Mr. SCROOGE!!!

"' greetings. Take me to your leader''. so here i was at the Alien registration office in apeldoorn. The police station here has the same theme. kindergarten. Nice colorful posters for helplines, a boy at the counter registering a complaint for a stolen bike. Its all very pleasant.

A pleasant lady meets us. Here is some useful info for people travelling on a netherlands visa. New rules state that all those given the visa need to report to the closest police station within 72 hours to get another stamp on your visa confirming that you really did get ur ass to netherlands. else? well u get arrested and thrown in to jail, is fined.... but will be let off after you eplain your ignorance. in extreme cases you get deported. even if they never findout that you dont have the stamp in your passport, when you exit... at the airport they check. and then well..... read above.

Then the lady asks me if this was my first trip. i say no. she asks if i got this stamp done last time. i say no. she asks me how did you get past schipol airpor. i say i flew out of berlin. hmmmm... she says.... germany doesnt agree with this policy of ours and do not check. i shiver. someone mustave been praying for me. thanks mom.

After this we drive to a park....well....woods actually. pristine nature. a nice healthy walk and we head off to bronkhorst. In the words on a website ''Bronkhorst, a former manorial estate with several beautifully restored buildings and farms, is the smallest town in the Netherlands and very popular with tourists. Bronkhorst as a place started out in the forecourt of the castle of the successive lords of Bronckhorst. It received its charter in 1482, giving it the privileges of a town. In 1810 Bronkhorst and Steenderen were consolidated into one municipality. The complete town, almost entirely consisting of monuments, is a place of special interest. The Hooge Huys (Tall House), also called Ophemert, towers above the little town. A lot of the buildings now house shops, galleries/museums or restaurants/cafés. Another interesting feature is the river ferry connection between Bronkhorst and Brummen. The population of this little town was 273 on 1 January 2005. ''

273 people. A town. It's beautiful. You get to the place on a small ferry ride. there are four crisscrossing streets that is the town. open restaurants and cafe's on the cobblestoned sidewalk. Quaint houses all around. One small church. little shops. all crowded inside with curios and artefacts. We have lunch out on the sidewalk of an old old koop that has been converted to a restaurant. I cant think of anyother way to spend this afternoon. That crisp air tingling your nose, the sun benevolently shing down on you, wrapping you in a warm blanket against the nip in the air. a beer in one hand, a good book in the other. birds chirrping, laughter, a clinking of glasses. :)

after a nice fat lunch, i must write about some spectacular cuisine i have been having,the dutch it seems is not as bad in their offering of dishes to the cullinary world as i thought, we walk over to a an almost fairytale like house right across called the dickens museum. And i swear mr.scrooge is sitting outside playing a woodmade version of an accordian! This is the owner of this little museum inside a house. Click here to see this man.

its stacked from roof to floor with anything and everything to do with dickens. Artefacts, lifesize puppets, little ceramic stages in which the characters are frozen forever in time from some book of dickens. books! books everwhere... some so old... so old... books that are two feet by two feet with locks on the side.... history everywhere. and mr.scrooge enthusiastically explaining to me mr.dickens hated racism. it seems mr.dickens was a journalist. and a nippy one at that. he apparently was constantly getting in to trouble with his editors for speaking up. In this episode being narrated to me, he wrote an article in one of the papers in which he told the general public that ''people of india are much more good looking, can dance unlike them with their beer bellies'' etc....

i slowly suck in my gut.

All that food and sun and walking around has made me drowsy. We head back home. I wont write anymore on food.... so suffice to say a lovely dinner at the town square... football and back home to do some research on design workshops and jazz clubs in amsterdam before i head off there.

I leave you with a quote from charles dickens that i found on the wall at the museum.

''When you are a married man, you will understand a good many things as you dont understand now; but whether it's wothwhile going through so much to learn so little...."