There's no doubt about it: BookCrossers are the salt of the earth. One of them happens to live in the same city as the seller of the teapot does, and kindly offered to go and collect it for me!

Themed, even. All of them had an outdoorsy word in the title, and I tried to fit the release spots to those words.
They all have pictures, too!

The Smell of Grass. Near some grass.
The House behind the Hill. Near a hill, of course.
View with Grain of Sand. A poetry book by a Polish poet.
A Forest of Candles. In the forest. Caught!
Under the Ombu-tree (whatever that is). In a tree. Caught!

It was a wonderful day for a walk with a good friend. Which is exactly what I did.

Nijmegen, a city close to where I live, used to have two OBCZs (dedicated BookCrossing points of presence, maintained by one or more members). But one is closed now, because the building is being renovated, and it's not likely to open again during this year. So this afternoon, Emmeken, Marsala and I are going 'OBCZ-shopping' in Nijmegen, because we want to find a new spot.
We've got our eye on this place:

Today was Queen's Day. If we have a national holiday, this is it: it's a celebration of our Queen's birthday, only it's not her birthday, because that's in February and we'd have awful weather. So we celebrate it on her mother's birthday instead.

I'm no good at tooting my own horn, so I'll just paste the News article here:

You can all stop biting your fingernails now. The votes have been cast and counted. (Over 1000 BookCrossers participated in our first ever online convention-location-voting. Wow!) We can now tell you who won the bid for the 2010 Anniversary Convention! (Drum roll...)

But first, who were the candidates again? There were three: Amsterdam, Boston and Washington, DC. Each of them had a great spokesperson. Presentations were done in London at the 2008 Convention by Moem, Tobysrus and Skyring (the in loco parentis representative for the "BC in DC" group.) It was really hard to decide which of these wonderful cities to vote for, especially after seeing the fabulous online presentations or hearing reports back from folks attending the Convention in London.

But the outcome was pretty clear: mark your calendars for April 2010 in Amsterdam! Congratulations to the Dutch organizing team: boekenxnl, chris147, fotomiep, Joanazinha, Luielezer, Moem, Phoenix-Flight, Rubberchicken. Keep your eyes on the Convention Info page for updates. They've already got a nice website going with plans and loads of information.

I'm still tired, but did we ever have fun! And there was so much interesting stuff going on. I'm interested in the technical side of things, so on many of the pics up on Flickr you'll see me talking to Matt or Wyando.
I actually didn't go to ANY of the talks and workshops because I was too busy talking to old friends, getting to know new friends, and getting to know old friends whom I'd only ever met online.
I did have time to taste a bit of London, which took the shape of sandwiches, fish & chips, excellent Indian food, and a nice pint of bitter.
This Convention has left me feeling hopeful and optimistic about many things concerning BookCrossing, one of them being our chance to host the 2010 Convention in the Netherlands.

Here's a video of the presentation of our bid: ( Cut for your viewing convenience )

Furthermore I just want to say that the Organisation of this Convention did a great job!

I'll be off to Rubberchicken's place in an hour. Tomorrow morning we fly to London for the International BookCrossing Convention. I've heard  the weather won't be all that good, so I've taken my precautions.
Fellow conventioneers, 'tis by my Brellycumber thou shalt know me.

(if only because I'm going to the BookCrossing Convention in London on the 18th!)

My mother and I arrived in the afternoon, rather clueless as to where we could find our hotel. We couldn't look it up because the keys to my mother's suitcase were nowhere to be found. We figured it would be easiest to find the hotel first and then solve the suitcase problem.
A bus took us into town from the airport. And we got off at the right stop. Several utterly friendly Portuguese folks helped us to find the hotel, which turned out to be really nice!
The room was lovely. And someone from the staff  picked the lock on the suitcase for us. So that was one problem taken care of.
We headed into the center on foot, walking along wonderful boulevards, dressed in our summer clothes. It was warm and sunny! It felt almost subtropical.
We ended up finding a nice place to eat and it wasn't even expensive.

