Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…
A few minutes walk from our house is a field that gets turned into an ice rink during the Winter when it’s cold enough. Temperatures this past week have been sufficiently low enough that the flooded field has become the much hoped-for ice rink.
I went down there yesterday at around lunchtime, and already people were there practising their skill at ice skating.
I suspect that now, on a pleasant, but cold, Sunday afternoon, there will be hundreds of people there.
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I grew up in the North Central US State of Wisconsin, where winter can be quite cold; like a lot of kids there, I learned to skate about the same time that I learned to walk. Friends across the road made a small ice rink in their backyard every winter, and my school always turned its athletic field into a larger rink. This winter in much of the US is being unusually mild, which is quite a contrast from a year ago when here in Connecticut we vastly exceeded historical records for snowfall.
Matt, there’s currently mounting excitement here in the Netherlands, because it looks as though the Dutch are going to be able to hold the Elfstedentocht this year – at 200 km, it’s the world’s largest and longest speed skating competition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfstedentocht
Thanks for the photos, they bring back happy memories of my introduction to the Netherlands in 1991. I remember getting off the Hull Rotterdam ferry with everthing frozen up (including the windscreen washer bottle in my car). As I drove north, the light was fantastic especially through the frost crystals on the grass. I was charmed by little children learning to skate on the canals in the countryside by pushing a chair in front of them with anxious parents/grandparents looking on. Elfstedentocht would be fantastic, needs to stay cold enough for another week from what I gather.
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