Sixty years of Irene Boender
My mom had her birthday today, her 60th, which meant we had a rather big party yesterday evening. Not at home, but down at ‘the club’. That is, where she and Nico play tennis. It meant they didn’t serve spirits, only wine, beer and sodas. Still, by the time we got home, I felt knackered. The end result was that I came out of bed around 12.
Betsy’s mom (her parents were staying at our place, since they also came to the party but live in Friesland, which is like the other side of the world, if you’re wondering) slept until even later.
In the afternoon, we headed out to the beach of Scheveningen. To enjoy the reasonable autumn weather, have some fish, and check if the arcades had a version of ‘Dancing Stage megamix’. They didn’t.
At Beelden aan zee (what a crappy website), we stumbled upon a fantastic collection of statues by Tom Otterness.
Statues
Earlier in the week, I recieved a call from UTi, saying they had located my missing crate with statues I sent from Zimbabwe. A good thing, although I was surprised the guy didn’t even apologise for the delay and the fact that, at first, they wouldn’t even acknowledge the loss of one crate.
So, after having handed UTi the goods in early June, it took them close to four months to ship the stuff from Harare to Rotterdam. They claimed it would take 51 days. An other shipping company, Kuehne & Nagel, say they can do it in 21 days. Makes me rather sceptical.
The crate was way too big to get into the car I was driving. As previously, I had borrowed Hoogstraten’s car, since he only has two seats and a flat loading area in the back. Still, the crate, about half a cubic metre, wouldn’t possibly fit.
So while I was loading the goods from the crate in the car, a guy from customs walked over and started chatting with me, continuously checking what I had shipped from Zimbabwe.
Many of the goods we now have can be found at ShonaBeelden.nl.
Demonstrations
I considered going to Amsterdam on Saturday and join the demonstrations against the Dutch government. The demonstrations were organized by the three major Dutch worker’s unions.
Not that I agree with them or disagree that much with the government, the problems the government currently are facing are too complex and I simply don’t know enough to be able to form a clear opinion on the situation. But I thought of taking pictures for Portreat.com.
The service now running on the site which allows for visitors to have pictures sent directly to their mobile phone has actually allready earned me some money, although it only went live a week or so after the last event I took picture at.