8th of February, 2022.
After having a great breakfast and coffee, everybody sits to talk about daily routines. I meet some more residents and volunteers. I offered help because I am hanging around until 11 o’clock, so I help Donna with the dishes and cleaning up a bit the kitchen. At 10 o’clock they have a coffee break, me too, and I meet even more people.
Vu comes earlier, around 10.30. Which is fine because I am ready. But he behaves weirdly when I ask him if he wants to say hello to everybody. He says he has a call and stay outside the whole time. I think he doesn’t want to talk with anyone from Emmaus, so I just grab my stuff and after saying thank you and goodbye to everybody, I walk toward his car.
During our trip to Gouda he also behaves different from yesterday. I don’t know how to explain but he seems less nice. He asks me why I don’t work one month here and there just to make some money and even after I clearly tell him I don’t like / want to have money, he keeps talking about it. He drops me in the centre of Gouda and buys me a juice and 3 croissants before he leaves.
The Tourist Info is closed. Great! I walk for a while until I feel comfortable to ask in a coffee shop to leave my backpack in there. It is a great move because the place is awesome and the lady with whom I talk, Minka, is lovely. A very pretty lady too. I leave The Hulk in their storage.
Gouda is small and cute. Unfortunately though, as many other small towns in the Netherlands, everything related to tourism is about money. The churches are all converted in “museums”. I believe is just an excuse for charging people to visit them. Because you shouldn’t charge people to go inside a church, right? Right? I walk through the canals and see my first windmill. Well, I saw some before but just from the car. This one I could stop and stare at it. It is so cute! There are some really cool boats around here too. But then basically that is it. Of course there is also the museum, but you have to pay for it, of course.
I come back for my backpack, eat some lunch, and then walk out of town. The first church I supposed to ask for a shelter it is actually empty. In the second one, after waiting for ages for someone with whom I could speak, the guy does not seem at all in the mood of helping me. I don’t know if he is connected to the church or what, because he mention that during the weekdays the place is used more like an office. He simply says that he could send a message to someone but he is pretty busy. Laugh. So I just say thank you (yeah, for what?) and leave.
Now I am in a McDonald’s, which is luckily just nearby. I will just try to camp somewhere around, because it might not be so cold tonight and also there are no other churches around. Plus I don’t really feel like asking in another church. It seems to me that church people in the Netherlands are not that much into helping the next one.
P.S.: The main reason why I have chosen to visit Edam and Gouda is because before I came to the Netherlands, I had no idea that those two types of cheese are originally from here and that they are actually towns too.
