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Europe has had a hard winter, but the upside may be that the Netherlands gets to hold a rare ice skating race. The Elfstedentocht is conducted in the province of Friesland whenever the 125-mile course of canals and lakes has frozen to a thickness of six inches:
Called the Elfstedentocht (or in English, the Eleven Cities Tour), the race is a roughly 200 kilometer trek across the frozen landscape and takes, at its fastest, over six hours. For the race to occur, the ice must be at least 15 centimeters thick throughout the course — which is rare. While the tradition of skating from city to city dates back to 1760, the race was not formalized until 1909. In the century-plus since, the Elfstedentocht has only taken place 15 times and not since 1997. [...]
If the race occurs in 2012, area officials expect as many as 15,000 skaters — and more than ten million viewers watching on television. Nearly 2 million fans will travel to the region as spectators — an absolutely enormous number given that the total population of the Netherlands is only about 17 million, and doubly so given that the race only occurs at sub-zero temperatures.
Link | News Story | Photo: Flickr user nikontino
This adorable old picture would have made a great postcard. It is part of a collection of photographs of Dutch life published in the 1906 book De Aarde en haar volken (The Earth and Its People). See more at IllustratedPast.com. Link -via Everlasting Blort
The Twist Bridge in Vlaardingen, the Netherlands, was built for bicycles and pedestrians to cross the canal, but it’s also a work of art! Made of 400 steel tubes, the matrix that covers the bridge is eye-catching and also absorbs vibrations. See more pictures at Amusing Planet. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Flickr user Theo Lagendijk)
Before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, the Calvinist group spent about ten years in the Dutch town of Leiden. You probably don’t know much about what happened to them there. Historian Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs spent years piecing the story together, and has documented his findings in a new book. Meanwhile, you can taker a photographic tour of Leiden and the places that the Pilgrims lived, worked, met, and worshiped, at Smithsonian. Shown here is the Church of St. Louis, which served as a guildhall during the time of the Pilgrims. Link
(Image credit: Leiden American Pilgrim Museum)
“And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground: and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left.” This eye-catching installation called the Moses Bridge lets you cross the moat of a Seventeenth Century Dutch fort beneath the water level. From a distance, it can’t be seen, so people walking on it appear to be moving through the water.
Link -via My Modern Met | Official Website | Photo: RO & AD Architects
Scheveningen prison near the Hague in the Netherlands holds prisoners for the the UN International Criminal Court. Some of those inmates think that Dutch food served in the prison is a form of torture.
“My rights are not being violated, but the food is an abomination,” declared former Liberian president Charles Taylor when he was brought to trial at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in Scheveningen in 2006.
Taylor, who was accused of crimes against humanity and orchestrating war crimes carried out by militias, was used to his own personal cook who made spicy African meals.
Unable to adjust to Dutch culinary blandness, he set up a cookery club using the facilities at the Scheveningen remand centre.
Yes, inmates are allowed to cook for themselves, but they have to buy their own ingredients from the prison shop.
Extreme Serbian nationalist and former paramilitary leader Vojislav Seselj is another notorious prisoner who slams the Dutch diet. Seselj, who was charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) with crimes against humanity, arrived in Scheveningen in 2003.
During one of the hearings in his trial, he publicly castigated the remand centre’s menu. The food was “a daily torture. Even pigs wouldn’t go near it.”
Prison officials defend their menu as “healthy and balanced.” Just one more reason you shouldn’t commit crimes against humanity. Link -Thanks, Ed!
Starting December 1st, the Netherlands will be giving their drunk drivers a holiday gift. Drivers who have been pulled over with high blood alcohol content will be given “alcolocks” to install into their cars. The device acts as a breathalyzer that can keep an engine turned off.
The way the alcolock works is that the driver must first breathe into it to unlock the engine, and will have to repeat the same process at regular intervals during the journey.
If the mini-breathalyzer, which is fitted to the dashboard, indicates a blood alcohol level above the legal limit, the engine will not turn on.
The alcolocks will be installed for two years with a possible six-year extension if the driver continues to drink and drive. In the worst cases, the driver’s license will be revoked, and the driver will have to wait five years before he or she can take a new test.
About 200 people die every year because of drink-driving, Dutch media reported.
Link | Image Credit Felix Triller
Divorce Hotel is not a particular place, but a service available to splitting couples in the Netherlands, in which they can go to a hotel for three days to work out an agreement. It’s the brainchild of Jim Halfens, who is not a lawyer.
Couples thinking about going through the Divorce Hotel process have to start with a set of extensive interviews. If they decide they can settle their differences quickly, with a mediator instead of lawyers, then they choose a four or five star hotel.
Over three days, the mediator and other specialists – notaries, even psychologists – are on hand to help the couple.
“If the marriage can be saved, we always tell people they are at the wrong address at the divorce hotel,” said Marie-Louise Van As, a lawyer who works as a mediator at the Divorce Hotel.
She notes that the three-day hotel stays are not a vacation. There are checklists, homework she calls it, that the couples have to do ahead of time.
But, Van As says, it’s worth it for many couples.
“In Holland to get divorced usually lasts six to nine months,” Van As said. “A bad divorce, a fighting divorce, can last five to 10 years. And cost 50,000 Euros or more.
The Divorce Hotel process costs about 5% of that. So far, participating couples have booked separate rooms. Link -via Fortean Times
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The wooden shoe is symbolic of the Dutch for many of us, but how did they come about, and why? The shoes have several advantages, including one illustrated by a Jackie Chan video in this post at Rue the Day. Link
Just a short journey away from Amsterdam there is one of the most remarkable nature conservation areas in the world. Oostvaardersplassen is a recreation of the landscape of the Europe of thousands of years ago, before mankind moved in and started managing the place. Even more remarkably, the whole project is situated on a polder – land reclaimed from the sea in 1968.
