Sunset in Paradise

A pure white sandy beach, the blue ocean, the sun, a sea breeze, it's nice and warm and tranquil, I am reading and somebody (our neibours on the beach !) just brought me a strawbury daiquiri with crushed ice, just like that.  What else could I want ?  There are a number of things I could think of, but it's near perfection to me, for a while anyway.  And those glorious sunsets ! Every evening any number of hotel guests would be on the beach trying to catch it on camera.  We did have a great holiday in Aruba.  The 10 hour flight was well worth it.  I actually could have stayed there for another fortnight, soaking up the sun, reading, eating drinking (!), swimming and enjoying the relaxing atmosphere.  Now that summer seems to be seriously delayed on our otherwise very nice seaside, I realise even more how lucky I am to have been able to be in the sun for 2 weeks on a wonderful holiday.  The hotel was super and everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves, even the Arubans who were working.  Most of the other guests were from the U.S., some were South-American and so we kept forgetting that a large number of the staff also spoke dutch.  Aruba, although it has its own government,  is still a part of the Dutch kingdom and dutch is still taught at school.  So very often when we were talking amongst ourselves they would immediately say "maar jullie spreken nederlands !' (you speak dutch) and I guess they liked speaking dutch for a change. They even knew some programs from our flemish TV channels.
So I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I read 5 and 1/2 books, and apparently, people do notice what others do on the beach, unlike myself because when I'm reading I am like immersed in another world except for the times I'ld be asleep or swimming or watching one of the pelicans diving for food, a remerkable sight.  The friends we were travelling with, met a couple from Philadelphia (well actually 'near' to as they lived at about a 2 hour drive from Philadelphia) and when they joined us for dinner one evening, they said : 'Oh, you're the ones that are reading the whole time.'.  It is funny how relative distance is : they said they lived near Philadelphia (2hrs away) and they asked us if we lived near to each other.  Our friends said no, but I said : 'We don't call it near but to you it would be, it's 'only' 1 1/2 hrs drive .'
So summer is on hold here.  It rained all night last night and now it's grey and cold for the time of year.  I am writing this now on my lunch break because it's too cold to be out.  I would much rather be outside right now, with my book, I am on my own at work all day, kind of boring but it has its advantages.  But still, a bit of a chat now and again is a welcome intermezzo most of the time.
Meanwhile a lot has happened even in the month since we got back from our holiday.  Our parental home is as good as sold, so we will have to empty it out now in the next 2 or 3 months.  A bit of pressure is always good.  Our sons are both moving house after the summer.  Not into the same house obviously ! The eldest and his wife have bought a house but a lot of construction needs to be done before they can move in.  I have been looking after their 3 children 2 Saturdays in a row, while they were clearing it out.  The previous owner and the tennant had left so much junk in the house and garden that it has taken them 3 weekends already of moving the stuff out to be thrown away and still the house isn't empty yet.  Last weekend I didn't have to babysit the children, so I went over to help them.   I am even more determined now to start clearing our attic of any stuff I don't have a use for anymore.  Not that it looks anything like my son's house but still, I will do it.  Our youngest son and his girlfriend are also going to move to another house after the summer, probably October, meaning that for the next 4 to 5 months I will not have a lot of time to read, but that's not too bad.  It will keep me busy as always.  This saturday it's Ophelia's 3rd birthday and according to the weather forecasts, dare we believe it, the weather will improve from then on.  Keeping my finges crossed as our joint birthday present, a trampoline, does require a day without rain and we would like to have a small family BBQ, can you believe for the 1st time this year. 

