travel

Happy new year!

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What to wear on Australia Day

What to wear on Australia Day

It’s been a while since I’ve been down this way. Is there anybody there? Or have you all wandered off while I’ve been away? I wouldn’t blame you if you did. In fact, if you’re in Australia, you probably have been away.

For in Australia, not a lot happens between December and February. The country takes a siesta, a snooze, a sojourn. Sure, some people return to work immediately after new year, but they don’t really do very much those first few weeks. At least not anything that involves other people, because most of them are on holiday.

No, the Australian start to the new year actually comes on January 27 – the day after Australia Day. On the 26th, the nation rouses itself from whatever it’s been doing for the previous month and prepares for the start of the new year proper by wrapping itself in the Australian flag, drinking VB and listening to Daryl Braithwaite. Every year there are (in my view, very valid) calls for Australia Day to be moved to another date to avoid the annual tradition of rubbing the Aboriginals’ noses in the fact the Europeans invaded, but somehow the sentiment is lost amid boozed-up beachside barbecues and firework displays strangely reminiscent of the ones staged just three weeks before for New Year.

And then on the 27th, everyone returns to the office and the real work starts.

This month-long hiatus in normal activity is a challenge for the incomer who’s not completely adapted to Australian living. For most Aussies, the combination of summer weather and enforced holidays for Christmas is the perfect excuse to head to the coast or to the country. Camp sites are packed and holiday homes booked out at premium rates.

But for this new Australian, it’s just a bit too much excitement in one go. Used to splitting my leisure time between what what passes for summer in the UK and the cold, dark, Christmassy Christmas break, I can’t seem to get my head round blending the two. I like to separate my summer holiday from my Christmas one by around six months, give or take a week. The upshot is that here, I end up neither fully enjoying Christmas nor a mid-year holiday. Despite trying to maintain some of my northern hemisphere Christmas traditions – gorging on DVD box sets and chocolate – I still struggle to feel festive in Oz. It’s too sunny to see the lights on the tree, goddammit. And taking a holiday in June or July is less fun when you’re faced with the worst weather of the year and you can’t just book a £25 Easyjet flight to Spain to escape.

So I take my allotted 10 days off work, potter about, then go back to work as soon as they’ll let me. Got to earn the cash to get me to the European summer somehow.

 

 

 

Trams, bikes, rain – sound familiar?

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So the other day I went to Amsterdam for a couple of hours. Yes, it’s a long way from Australia, but I have form in this area. I once flew to Benidorm for lunch from Lancashire, but that’s another story.

This time it was a very brief stop on a flight from Melbourne to Glasgow. The Silver Fox and I had four hours to kill and while Schiphol is undoubtedly a fine airport, we thought it would be more fun to jump on a train and go and visit the canals. So we did.

On the basis that any time away from the airport counts as a visit to a country, this was my fourth time in the Netherlands. I’ve explored Amsterdam, of course, but also the other major cities, and even made it to a wedding in Wemeldinge, a small village in Zeeland, where the bride and groom had their photos taken atop a dyke.

Going back for the first time in a decade, albeit briefly, reminded me of how much I love the place. There are so many reasons.

Obviously, there’s the cycling. Getting around on two wheels is the norm for many people, and drivers respect that. The infrastructure for cyclists is great and it’s so safe no-one ever needs a helmet. People ride in their everyday clothes and when it rains, it’s not unusual to see a bicyclist carrying an open umbrella as they pedal along.

Amsterdamized

There’s the amazing public transport, that can take you from one end of the country to the other in a couple of hours, and that never lets you miss a connection because it’s just so well planned.

Then there’s the people. I am fortunate to have a couple of good Dutch friends in my life who can be relied on to tell me the truth when I need to hear it. That attitude also seems to extend beyond those who have known me for a long time. At the aforementioned wedding, a guy I had literally just been introduced to suggested that I was perhaps a little too pale to wear my chosen summer dress with bare legs. Rude? Possibly, but my legs were threatening to blind the other guests with their whiteness, and he was clearly just keen that I consider tinting my skin the same colour as his – a rather artificial hue in a shade that I can only imagine was a tribute to the Dutch royal family. I wasn’t offended.

And there’s the pragmatic approach taken to social issues that other governments spend years arguing about. Gay rights ceased to be an issue a long time ago, and while there are some critics of the Netherlands’ liberal approach to prostitution and drug use, on the whole the laws seem to work. Equality is everywhere – even the female flight attendants on KLM are able to wear natty blue trouser suits that are far more practical than the tight skirts and high heels of other airlines, should they need to do their most important job of saving your life in an emergency.

For these and so many other reasons, I love the Netherlands. So much, in fact, that I even considered – quite seriously – learning the language. I thought my Scottish accent would give me a head start on many of the guttural noises needed to sound convincing; I changed my mind after I tried leaving a message on a Dutch friend’s answerphone, asking ‘How are you?’ in Dutch, and she asked why I was speaking Japanese. It’s also not the most useful language for the world traveller – something even the Dutch would admit. They know it will never be a lingua franca and while they appreciate any efforts to speak it (even with a Japanese accent), there is no expectation on the visitor to do so. In fact, I’ve found most of the Dutch people I’ve met are embarrassed by their (few) countrymen who can’t speak excellent English.

I probably should have tried to move there for a while when I was young, but I missed my chance, if it ever existed. I had to wait until I was in my 30s to do what was the next best thing – move to Melbourne. It’s not so dissimilar: it has trams, bikes and, at least in the inner city, a liberal (with a small L) attitude. Most Australians also fulfil the plain-speaking requirement quite nicely. Umbrellas on bikes haven’t caught on yet, but given Melbourne’s climate and inherent sense of style, it’s surely just a matter of time.

Image: Amsterdamized, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). If you like it, there is more about Dutch cycling on the Amsterdamize blog.