Tuning in

The last few days have been filled with challenges, both personal and work related. On the whole I'm fairly upbeat and tend to muddle through, but today, along with questioning what I really want in life—I hit a metaphorical wall.

The photos were taken in town at the local market in Groningen, Netherlands and based on a card drawn from a series to: Indulge your senses. My card's purpose changed from taste to view, I suspect to lighten my mood, I needed visual food, as opposed to actual food to satisfy my mental appetite.

© Alison Day 

Alison Day Design 

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Prawn Crackers

In existence since 1969, the Seafood Market Restaurant in Bangkok, Thailand, boasts excellent cuisine, a seating area able to accommodate 1500 people, and a 50 metre long counter displaying all the seafood possibilities. In their words: If it swims we have it.

This is dining on a large scale with the guarantee that your meal is totally fresh. Upon entering,  you first select your fish or seafood - live - from fish tanks. This is followed by choosing salad, vegetables and wine. Pay at the check out, pass on how you would like you food to be cooked, then wait at your table to be served. Also, no monosodium glutamate!

Although I am myself, admittedly a great lover of seafood, and the freshness with which the fare of this restaurant is served appeals, one can't help but wonder, with over fishing the world over, whether this idea is actually sustainable with regard to world fish stocks.

As for the catchy one-liner, ... I'd say watch out mermaids!

Say Alkmaar, Say ‘Cheese!’

Alkmaar is a Grand Dame of a city at 750 years old, with 100,000 inhabitants, and is known as the Netherlands Cheese City. It can be reached in just over half an hour from Amsterdam Central Station by intercity train.

The main attraction is the cheese market which starts at 10.00 am until 12.30 pm from the first Friday in April until the first Friday in September. During this time the market place is full of enormous cheeses being bought and sold, a yearly occurrence that has been going on for the last 600 years.

The cheeses are sold by a method called, ‘handjeklap’ (literally ‘hand clap’), a traditional selling method in the Netherlands amongst farmers where the seller and the buyer clap each other on the palm of the hand, whilst speaking a secret language. This means that they are in the middle of ‘doing business’. When the clapping stops it means that one has decided that the transaction is finished. The cheeses are then removed after weighing in the ‘Waag’ (the Weigh House), by ‘cheese porters’. Dressed in white uniforms and straw hats with coloured ribbons, these men are members of a 400 year old Cheese Carriers Guild. They use ‘berries’, a sort of sleigh contraption which helps to lift the heavy cheeses by the use of a strap system round the shoulders of the bearers. The cheese museum can be found in the Waaggebouw (Waag building) a 14th century building, which has all the information about dairy production.

From the historical point of view Alkmaar has about 400 monuments including the 16th century Town Hall and the Grote St. Laurenskerk.  The latter is built in the Brabant-Gothic style (like French Gothic, but with a more ornate exterior) and contains a world famous organ. There is also a Dutch Renaissance house, as well as numerous other churches, small estates and buildings with marvelous facades some being a couple of hundred years old and dating back to 1573, when Alkmaar became the first city in the Netherlands to beat the Spanish army.

Being the largest city in the region Alkmaar is popular as the social centre and offers a broad diversity of restaurants, cafés, theatres and museums. 

© Alison Day

Alison Day Design

First published in the Connections magazine #11 Spring 2006