FRISLAND

Nobody would believe I'd been to Holland if I didn't have a picture of a windmill so there's a picture of a damn windmill.

This one, however, isn't actually in Holland, which strictly speaking is merely a part of the Netherlands - roughly the western part, but I don't know where they draw the line. This one is located in Frisland aka Friesland aka Frisia, a stretch of the North Sea coastal plain up in the northeast part of the country. (There is also a bit of Frisian turf in Germany, called Ostfriesland.) Very old people, the Frisians; the Emperor Charlemagne had some battles with them. Frisian is a separate language from Dutch; supposedly it is very close to English but the times I heard it spoken I couldn't understand a word of it.

Rich grazing country anyway, herds of plump sleek cows in the fields alongside the railroad and the highway, looking very pleased with themselves. Every now and then you could look out across the fields and see a boat moving along one of the canals that cut across the countryside.

Harlingen is an utterly delightful town located up on the Frisian coast, in the angle formed by the seacoast and the eastern shore of the IJsselmeer. We spent three days there and would have liked to spend more; the place is simply a stone gas.

It's a particularly great place if you like boats. Anywhere you go in the Netherlands they've got canals, but in Harlingen they've got a really amazing network that runs all over town. Indeed the basic fact you have to deal with, when walking around the place, is the locations of the bridges; you may have to walk several blocks out of your way just to get across. Not that this is any hardship in a town as pretty and clean as Harlingen.

Some of the boats did seem a trifle impractical.

There was nothing whimsical, though, about the big craft down by the harbor. Some very serious boats here, for all their homey lived-in look.

That's something to keep in mind: for all the quaint appearance of much of the town, Harlingen is also a very busy little working seaport with extensive dock facilities, and a well-developed industrial complex off to the east of town.

But the smaller private craft come right into the middle of town; the bridges even raise up to let them by.

All in all we took a real liking to Harlingen. Only two things marred our enjoyment, but I have to admit they were both pretty bad.

One, it was too damn cold. Not freezing cold of course, really no more than chilly in terms of actual temperature, but the wind was terrible. It came screaming down off the North Sea and cut right through you; it was as bad as early spring on the High Plains, which is saying something. In town, with the buildings for shelter, it wasn't so bad; but out in any open space, like along the waterfront, it was brutal. I couldn't see how the people stood it - let alone get around on those bicycles they all rode everywhere - but nobody else seemed to notice, and if you said anything about it they looked surprised.

Not everybody was out in the wind and weather, though. Some of the inhabitants obviously had better sense.

The other thing that detracted from our enjoyment was the hotel. We'd stopped at the first hotel we saw, walking into town from the boarded-up train station, and taken a room with only a cursory look, eager to get in out of the wind and set our packs down. This proved to have been a serious mistake. The hotel was old and poorly maintained; the heat in our room wasn't worth a damn - it took us almost all the first night to get the temperature up to something bearable, and then next day while we were gone the silly bastards opened the windows so that we came back to a God-damned icebox and had to go through the whole struggle with the inadequate radiator all over again.

Even worse, the beds were horribly uncomfortable; I never saw anything quite like them, the frame came up around the mattress on all sides so that you were lying in a kind of box. and no matter which way you turned your knees and feet and elbows collided with a hard wooden edge. All in all a lousy hotel, one of the worst I ever stayed in in Europe; and a real disappointment, given the Dutch reputation for excellent hotelkeeping.

Still on the whole we had a good time in Harlingen; we found we liked the Dutch people immensely - as well as their life-threateningly rich cuisine - and after we hastily bought some warmer clothes, the weather was a bit more endurable.

Wandering aimlessly about the town, we came upon a large old-looking cemetery, where we made a couple of discoveries. In a neat little plot near the center lay a number of graves of Allied servicemen from World War II, mostly RAF and Royal Navy; mostly British, but a few Canadians and even one Pole. Evidently they had been killed in the area - plane crashes perhaps, sunken ships, bodies washed ashore - and been buried here. It was quite a moving thing to see and I confess to tearing up a bit.

And if anyone questioned the worth of their sacrifice or what it had all been for, the answer lay just a few meters away, in the little Jewish section of the cemetery. Most of the individual markers were in Hebrew, but at one corner stood a large and beautiful monument with a bilingual inscription, and even I was able to make out the meaning: it was in memory of the Jewish residents of Harlingen who had been taken away by the Nazis and never returned.

The last day, we walked out to the edge of town and climbed over the big sea dike and down to the little beach and spent a little time walking along beside the North Sea. Or rather, technically speaking, the Wadden See; that being the name for the stretch of water between the Frisian coastline and a string of low-lying offshore islands, with the true North Sea beyond. There was a ferry that would take you out to the islands and we thought about going, but it was just too damn cold and windy.

Thursday morning we went down to the train station. A big shiny bus was sitting parked in front; we woke the cranky old driver, who was taking a nap at the wheel, and made inquiries. It was indeed going our way. We purchased tickets; anything to get out of that neck-jerking train ride - the track between Leeuwarden and Harlingen really is in serious need of work. Not long afterward we were rolling across the flat green fields of northwest Frisland, through neat snug little villages with signs in both Dutch and Frisian, till at last we came to Leeuwarden. Where we had considered spending some time, but it didn't look all that interesting; so we got off at the railway station and bought our tickets to another promising-looking spot on the map: Groningen.

NEXT: GRONINGEN

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