Are you as afflicted by the ice-cold January weather as we are here in the Netherlands? Those of you dear readers living in the Southern Hemisphere – my statistics tell me that there are a few – I exclude from the get-go, but otherwise a story-book January does seem to be in effect in Europe, North America, and throughout Asia.

Love that or hate it (I’m not so enthusastic, to tell you the truth), there will always be winners emerging from this situation. Among these are clearly Holland’s ice-skate sellers, as we see from an article in Het Parool (Gekkenhuis ["Crazy-House"] at ice-skate factories).

The unnamed reporter from the Dutch news agency ANP sought out for his/her story the firms “Viking” in Almere and “Zandstra” in Joure (a city in Friesland, the Dutch province especially known for its ice-skating ardor). They’re likely not the only ones in the Netherlands, but provided some good material nonetheless. Normally, says Viking director Jaap Havekotte, they sell around 20,000 pairs of skates per year; this year they are on track for 50,000 or 60,000 pairs. “Our skates are flying out the door,” says the Dutchman. (Yes, that’s really the quote: Onze schaatsen vliegen de deur uit.) Zandstra spokesman Marco Vlap doesn’t want to reveal exact numbers, but confirms that his firm is also working like mad but probably won’t be able to keep up with this year’s demand.

Actually, points out Havekotte, last winter in December (2008) we also had a bit of a cold spell that set people to skating and so brought with it elevated sales figures. He doesn’t have to explicitly say it, but in most Dutch minds it had yet another effect: raising hopes for the holding of the Elfstedentocht, an eleven-city race over the frozen streams and canals of Friesland that occupies an honored and central place in Frisian and Dutch culture and is held whenever ice conditions permit – which they last did only back in January of 1997! Think of the Super Bowl – to come up with an American cultural equivalent – but one strictly subject to the weather year after year for its happening at all! (You can check it out at the Elfstedentocht website, including the race-route, but the text is available only in Dutch or Frisian!) The cold didn’t last long enough then for that, but maybe it will this time, in which case you can expect some tenths-of-a-percentage point to be shaved from the 2010 GDP in the blizzard of sick-days taken as people flock up to Friesland and/or in front of their TV sets.

While you’re waiting to see if that happens, this article in English (“Amsterdam prepares canals for ice skating fun”) tells of our fine city’s preparations for letting people skate on certain of the historic canals, should the cold weather indeed continue. Personally, I sincerely hope that it won’t, but nonetheless those measures now being undertaken are mainly banning boat traffic on certain of the canals to protect the forming ice. You can peruse a map here showing to which stretches of which canal that ban applies, as well as the accompanying detailed list.

The Flemish Gazet van Antwerpen reminds us today that the Anne Frank House Foundation recently set up an Official Anne Frank Channel on YouTube.

Among the film-clips on display is one showing the only time Anne Frank was captured on video, as she watched from her family’s balcony the departure of the neighboring girl to her wedding. Naturally, this is before the Frank family had to go into hiding. In fact it is a little less than a year before they did so, and so the scene is at the apartment house elsewhere in Amsterdam where they lived a normal family life up to and a couple years into the German occupation, before moving to the famous achterhuis on the Prinsengracht to try to disappear and so evade a call-up from the occupation authorities for relocation to a “work camp” (which more often turned out to amount to transportation to a death camp in Eastern Europe; it was only Anne’s elder sister, Margot, who received this notice, but that was enough to drive the whole family into hiding).

The brief Gazet van Antwerpen article (no by-line) notes that another clip gives a video-tour of the achterhuis and was put on-line in celebration of the Anne Frank House Museum’s fiftieth anniversary, but it also seems that the entire YouTube channel was created only recently.

How about that Michael Phelps, hey? And the rest of his teammates on the American swim-team, too: not only is gold raining down on them, but an incredible number of swimming world-records are being broken at these Beijing Olympics as well. It’s phenomenal! The Olympic Games have not seen anything like this since . . . well, perhaps since the Winter Games of 1998 in Nagano, Japan, which occurred in the period when clap skates were coming into widespread use for the first time, and as a result “long track” speed-skating records were broken wholesale. (more…)

OK, let’s talk about the Olympics, then. But not the 2008 Beijing Olympics – rather, the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics! Yes, we pride ourselves here at EuroSavant on our solipsism, but the immediate motive for this nostalgic look 80 years backward is the excellent recent article in the Dutch newspaper Trouw by Haro Hielkema, Amsterdam: Example for the Rest, which is itself largely derived from the book Model voor de toekomst – Amsterdam, Olympische Spelen 1928 by Ruud Paauw and Jaap Visser (which was itself only published a few weeks ago, that is, just before the opening of the Beijing Games – which I bet will not surprise you at all). (more…)

The Dutch newspaper Nederlands Dagblad is somewhat of an outlier in the European media sphere, as it is expressly a Christian newspaper. You can see right there in its logo, written at the top: Christelijk betrokken, or “Engaged in a Christian manner” (“Christianly engaged,” if you like). Surf to the paper’s website on Sunday and you’ll find nothing: that’s the Lord’s day of rest, after all.

It’s not alone, though: the Reformatorisch Dagblad, or “Reformed Daily,” is similar, although that website does stay open on Sundays. People should not confuse the allegedly “anything goes” atmosphere of cosmopolitan cities like Amsterdam (see this weblog’s recent coverage of the famous yearly Gay Pride parade there, for example) with Dutch culture as a whole, which in fact features some enclaves which can easily hold their own in the Christian piety department with any of the American Amish communities.

