Dutch composting

Dutch neighbourhood waste removal is a wonderful thing. Each house is issued a pass, which opens a large metal container that buries deep into the ground and holds all of the garbage for the houses in the area. Each day, to the delight of my small child, a truck comes, attaches to the top of the container, lifts it up and dumps the refuse into it's belly before returning it to the ground.

 It wasn't always this way. Before there was the hole, each house had a standard issue black bin that needed to be wheeled out to the street once week and then retrieved the next day. When the hole was built, the city collected the bins, but somehow, we missed the memo, leaving us with a big black bin in our small backyard. Instead of fessing up and turning the bin in like we should have, J drilled a few holes in it and - just like that - we had a compost bin.

At first, in my enthusiasm, I composted everything. All the time. I saw myself as an urban environmental warrior. Then, as winter set in, I became less enthusiastic until, citing snow and ice, I called a temporary cease. As spring warmed the air, I started feeling more inclined to wander outside without a jacket for the sake of a banana peel and a few egg shells. That is until, in the full heat of summer, the stench, the fruit flies and the spiders claimed the mulch and slowly rotting fruits and vegetables as theirs. And so, this is how I've come to mark the seasons. In the spring and fall, the compost is mine; in the winter and summer it lies fallow.

This summer, though, has been different. Perhaps it's apathy, perhaps it's the unseasonably cold weather, but I haven't been able to find the motivation for it this year. I've been feeling a bit guilty about it though, and as luck would have it, I think I've hit on the solution.

One of D's favorite pastimes is feeding the animals at the local petting zoo. Currently, there is a large mama pig with ten piglets, loads of sheep and goats, and several aggressive peacocks. This being the Netherlands, bread is plentiful and cheap (except for us what with gluten-free bread being almost pricier than gold), meaning that many families show up with an entire bag full of fresh bread. The animals expect this and, with the exception of the lamas and sheep, all go all of which go crazy at the site of a slice of bread. Although the animals are kept behind a fence, the fence isn't locked and people are free to run around inside in order to try and pet the goats and sheep, but normally, the children stand at designated feeding stations. At the site of bread, the mama pig will push her babies out of the way, and it's quite common for the goats to lock horns over a piece of crust.

Up until my brilliant 'aha' moment, we'd been feeding the animals the leftover crusts that D, with her two year old reasoning, finds icky. I'm not sure why it took me so long to figure out, perhaps because I've never seen anyone else offer anything but bread, but one day it occurred to me that if they would eat bread, they surely they would eat other foods too. And so, yesterday, having collected a few scraps, off we headed to our new 'compost' system. Success! The mama piggy fought with her babies of the apple cores and a few slices of lettuce. Not those goats, though. They turned up their noses at the lettuce and the apples. They're good Dutch goats, through and through.

Flat as a pancake

One of the most amazing things about the Netherlands is how incredibly flat it is. A natural biker, I'm not. I get lost easily in the labyrinth streets, I'm skittish about the traffic (and this is in a country with dedicated bike paths), I'm even more skittish about the pedestrians (re: tourists) who inadvertently wander in front of me, seemingly out of nowhere, and I'm embarrassed to say that I still occasionally have to spend a few minutes locating my bike out of the myriad indistinguishable rusty old bikes parked in the same vicinity as mine. What I've found I do like about biking, at least in Amsterdam, is that it's easy.

Settled on land reclaimed from the sea, the builders of Amsterdam had the foresight to make it flat. As in very very very flat. As in, the very slight slope on a street a few blocks over is worthy of remark. It always catches my eye.

Just how level Amsterdam is was brought home to me when Jason and I made a day trip out to Zuid-Kennemerland National Park yesterday. We, and our bikes, took a quick train out to Haarlem and then headed west on our bikes. The park is notable for it's large sand dunes and I'll admit that before we got there, I wasn't entirely sure how we were going to bike this with our aging one speed bikes. For some reason, perhaps it was the word dune, in my imagination I had pictured hill after hill of sand leading us down to the sea; camel optional. To my surprise, we didn't end up in the Sahara.

Rather, Dutch sand dunes are covered in some of the most beautiful and unique trees and brush that I've ever seen. Very hilly, the landscape is covered in low flora in a range of muted greens, silvers and greys with a few low flowery patches, although I expect that more flowers will appear as the sun becomes stronger. It's the roots of these plants that help protect the sand lying just under the surface, clearly visible on horse trails that appear from time to time. To protect the delicate ecosystem, some areas of which are protected areas set away from the public, the Dutch have built biking and walking paths through the dunes. Even here, wandering through the hills, are the bike paths impressively flat, or so I thought. As a novice biker, it appears that I have landed in the right town. After a day spent biking inclines almost negligible to the human eyes, the ache in my legs was a testament to Amsterdam's impressive uniform flatness.