Friesland - northern province

The past three days I was able to visit several old friends and colleagues who live in the northern province of Friesland. The Frisians have their own distinct language and my youth memories of the province are all linked to memories of sailing races. Nienke - here on the photo and with whom I worked in the Amsterdam office of Doctors without Borders during 1993 and 1994 - took me to the island of Terschelling (one of five islands on the north shores of The Netherlands), where she has a small property. It takes a two hour ferry ride to get there, because the ship has to make an elaborate slalom course to avoid getting stuck at the many un-deep areas. That body of water is known as the "Waddenzee" and people do walking tours from the islands to the mainland during low tide periods. I have done that once during my university years.

The island has the tallest lighthouse in Holland. The first layers were constructed some 500 years ago. The lighthouse still sends very important signals for the ships passing The Netherlands along the northern islands which forms part of the Atlantic Ocean. The small towns on the island house a total population of around 4,000 people and some of the houses were built 300-400 years ago (but probably rebuild many times after fires and storms).

Throughout history the population mostly lived of small scale fishery, but nowadays these ships are there mostly as showpieces for the many tourists visiting the island during all seasons of the year. Nienke is undertaking a project of demolishing two old vacation homes on her property and instead placing two modern Swedish prefab cottages.

The view out of the northern windows show in the distance the extensive natural dunes area on the Atlantic Ocean side of the island. On the south side of the island one can find the manmade dikes where many sheep graze as natural grass mowers....

Nienke lives in the city of Franeker, an old town with an impressive history. The "Planetarium" is a small museum - recently named a UNESCO world heritage site - in which the history is described of an astrologer who constructed a mechanical model of the universe during the mid 1700s.

Like so many old towns in Holland, the center is constructed around small canals which formed part of the transport systems. The townhall is still another historical building.

Another historic building is this church - constructed about 400 years ago. An old friend from my high school lives next door. It was about 50 years ago we last caught up. Still a real fun person!

A friend from my university years lives in another part of Friesland in an old farmhouse, where he is trying to restore on his property some of the old original eco-systems. Wouter and I travelled together to one of our university reunions last year in September (see blog posts from that event).

These days in Friesland started out at a cottage of a former colleague at Fokker Aircraft. We had a small reunion of our old boss (on his 84th birthday) and a few of his team members during the period that I worked at Fokker (1985-1988). The host has an old model "platbodem" (flat bottom), very common transport ships during the history of this province. We had a wonderful day on the water...

Along the route our host took, we saw this statute of three local ice-skaters who had completed the "elf steden tocht" (100 kilometer skating race past eleven cities in Friesland). This race was very hard during the decades that the winters were still very cold and harsh. The last version of the race is now more than twenty years ago (global warming "victim").

And my old friends in Bilthoven send me this photo afterwards (see previous post about their place).