The Nederlands Dagblad reports today, as the 2008 Olympic Games open in Beijing, that the Chinese church leader Zhang Mingxuan was recently arrested by the authorities in his hometown in the province of Henan, along with his wife and another associate, and brought to an office of the “security services” in that province’s capital, Zhengzhou. This follows Zhang’s being driven out of his Beijing by the authorities at the beginning of last month, and then out of the city itself two weeks ago.

The Stichting De Ondergrondse Kerk (a Dutch name, of course: “Foundation of the Underground Church”) has issued a call to make these opening days of the Olympic Games days of prayer on behalf of the persecuted Christians in China.

I don’t like to talk about local affairs here except on rare occasions; this is hardly intended to be any sort of “Amsterdam blog.” One of the few things I’ll make an exception for is the “Gay Pride” festival occurring here every first week of August. It is known world-wide, to a considerable extent takes over the city, and features a unique “parade” on the Saturday (today!) that makes its way along the city’s canals (actually, mainly the Prinsengracht), not its streets.

It also enjoys a rather high level of public support. That was perhaps the main point of the article from Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza that I covered here on Tuesday, which noted that, for the first time, a national cabinet minister will be officially present in the parade (namely Ronald Plasterk, of Education, Culture, and Science) as well as an official boat from the police. But it turns out that Gazeta didn’t know the half of it (and probably did not want to know the half of it, in any case): this whole new politician phenomenon has mushroomed so rapidly that not only have plenty other national Dutch lawmakers scrambled to find a place for themselves for today on a Gay Pride boat, but questioning eyebrows are even being raised in the direction of politicians who will not be present. (more…)

Coming up this very next weekend: Gay Pride Amsterdam! What’s in it for you if you’re not gay? Well, the parade of boats through the city’s canals – actually, basically the Prinsengracht – is the highlight of the whole weekend and attracts 350,000 spectators, or so the above-linked website claims, so it’s something to consider going and watching, as long as you also realize that the “entertainment” on the passing boats verges into outright nudity not infrequently and into sheer camp always. Plus, there will be gay street parties all over the place from Friday to Sunday. Amsterdam is generally a big enough party-place on a summer weekend for one to be able to find a suitable heterosexual vibe somewhere, if that is more your thing – and meanwhile just think of all the sales- and tax-revenue those hundreds of thousands of visitors are bringing to the city! (more…)

One of Amsterdam’s less-known but worthwhile tourist attractions is the Tropenmuseum, or Museum of the Tropics, housed in a magnificent late-19th-century building way over on the east side of the city, generally outside the radius within which most tourists venture. True, its original purpose was as a storage and display point mostly for what the Dutch colonial authorities were looting out of the lands where their authority held sway (the same could be said of the British Museum, or indeed the Louvre), but time has moved on since then and the facility is now known simply as an interesting museum for non-Western cultures – even if what is contained within still probably originated as loot from those non-Western areas where Dutch colonial authority once held sway.

The museum’s sister-institution, installed in its eastern wing, is the Tropentheater (English version unfortunately not yet available), which offers a platform for the staging of usually non-Western-related musical and drama productions. And coming up this week at the Tropentheater (starting tomorrow) we had an interesting affair called the “Zanzibara Festival”: a festival of music and films about the Swahili culture of East Africa, predominately in Kenya, Tanzania, and yes, Zanzibar. At the center of the festivities was the Kilimani Qusida Group from that Indian Ocean island, a group of Islamic musicians specializing in Sufi music (Sufism is essentially Islamic mysticism), scheduled to travel out of Zanzibar for the first time in their lives to come play in Amsterdam. I’ve seen posters for this Zanzibara festival all over town – I even saw them on a visit to Antwerp a few weeks ago. (more…)

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am fine today, and how are you? I hope this weblog entry finds you in the best of health. I am Prince MAO Kawanza, chairman of the West African Expatriate Legal Defence Fund, an institution established under the late Nigerian Head of State, General Sani Abacha, for the provision of legal assistance to travellers from West African states ensnared in difficulties with foreign criminal justice systems. General Abacha chose to fund our laudable institution by means of a special tax on revenues from the Nigerian petroleum sector, which revenues are estimated to total more than USD 45 billion yearly. (more…)

Today is Holland Day at EuroSavant! The good reason for that is that yesterday was Prinsjesdag, or the third Tuesday in September, which is when every year the Dutch Queen Beatrix rides an elaborate, old-fashioned coach to the Binnenhof in the Hague, the Dutch house of parliament, to read out a speech which the current government provides her with, which lays out that government’s program for the year. It probably comes as no surprise to you that this year’s government program has already provoked much wailing and gnashing of teeth: €10 billion to be saved this fiscal year, €7 billion the next, and so cut-backs in all sorts of government programs and services held dear by Dutch society.

Given that good reason to make today “Holland Day,” though, I’m going to ignore it – too boring, and too specific to Dutch conditions. If you don’t live here, why would you want to know about that? In fact, you’ve already discovered everything you would want and need to know in my two sentences above.

No, if it’s to be “Holland Day,” let’s devote our attention to something a bit more interesting, to a phenomenon out of Dutch society that does pique the interest even of those who are not native Hollanders: bordellos. Does it come as a surprise to you that, recently, even the municipal authorities of Rotterdam have gotten themselves in to the business of setting up a bawdy house? (more…)