Slow Thursday

I don't know why, but I somehow found myself at Hoek van Holland again this afternoon. Maybe the trip I made with my bike there on Sunday had some kind of profound effect on me, maybe it's watching those big ships go by, or maybe for no particular reason, but as the sky was darkening, and as the lights of the Port of Rotterdam became brighter, I stood on the beach and enjoyed the scenery.

Went into work today, and attended this interesting seminar on the Special Court for Sierra Leone. There were all these people from the Court giving lectures on what it does, and particularly the very unique situation of Mr Charles Taylor, who is being held and tried here in The Hague. To the sceptics (like me...) such Courts are not so much about justice and penalising hard international war criminals, but also about the ability of certain countries (in the West) to decide who to hunt down and who to put on trial. Why, for example, was the former Liberian president arrested, when there is no rule in international law which permits acting heads of state to be arrested? And why is he being tried here, instead of in Sierra Leone, where the Court is mainly based? There were also many questions raised about the whole idea of 'innocence until proven guilty', which under the international criminal system appears to be forgotten, especially because these alleged war criminals have been so demonised that the main objective seems to be putting them permanently behind bars, instead of respecting their rights as an accused, or trying to find out what really happened during the attrocities in the last decade. This is a pattern repeated in all the ad-hoc international criminal tribunals, from Yugoslavia to Rwanda, from Iraq to Cambodia...

By early afternoon, I was feeling really exhausted from all the discussions, and feeling a bit impatient and restless. I'm not sure why I've been feeling like that recently, but I felt so much like just going away! So I left the office, and just jumped on the train randomly!

First train headed in the direction of Dordrecht, a city just above the so-called 'Great Rivers' and often seen as the symbolic border town dividing Catholics and Protestants in the Netherlands. But the train was so slow, that when it arrived in the harbour city of Rotterdam, I jumped off and started to wander around the streets.

I made a short call to my mum, who is about to undergo an important body check tomorrow. I called for no other reason than to wish her well and to tell her to take care, because she told me it's a really long and painful process, which can really be phsycologically and physically tiring... After that, I walked around a bit more, but the busy streets and shops didn't really appeal to me. So I went into the Maritime Museum, where they had big models of ships and a replica of the whole harbour and city of Rotterdam. There was also a special exhibition about the tragic sinking of the S.S. Berlin in 1907, exactly a hundred years ago. It happened at Hoek van Holland, when the ship was blown off course in foggy weather and hit the rocky pier at the mouth of the river Maas.

So perhaps that's the reason I jumped on the train again, and headed in the direction of Hoek van Holland. This, and the fact that when I got to the train station, this was the first train to leave. Coincidence?



I actually fell asleep on the train, but got up at the final stop and also the destination. The station was almost empty, and the town seemed deserted. But I remembered the direction I had cycled a few days ago, and I headed towards the shore. I walked along the water, on rocks and the sandy shore, and now and then big ships would hurry by blowing their horns. It was a calm day today, not too windy, so the water was calm. But when a ship goes by, the currents would rock and violently crash against the shores.

I walked a long way, and onto the long pier. It was so quiet, so still that all I could hear were the call of birds and seagulls and the mechanical sounds of the harbour in the distance. Smoke rose up from the chimneys, and the lights in the distance flickered like candles, while huge wind turbines moved around in a row, looking like tall, gray flowers along the coastline, stretching all the way out to sea.

I felt so much better... less restless, less annoyed at something I'm not sure what, and more at peace. Just standing there, hearing and watching the waves, getting away from it all, helped. A lot.