South Africa
A Unesco 'cultural heritage site', just like Willemstad, Curaçao. We have seen several of these and you must take the greatest of care to visit them out of season: Every other house, and then some, offers at least B&B.
But when we were there it was devoid of charabancs.
Another one of those places where we, from somewhere the Dutch have left their marks as well, feel right at home.
The Dutch would, too; even the quality of the light is Dutch.
We did miss the rich color palette of our island.
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In a lecture by a Dutch professor specializing in Dutch colonial architecture, he told about the extremely steep staircases you could find everywhere the Dutch had been. He blamed the fact that ships' carpenters had designed and built them.
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Still, I doubt if those ships' carpenters have been that busy in Amsterdam itself, too; they just didn't know any better.
But I admit there are no bicycles or worse hanging on the walls–unlike in Amsterdam.
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In one of her books, set in South Africa, Agatha Christie complains about her publisher insisting that she puts in exotic words like de stoep and pawpaw (which we call papaya.) So she has one sentence in the book where they sit on de stoep, eating pawpaw and looking out at the koppies in de veld; just to get the nuisance over and done with.
Well, here you have some stoeps. And very cosy they are, too.
What's the use of living in a monument
without a satellite dish?
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