Springtime

Springtime, should be sunny and fresh and green and hopeful.  That is how I expect spring to be anyway.  This year really is no spring at all. On monday morning, there was ice on my car again and it's almost May.  As I am writing, I am trying not to pay too much attention to the weather forcast on TV.   We had a couple of nice,  sunny and invigorating spring days so far.  last Thursday was really wonderful, sunny and around 20 ° C, but Friday morning it was foggy, chilly (8 °C) and raining. This weekend was sunny, but still too cold for the time of year. I am really looking forward to our holiday in less than a month.  We are going to Aruba.  That will be the most exotic holiday we ever took, but hopefully the first one of a series I am intending to take.  Meanwhile I am still trying desperately to get rid of some kilos.  I refuse to buy bigger size clothes.  That is an advantage financially.  Every down side, has an up side ! But I am very determined I will succeed, so I am sure somehow I will lose weight.  Well somehow means obviously I have to cut down on sugar and fat and eat more vegetables an fruit.  But hey, it is spring or is it ?  My parental house is still not empty and we haven't been able to sell it yet.  You probably think not much has happened apart from the holiday bur that is not entirely true.  Untill the end of March I had 2 rehearsals every week with our theatre company, and I am still following an italian course. I have been doing that for 5 years now, and this year we went on a weekend trip to Milan together.  We were a bit unfortunate in that the weather was more wintery than spring like - it actually snowed  while we were there!  The 'primavera' as the cycling race Milan San Remo is called, that was cycled on the Sunday we went to visit Bergamo, had to be interupted due to the snow and cold.  But otherwise I thoroughly enjoyed the sights, the atmosphere, the food (yes, it is no wonder that I have trouble losing weight), the people there and the company, and the art.  I am defenitely going back someday.  Yesterday I got some work done in the garden.  I bought lots of plants and filled many a terracotta pot so even though spring  is a bit late, I am hopeful and ready for it.  The previous weekend I managed some spring time cleaning around the house.  That should be the start of another project that has taken form in my mind.  I keep adding projects to my to-do list, I know, but I do have more energy than I have had at the beginning of the year, although with my hobbies, the family and work, I should not complain about a lack of energy.  The project I have added is renovating the rooms that have been standing emty for a while now(we have become 'empty-nesters').  The rooms are really in need of redecorating and when that is done, we can finally offer nice lodgings to friends or family visiting with us. So, that is what I have been up to, next time, I will have been on holiday.  I am still hoping to get some sun before, otherwise I will need some heavy sunscreen, at least, that is the ecpectation.

Looking back and ahead

I wasn't aware 2 months had past since my last scribblings. As you can guess, I have been very busy.  First I spent so much time contacting my former colleagues from North Sea Ferries and put up old pictures on the facebook event page I set up.  This started out others going through their photographs and even looking up stuff on the internet and I really enjoyed seeing new facebook friendships grow and everybody connecting again and I really felt good about this.  Many of you probably saw some of the going ons on fb.  After my last post here I kept going.  At first I was a bit worried that it would not be a succesful reunion because  it took some people a long time to confirm their attendance,  But 2 weeks before the event some 70 had confirmed, some couldn't make it on the day, so we were 63, and 46 of us actual ex NSF.  On the day of the reunion, I was very nervous.  But there was no need for that.  My sons and their friends did a splendid job serving the food and drinks and it was such fun to see everybody in a great mood at renewing friendships and catching up on what everyone had been up tosince 2003 and how their children were doing and if they had grandchildren.  It was great and there was not nearly enough time to talk to all of them.  They all brought so much Potluck, I still have some chips and nuts left, even after I gave away half of it and used some myself on my birthday and at Christmas.  One of my dutch friends, and it was great that so many of them drove all that way to join us, had prepared a wonderful power point presentation with lots of pictures and videos from 'the good old days'.  It is amazing that even after such a long stretch of time, you immediately feel at ease again with old friends.  Afterwards I realised how I had missed this familiarity, and it is maybe a bit sad but on the other hand : it was great back then and I have all these funny and happy and some sad shared memories.  After the reunion I did still spend time posting pictures and mailing pictures to the ones that are not on fb.  A lot of time spent on my computer but rewarding.  After that, I was looking forward to the arrival of our American friends.  They arrived on the 20th December and I collected them from the airport. It was great to see them again.  On my birthday, 21st December, the supposed Maya end of the world, I took them and son Niels and friends that helped out at the North Sea Feast with POtluck out for dinner to thank them for helping me out.  We had a wonderful evening with them.  I had some offtime from work and Christmas dinner to prepare.  I did a lot of cooking, and eating I might add, over the past 2 weeks, but enjoyed having all the family here even though we had to move some furniture around and 3 champagne glasses were sacrificed. On New Year's eve we went to my brother and had a great dinner and evening there.  Wednesday our American friends had to go back home.  And now well : I am teary eyed and snotty nosed, not from crying but from a cold I seem to have caught.  The New year comes with new challenges, losing some kilo's I seem to have gathered over the last month or so (that is not really a new challenge), selling our parental house (that may not prove to be the biggest challenge - emptying it of all it's contents will prove far more difficult I'm sure) and last but not least : planning a holiday that is a bit out of the ordinary, but I guess nobody woul call that a challenge but rather a wonderful propect.