The whole place challenges an assumption long held about wildness. Generally people think of dense forestation when they think of wildness. In other words when you leave a place to its own devices it will naturally turn to forest. In terms of ecology this is known as succession and the theory goes that ecosystems unfold due to succession in much the same way as natural selection rules evolution.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.
The Inntel Hotel in Zaandam, the Netherlands, is intentionally designed to look like traditional houses of the region stacked on top of each other. It’s 11 stories tall and has 160 rooms. This hotel, designed by Wilfried van Winden, opened last March.
Link via DVICE | Official Website | Photo: Roel Backaert
Time lapse video from the fourth largest city in the Netherlands.
This is an ordinary Wednesday morning in April 2010 at around 8.30 am. Original time was 8 minutes that were compressed into 2 minutes, so everything is 4 times faster than in reality. The sound is original.
This is one of the busiest junctions in Utrecht a city with a population of 300,000. No less than 18,000 bicycles and 2,500 buses pass here every day. And yet Google Street View missed it. Because private motorized traffic is restricted here.
These cyclists cross a one way bus lane (also used by taxis and municipal vehicles), two light rail tracks and then a one way street that can be used by private vehicles.
Commentary at the link addresses the absence of helmets on the cyclists.
Via The High Definite.
Well they would have the element of surprise. It’s like those kids who tried to hold up a police station. Who would expect that criminals would try to break into a prison?
It would make a good gag for a comedy if it weren’t actually true – thieves have broken into a Dutch prison to steal the inmates’ televisions.
Twice in the last six weeks, burglars broke into a minimum-security prison and stole TVs from cells while prisoners were away for the weekend, a spokesman for the justice ministry said on Wednesday.
Link | Image: FBI
Paul van Bree has been hired by prisons in the Netherlands to help prisoners contact and make peace with dead relatives:
He has claimed that by talking to both the prisoner and the prisoner’s dead parents he can discover key psychological insights to help the prison authorities rehabilitate criminals.
“With my antennae I sometimes reveal more than a psychologist or a prison welfare officer,” he said. “My work can be compared to mental health care in widest sense of the words.” [...]
The Dutch employment service has also looked beyond the normal to use “regression therapy” and tarot cards to help the jobless.
Uncooperative welfare claimants have been told they will lose benefits unless they accept the guidance of a regression therapist to help them get in touch with their past lives.
Link via Andrew Stuttaford | Photo: Getty
An unnamed 35-year-old female inmate broke out of a prison in Breda, the Netherlands. She was housed on prison grounds in a special building for inmates preparing for release. To escape, she dug a tunnel with a spoon!
The woman’s tunnel began in a cellar under the building’s kitchen, with its entrance concealed by a removable hatch. According to Dutch public broadcaster NOS, the police are assuming that the fugitive had at least one accomplice, who is believed to have loosened paving stones that were part of a sidewalk next to the detention center, allowing the prisoner to emerge from her tunnel.
The woman had only 22 months left on her murder sentence. She is still at large. Link -via Arbroath
(image credit: Flickr user Jeremy Brooks)
Netherlands residents now have a place to watch their fish when they go on vacation. It’s the world’s only fish-resort. My question is how can they stop the fish from fighting each other?
In the Netherlands, there are not many natural places to practice the sport of rock-climbing. But oddly enough, the University of Enschede in the east of the Netherlands has a very active mountaineering club.
So the architects of the new university dormitory chose to make one side of the building into a huge climbing wall, 30 meters (about 9 stories) tall, with 2,500 grips.
photo by Jeroen Musch, via Arons & Gelauff Architects
“As a climber in the Netherlands, one anyway has to resort to artificially created training spots, so why not combine architecture and climbing wall?”
–Arons & Gelauff Architects
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
Normally when we talk about religion and "conversion" we are referring to people that decided to make a major change in their faith. But what about actual religious temples going into a major conversion?
That is the case -among others- of this Dominican church in Netherlands that has been converted into an amazing bookstore, with a coffeeshop that, well…, let’s say was a bit controversial.
Check out some other churches turn into more mundane businesses.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by scbr.
Nowhere is it written that your nuclear waste storage facility can’t be
easy on the eyes. As long as the place isn’t glowing too brightly,
melting down or shrouded in a mushroom cloud, you can decorate it as
much as you like.
Habog is an interim for high-level radioactive waste in the
Netherlands. Designed to last for up to 300 years, the facility
contains waste resulting from reprocessing nuclear fuel removed from
the Netherland’s Borsselle and Dodewaard nuclear power stations after
the implementation of electrical generation.
The lucky artist
hired to paint the Habog storage facility was one William Verstraeten.
The artist decorated the facility’s exterior in bright orange that’s
then covered by Einstein’s equation E=mc2 and Max Planck’s E=hv.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.
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Two Dutch students, Omar Kbiri and Lennard Hulsbos, found themselves on a last-minute trip to Washington, DC to watch the inauguration, thanks to Virgin founder Richard Branson! Branson was at a conference Tuesday in Amsterdam and mentioned he was flying back to the States for the inauguration. The original story in Dutch is available here. An English translation provided by b°b (the full version is in the comments):
To make his speech more interactive, the attendees were allowed to send their questions to the Englishman to a big screen via text-messages. On the question “Can you take 2 broke students to Washington DC?” Branson answered “Yes” immediately. After his speech, the two students stepped inside Bransons’ limousine and drove to the airport where Branson’s private jet was already waiting.
The two ‘poor’ students didn’t even have to pay for their hotel. A sponsor spontaneously offered to pay the bill.
Link to English translation by Google. -Thanks, b°b!
