someone throwing mini cookies into the crowd, which encourages children in their weird costumes to run from the other side of the street to collect them.


The kids were picking them up off the ground and putting them in their mouths. As they were doing this, more and more cookies are hitting everything in sight.


To express his joy, this kid starts bouncing around in a strange Zwarte Piet jig-like thing, as the young child in the background crawls under a car for a cookie.


I pan the camera and catch this kid in the red hat, just as he's about to throw a handful. He's scanning the crowd for a target, and when he sees me, he takes aim. . .


and fires! At this point, there is much jiggling of the camera, as I'm being pelted with cookies. (Note that other kid on the left. I don't trust those eyes.)


The mad dash for cookies is now taking place directly in front of me.


This little "bull-in-a-china-shop" gets in on the action. I think she ran from across the city when she heard there were cookies up for grabs. Look at the determination in her face: she only has one think on her mind. Cookies.

In the meantime, a hailing of cookies continues to spatter upon me.


This little girl is witnessing the measures her competition has gone to, to get the prize. Apparently there were cookies behind my feet, and that hell-bent little blond girl isn't just climbing all over my feet to get the cookies, she pries my legs apart to climb through.


As I'm losing my balance, I turn the camera to see who's throwing cookies at me, and it's that kid with the untrustworthy eyes! I knew it!


And now he's all shy. He knows I have evidence.


Blondie resurfaces from under the crowd's feet, no doubt with a Sinter-sack full of cookies. The competition on the left knows that although she's the one wearing the fancy costume, Blondie is the reigning champion of the cookie-scramble.


After this, Blondie skips away, like a sweet little girl.

The End.

Sinterklaas is in The Hague

I recently noticed a poster that read Sinterklaas was going to be on the old shopping street close to our home, today at 1:45pm. When the time came, I convinced Ross to put aside his homework so we could go see Sinterklaas.

Sinterklaas is a very special man to the Dutch. He is not what the Dutch call Santa Claus; they are two different people. In fact, Santa is here too, but according to my work mates, "nobody believes in him." Sinterklaas, on the other hand, is the real deal.

Every year around this time, he arrives from Spain on a steamboat. He lives in Spain the rest of the year, and if I was Mrs. Claus, I'd be pretty jealous. I've never been to the North Pole, but I've been to Spain, and I'm pretty sure I know where I'd prefer to spend my time off.

Sinterklaas' journey here is tracked on the news, and apparently he has terrible luck every year, and something always goes wrong. In previous years, he has had the map upside down, or was going in the wrong direction, or has forgotten all of his necessities back in Spain. Somehow, however, he always manages to get it together just in time. Once his steamboat arrives, he is publicly welcomed by the mayor of a different Dutch city each year. I don't know where he arrived this year, but he made his way to The Hague today.

But Sinterklaas is not alone. First of all, he rides a beautiful white horse named Amerigo. Also, he has many helpers, known as Zwarte Piets. Zwarte Piets wear 16th century colourful Spanish clothes, but their most recognizable feature is their black faces. Supposedly they are black because they have the task of climbing down the chimneys and they are permanently covered in soot.

For us sensitive North Americans, the idea of seeing white people paint their faces black seems . . . hmmm . . . "inapropriate", but it's all a part of the Dutch holiday spirit.

When we made our way down to the street, I don't know what we were expecting, but I definitely didn't expect for all the kids to be dressed up. Some of them were dressed as Sinterklaas, but most of them were dressed as Zwarte Piets, complete with painted black faces.

We had been warned ahead of time by our Canadian neighbour, but it was still quite surprising to see these little blond-haired, blue-eyed, black-faced kids.


All the kids had Sinterklaas sacks, and we learned later that the Zwarte Piets hand out cookies. (Or, if you don't have a Sinter-sack, the Zwarte Piets will just throw cookies into your purse :) It was pretty chaotic. Obviously the kids were really excited. As everyone was waiting for Sinterklaas to arrive, many of the kids started throwing cookies at each other (see video.)

Finally, the event started to happen. I thought Sinterklaas was just going to be saying hello, but it was a full out parade! There were hundreds of Zwarte Piets singing, dancing, playing music, and throwing cookies in my purse.



This one grabbed me and started dancing and automatically posed for the photo:


It was by far the most chaotic, dangerous parade I've ever seen. The street was so narrow, I think it's a Christmas miracle that no one was run over.

Finally Sinterklaas arrived, on the beautiful Amerigo. Note that Sinterklaas is in much better physical heath than Santa Claus.


For someone that spends all year in Spain, he's pretty pale. Sinterklaas must be wearing lots of sunscreen.

It was very fun.