Nostalgia

I haven't been writing here for a long time.  I have been thinking about the past quite often recently.  I finally took action and I am organising a get together with my co-workers, friends I should say, from  North Sea Ferries.  So I went through old photographs, to try and spot faces and try and put names to the faces and try to find their address, email, phone number whatever, to get in touch with them.  I found it really surprising that some people seem to have disappeared from the face of the earth.  You would expect that with all the social media, we have all lost our privacy.  Some people clearly have not. Before everybody had a cell phone, most people had a phone in their home and if you had their name and knew the name of the town they lived in, you could find their phone number and home address.  Nowadays, most mobile numbers are not listed.  I find it even annoying at work that a lot of persons emailing omit their contact info from the mail and you have to mail them back, even if a phone call of 1 minute would be enough to explain, or ask something.  I guess I am kind of "old school" in that I find writing mails or even texting more cumbersome.  I started out with a list of about 50 contacts and it grew to 150.  And still frequently a name or face pops up that I had not thought of before. Some are very enthusiastic and others don't even acknowledge they have received the mail.  For some it is difficult to join in, especially for our friends from the other side of the Channel, but even the dutch colleagues have to travel a long way.  Still some of them think it is worth the effort and I really look forward to seeing them again.  No doubt a lot of funny, some sad and more than 1 embarassing story will be told that night. In the same time frame I went to my parent's house.  We already spend a day clearing out part of the attic.  I can assure that there was and still is a lot of stuff in that attic.  I found clothes I didn't know my mother had kept.  A suede jacket that I bought when I was 16.  Dresses, coats  and trousers from the same decade so from 40 years ago.  We found sunlight soap and 'union match' match boxes.  Vim powder, used for cleaning, anybody under 40 probably doesn't know what i'm talking about.  My school books were still there, and my brother's.  There was a diary my dad wrote during the war. I haven't read it yet, but I will.  So if I do feel a bit nostalgic, I have good reason to be.  Still, I am looking forward to seeing my old friends again.  Nostalgia does not mean I am only looking at the past with regret, I am remebering the good times and trust there are a lot more good times ahead.

