Training, part 2

Ok, so apparently i've ranted enough about the food in holland. To summarize - it wasn't the greatest.

The rest of the training, however, was fantastic. Sure, we couldn't ever leave the hostel to speak of. Sure, we were all crammed together for 10 days straight. It was excellent!

The hostel waas about 30 minutes by train outside of Amsterdam (about 30kms, I think). It was in very un-urbanized area, actually near one of the last forests in holland, as well as close to the Dunes national park and the North Sea (as you could maybe see from the map in the previous post). The dunes is a 2km wide, long (don't know how long, maybe 20km?) stretch of protected land that runs along the beach. The dunes are protected because if they were torn down, north holland would flood whenever there was a big storm. For those that don't know, most of holland is below sea level...So the big sand dunes (and they _are_ big, they get up to a couple hundred feet high) help protect the whole country. Must make them feel important...

The sea was a solid 45 minute walk from the hostel. You had to walk through the dunes to get there, which made for good exercise. The North Sea, I guess, in that area, never gets more than like 30-40m deep - at least, that's what my new Dutch friends told me. So the surf never gets too huge. The water is freezing. We briefly entertained the idea of going for a swim, however, the air temperature was about 2-C, and the water not much warmer, and we would have had to walk 45 minutes back to the hostel, so we decided to forego the requisite hypothermia in lieu of just looking at the nice water.

We made a brief trek one evening to the seaside town of Egmond En Zee - a resort town (in the summer) that pretty much shuts for the winter. However, diligent travellers that we were, we managed to find an open bar in the dead of winter and spend some hours drinking fine dutch beer (mostly heinekin) and strange 'traditional' dutch liquors that were an awful lot like jaegermeister, except, of course, that you were supposed to sip them. But, after an hour+ walk along the freezing beach, a warm fire and warming liquor sure felt nice.

The other place we went after hours was the town of Alkmaar, to the north. The last night of the training we got to have a party, so we went to a nightclub/bar in alkmaar. it was absolutely packed.

I have to mention now that I have never felt so _small_. I'm not huge, but i'm 6'2", and I'm used to being at least a little bit taller than most of the people i'm around, especially in a crowd. When I was at the nightclub, for the first time ever, i felt genuinely diminutive. The dutch people are TALL! Many of them easily 6'6, 6'8, and not just the guys! I have a new-found appreciation for being 'short' in a crowd - you can't see where you're going, or what's happening near you, or anything!
It was pretty wild. We had a lot of fun, although the dancing was a bit hard as there were so many people.

That's it for now.
taj