Back in Holland again. Staying away from Amsterdamage this time. Rather, I'm visiting friends whom I met in the Himalayas. I'm in a small town called Harmelan, 30 minutes from Amsterdam.
I arrived last Saturday and we went straight to the Opera to see a modern performanace of Mozart's Don Giovanni in Amsterdam. It was sung in Italian and it had Dutch surtitles translating the text projected onto a thin, elongated screen hanging from the ceiling. So although I got the gist of the storyline I didn't exactly know what was going on. And the modern interpretation and symbology made it more challenging. It seems the older crowd, which typically attend the opera in Holland, didn't appreciate the modern swing on things and began booing at the start and end of the second act. They did heavily applaud for the woman playing the virgin slut though... seeing as she was Dutch.
Over the last week we've been dining on great food, drinking great wine and just chilling out. It seems the Dutch have the ability to create their own land. They use water pumps, such as windmills, to drain and dry out the land and expand the land-mass of their country. On Wednesday we went to a small island off the coast of Holland which I didn't even know existed. We just returned yesterday.