Ferry Good

The summer, or should I call it that, has almost come to pass.  I don't think the past months will become one of the finest summers this decade let alone this century. I have been very busy getting in touch with old friends and colleagues and family, but also had some difficult times when my sister was in hopital and I had to take care of her and took on all her household tasks. Last weekend I met up with a former colleague I hadn't seen for 9 years as she lives in France, and we had a great day in Bruges talking about the good old days and our lives since 2003.  Meanwhile I still enjoy spending time with my grandchildren.  Our granddaughter Ophelia is such a cute and very actve child and when she comes round I always dance around with her.  She is always dancing and jumping and skipping around, it's a lovely sight and she always wants me to join in.  So all in all I am Ferry Good.  'Ferry good' was actually de baseline to North Sea Ferries when I started to work there in 1978. During my first years there, the small ferries, Norwind and Norwave, that sailed to Hull from Zeebrugge, often arrived late due to stormy weather.  On one of those occasions, the ferry arrived in the evening about 10 hours delayed.  The crossing was overnight, the ships leaving at 6 pm and arriving around 9 am.  Not only did the ferry arrive late, she was supposed to depart again the same evening, but we already knew she would stay in Zeebrugge for 2 days because  some of the cargo had been damaged,  All pasengers and freight that were booked on the cancelled sailing had to be contacted and offered alternative ways to travel : catch the ferry from Rotterdam, a 3 hrs drive away, get a refund and travel via Dover, or stay the night and go on the ferry the following day.  Most of the time there weren't too many passengers so we had no problem getting things sorted.  Our office and the berth were located on a dock seperated from the tides by a lock.  When the ship was in the lock, we could see her but only standing on a a chair, or the window sill.  My boss was an impatient man and the first time I saw him getting up on the window sill to check wether the ship had already gone into the lock, I almost burst out laughing.  After that first time, I found it quite normal for him to be on the look out.  Whenever anything went wrong and we had to deal with delayed or cancelled sailings, he would always be around to see how things were going, and offering us his assistance.  But he was such a nervous person that nobody would ever ask him to help out, a fact he knew and often he would sense that his presence was not required and quickly say "I'm gone already" and hurry away, back to his office.  One of the things that I will  never forget is the blockade of the french ports of Calais and Boulogne in August 1980.  It was the heigth of the summer season and lots of British passengers were returning from their holiday on the continent.  All of a sudden our small terminal that was only meant to accomodate 249 passengers at the most was swarmed by 5 times that number.  On the first day of the blockade, 10 full coach loads of passengers turned up out of the blue on a Sunday.  The Normandy Ferries ships, with names that seemed a bit strange to us (Leopard, Lion, Panther) that were not stuck in the blocked ports in France came to Zeebrugge but that was not nearly enough for the large number of passengers and cars or the number of trucks hoping to get accross the channel.  We did part of the handling but some of the french staff came to Zeebrugge. But somehow they were more relaxed than we were, and even managed to disappear for a 2 hr lunch break, much to our dismay as we worked almost round the clock.  The people waiting to get on the ferries were lined up on the road into Zeebrugge and food and water distributed by the authorities.  The passengers at our terminal used our facilities for washing and even doing dishes.  People were almost prepared to fight to get a place on one of the ferries.  The whole thing lasted 2 weeks and although it was a very exciting time, we were all happy to have our small terminal back to ourselves when it finished. And the blockade ended with another anecdote : a  Spanish truckdriver, poor man, had driven to Zeebrugge on the day the blockade had been lifted, only to find that the Normandy Ferry ships no longer departed from there and he had to return to Boulogne.

Memories of the good old days

The weather being as it is I have some time to write again.  I'm having a really lazy Sunday although in a way I have been busy doing some paperwork. I finally took action and contacted a lot of former colleagues from my ferry days for a big reunion.  I had set a date in September, the weekend before I'm off on holiday, but as many of them seem to be out of the country at that time of year I have changed the date to November.  That does give me some extra time to get things sorted.  Not a bad idea seen that I will be very busy at work in August and the first half of September.  Some of my friends were in doubt if this is a good idea but fortunately a lot were really full of enthousiasm to get back together again.  I knew before I set out on this task that this is how people react so I'm not too bothered. I'll just carry on and see how things turn out.  In the process of trying to contact as many NSF colleagus as possible, a lot of memories came back to me.  I suppose this has to do with my age.  Some names seemed to be burried very deep and I had to do a lot of digging and to my disappointment there are still faces I haven't been able to match with a name.  I am trying to get the ones I have been able to get in touch with to help me out.  You would think that it should be fairly easy to get in touch with people nowadays, but some people just can't be found.  Not everybody is on facebook or linked in or google and I guess most must have a mobile phone but with an unlisted number.  One of my colleagues was actually saying that there not are only happy memories and quoted (I don't know who) that 'the past is never where you think you left it'.   Ofcourse over a period of 25 years there have been many happy, but also many sad occasions.  That's just life.  The ship sailed out in the evening and arrived in the morning.  When I started working there, the small ships only carried a maximum of 249 passengers but when I left the company the ships from Zeebrugge could accommodate a 1000 passengers.  It was a night crossing and there were restaurants,shops and bars on board.  Everything that happens on land can occur on board.  There was a birth once on the ferry to Rotterdam.  That was a very happy occasion.  Unfortunately there were also fights, deaths and even suicide or passengers gone missing. In the early days, the ferry often arrived late when there were gale force winds and some passengers joked that NSF meant Not So Fast.  We had problems with strikes, but the Iron Lady put an end to that and one of our ships was requisitioned by the British government for troop transport during the Falkland war, leaving us with a chartered vessel for 6 months.  I saw new ships being launched and named.  Some people may believe we should let the past be the past, but the future is built on the past so even looking ahead means leaning on the past.

