Caroline, my host for the night, and I stayed up pretty late last night. Unfortunately, I had to wake up at 8:30 am since she had to leave for work. When I opened my eyes, Caroline was already fully awake and my breakfast was waiting for me on the living room table.
Following this breakfast, I showered and gathered my belongings.
I expressed my gratitude to her wholeheartedly as we parted ways at her entrance. While she headed off to her workplace at an internet company, I retraced my steps to the Wibautstraat, which eventually lead to a highway if followed it until the end.
Next destination: Scheveningen. Halfway down the street, it started pouring rain heavily, shattering my expectation of a sunny 25-degree Celsius day.
I sought shelter from the rain in front of the building that housed the Dutch newspaper, De Volkskrant. While standing there, I read a few pages from the latest edition through the window until I received a call on my mobile phone.
Eddy Keur, a radio personality from the Dutch AM radio station Q The Beat (ceased in August 2002), called me unexpectedly for an English interview to be recorded and broadcasted abroad. This was part of my sponsorship deal with the station, but I was caught off guard by the timing of the call.
After the little interview I put on my raincoat and continued the walk to the highway.
I recalled hearing that walking along highways in The Netherlands is prohibited, so I opted to use a bicycle path next to the highway. I arrived at a gas station where a German girl was already attempting to hitchhike in the pouring rain. I decided to let her go ahead of me and took shelter at the gas station until the rain subsided about 30 minutes later.
Despite an hour of waiting, I failed to catch a ride. Therefore, I decided to walk to the nearest off-ramp for traffic heading towards The Hague.
I quickly caught a ride from a versatile artist who was headed to Vlaardingen. He dropped me off on the highway just before he turned left to his destination, while I had to turn right.
After walking for only five minutes along the busy 4-way road with a highway, a police car pulled up next to me and an officer began speaking to me in English.
I asked him to speak Dutch and he requested me to get inside the car. I had a feeling that it wasn’t just an ordinary hitchhiking offer to me, so when he asked for my identification, I sensed trouble. The officer issued me a ticket for walking along the highway, which I later learned was illegal. The fine amounted to 120 Dutch Guilders, which is equivalent to over US$80. The bill would be sent to my home address, which made me chuckle inwardly since I wouldn’t be there for a while.
I was dropped off on a sandy road in Leidschendam, where I once again displayed my cardboard sign that read “The Hague”. In just five minutes, a Turkish man offered me a ride all the way to Scheveningen, which happened to be my final destination for the day.
The Turkish man worked as a cook and a waiter at the Columbus Restaurant and we talked a little bit about the Turkish music that was playing from his car cd-player, in Dutch of course.
I arrived in Scheveningen around 2 pm and walked a bit through that part of The Hague until I got at the right address where my hostess for today would live: Charis.
Charis is one of the most a(ttra)ctive and youngest webcam girls in The Netherlands and she has a very unique website where she also posts almost daily information about what is going on in her life in English.
She is honestly surprised by a small number of 500 people visiting her website everyday from all over the world, although most off them are dirty older men asking her to take her clothes, which she sometimes does – but not revealing anything on the screen next to her bare shoulders and a nice smile.
Her ex-boyfriend Derk, where she still lives with for just a little while, let me in and a few minutes later I met Charis who just returned from the mall.
Our initial reactions to each other were based on mutual shyness, but as we chatted and shared stories about our experiences on the road, it felt like we had known each other for a while.
She showed me their little but nice apartment where she’ll be moving out soon and of course she had to turn on her webcam to show me to the world.
After some time of online chatting and being on ICQ she took me to the beach, just a ten minutes walk away from her house. The weather still wasn’t great, very windy and on the beach itself it could pretty cold, but it was very refreshing for the mind.I hadn’t been to a beach and felt the wind in my last remaining hairs in a while, and it felt great!
Next to her study Information Technologies Charis also works as a waitress at the popular Bora Bora Beach Club. So the insisted on visiting this place for a cup of hot chocolate around the fireplace. It really was a very cosy place where ‘just feeling good’ was on the number one spot of the service.
I received an email informing me about my appearance in today’s edition of the USA Today newspaper. Charis kindly purchased a copy from a local newspaper stand, which was a pleasant surprise. It felt surreal for both of us to read about my project in a newspaper that is sold worldwide. It was exciting and overwhelming at the same time!
We spent the rest of the afternoon chatting on ICQ on the net at the house and Derk did some shopping for dinner: we ate rice with chicken and vegetables baked in some great sauce, which tasted pretty good! All this time Charis had her webcam running live. (In those days, a webcam would not stream, but a photo would be taken and uploaded every X seconds, ed.).
After dinner Charis changed her outfit and took me to her friend Mark, a very good friend of her and where she’ll be moving into the student flat.
We took the tram-car and Charis even bought me a public transport strip card to get to Mark’s place! Every separate student room there had a superfast ADSL-connection, and those experiences are pretty new for me – I only had a 56K-modem at home!
Those two took me to Havana, a restaurant that turned into a little dance-hall as we were standing there, drinking some beers and meeting some friends of Charis and Mark.
Around 1 am Charis and I took the latest streetcar back to her house where I wrote my update about my previous night at Caroline’s place.
I will keep on trying to stay only one day behind in writing my reports here, but excuses me if Mr. Time is not on my site, anywhere in the future.
This day spent with Charis turned out to be quite intriguing and we had some great conversations. We discussed her website, her recent breakup with her boyfriend, and even delved into some deep psychological topics while riding on the streetcar, causing us both to contemplate and gaze out into the dark night.
When I presented Caroline’s gift to Charis, she was pleasantly surprised. The fact that it was a personal gift from Caroline and that the book was written by her left Charis feeling amazed.
Tomorrow, I will be staying in The Hague city itself, and Charis still hadn’t decided what kind of personal gift she would give to my next host. You’ll have to wait and see!