Life as a hostess

When I was studying tourism - I know that sounds funny - I lived in Blankenberge and had to take the train to Bruges every day.  A short trip, less than 15 minutes.  But even then we played at cards for the short trip.  You were still allowed to smoke on trains back then, so we did that too.  Arriving in Bruges, I often noticed a couple of girls in navy blue uniforms waiting on the platform to catch the train to Zeebrugge.  They were hostesses working for a ferry company, but I didn't know that.  In winter they wore a cape.  I was only 17 and for some reason or other I loved the uniform and often saw myself wearing one.  That was a bit odd for me because I hardly ever wore a skirt or dress, jeans being the 'uniform' of the day. When a Lufthansa stewardess came for a talk about her work I was at first very disappointed to learn that I wasn't tall enough to qualify as a stewardess. So when I graduated and had to work at the ferry as a trainee for 2 months, I  was over the moon.  But to my grave disappointment, I didn't have to wear a uniform because I would not be working at the check in desk, but on the reservation department.  I still remember my first call with my boss to be.  I had to make an appointment with him to introduce myself and to learn what the job would be like and what would be expected of me.  At the end of the phone conversation he said : 'I will see you then, okidoki'.  I thought it very funny that my future boss used such a funny word "okidoki" and told everybody what a weird person he must be.  Rememeber this is 35 years ago when working relationships were a lot more formal than is the case now.  Fortunately for me, it was a very informal company.  All the staff on the passenger department were in their early twenties, like me, and some were married but none of them had children yet.  The Manager was just 10 years my senior and his assistant 6 years older than me.  I enjoyed my 2 months there very much and was a bit sad to have to leave.  I found a job doing secretarial work at the casino in Blankenberge.  Some people may think that would have been rather more glamourous, but it wasn't.   Blankenberge isn't Vegas by a far stretch, and my boss there was a 60 year old, very formal and very conservative frenchspeaking man.  The only thing good about the job was that I got to know some nice people and my closest colleague became a close friend.  7 months on, my trainee boss called with a job offer, again on the reservation department (still no uniform) and that was that.  I hoped to be in that uniform sooner or later anyway.  At the time the company did not only operate a ferry service from Zeebrugge and Rotterdam to Hull (Kingston upon Hull), but also a jetfoil, between Zeebrugge and London.  The Jetfoils were something special, new and exciting because they were built by Boeing and they sailed up the Thames and moored at Tower Bridge. The crossing took about 4 hours whereas you already needed the same amount of time for the normal ferry crossing from Zeebrugge to Dover alone and you still had a long  train ride from Dover to London.  Many people wanted to travel on the jetfoil instead of  travelling to London by plane.  The crew 'flying'  the jetfoils and the maintenance staff were american and we spent a lot of time with them.  The only disadvantage of this new exciting way of crossing the channel was that they often broke down and then we had to transfer the passengers to fly from Ostend on British Air Ferries, who were very happy with the business we gave them.  Now and again we also had some celebrity passengers like the now Sir Cliff Richard and Golden Earring.  They were exciting times and oftenwe joked about how we would tell our children and grandchildre all our funny stories, or even write a book, changing all the names.  Perhaps I could tell some of those "fairy tales' here.