The next day, we went and bought a three-day ticket for public transport, which turned out to be a very good deal. Here's a short list of things we went to see and do during those three days:

- the National Tile Museum, which was much more interesting than you'd think
- the Monastery of St. Jeronimo, very impressive
- the city quarter named Belem, where we had tea and the traditional pastry
- the river. We took the ferry to the other side especially to see it, and the Bridge of April the 25th.
- the Cathedral
- the streetcars, especially line 28, the so called historical line
- the funicular to the higher part of the city
- the lift. See the pic and you'll understand
- the city quarter named Bairro Alto, which is where people go out, and where the artists live
- an antiques shop where they sold original tiles from people's houses
- the castle, but we didn't go in. We've seen castles before.
- the Museum of Modern Art and its spectacular gardens. We had tea with two local BookCrossers there, which was very nice!
- the tiles and the architecture. We spent a great deal of time looking up.

Furthermore, the food was great. We had lovely fresh fish, orange juice, lots of great coffee (and decent tea served in generous amounts), local pastry, roasted sardines, local wines... Lisbon is full of great flavours. The people are very friendly and helpful, and almost everything you see is adorned with decorative patterns. Even the subway stations look like works of art.
It was a great little holiday. It's a lovely city. In fact you should go there and see for yourself.


Oh, and my mother ended up finding a spare key for the suitcase padlock on the same keyring her house keys were on.

Fun with powertools; not for the faint of heart.
Most of us know about the quote by Dorothy Parker: "This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force." Stoneshop takes it one step further here.
( Photo series behind the cut, for those who can handle it. )

I couldn't help myself and just had to order some stuff from Vistaprint again.
Of course, if you use the Very Very Special Offers Just For You - Hurry! that you can get by e-mail, the prices are quite reasonable. edko66 had forwarded me some of the mails (for some reason they'll only ever send me the American offers, no matter how often I try to tell the website that those aren't the one I want), so I could simply pick the best offers.
The best offers happened to come with free picture uploads. Good moment to make some new BookCrossing postcards to tuck into books, send to other BookCrossers or sneak into the Free Postcard-racks in OBCZs.
And perhaps some new stickers for labeling books would be nice, too.
So here's what I came up with:

Read recently:

Self, by Yann Martell
A bit of a disappointment, I must say. I expected to love it, because I loved Life of Pi. But I didn't. It never really grabbed me and so took me a long time to read. The idea of gender change was, well... different. But I didn't see what it did for the story. It seemed superfluous to me.
The multi-lingual thing was similarly original but didn't really do much for me either, mainly because most of the time the text appeared to be the same, just in two different languages.
It's not a bad book per sé; it's just one I expected more from.





Een goede man slaat soms zijn vrouw, by Joris Luyendijk.
Very good and informative book about everyday life in Egypt, mainly among Egyptian students. Luyendijk allowed himself to get involved into the lives of his subjects as much as he could, and writes about them with humour, honest curiousity and sometimes endearingly naive. Makes you wonder how people from Western Europe and the Middle East can ever really learn to understand each other, though.






Reading right now:

Maus, vertelling van een overlevende, by Art Spiegelman.
Good stuff. Art tells us about the story of his father and the way he survived the war as a Jew in Europe.
The comic strip format works well and is never in bad taste. The drawing style is simple and stark. It's not funny, nor is it meant to be.
Could be a very good way to tell (older) children about the war and the way it helped shape most of Europe.





All of them ringbooks, as I see now. After this one, I have no ringbooks left for a while, so I can read whatever I choose, which is nice too!

Today is Valentine's day, a day which doesn't mean dick to me by itself; however, any excuse for releasing a bunch of BookCrossing books will do. I had about 50 books prepared; all of them with words like 'love' or 'heart' in the title, or hearts or Cupids on the cover. I'd made them look nice and sappy with some glittery heart shaped stickers, and each of them had a pink heart shaped sticky note with the words 'Voor Jou' (for you) on it, and a bit of shiny ribbon.
Luckily, it was a dry day, so no bags were needed. I loaded the books into a suitable release vehicle and we headed into town. The first journal entry was made before we even got home!


Added on february 18: The catches so far. Most of them are, of course, in Dutch.

one
two
three
four
five

[Error: unknown template 'qotd']English speakers usually pronounce Moem to rhyme with poem, while it should rhyme with room. The 'oe'-sound in Dutch is similar to the English 'oo'-sound, just a bit shorter.

The name (which is my BookCrossing nickname) comes from a series of books by Finnish writer Tove Jansson about creatures named the Moomins, or Moomintrolls. Moem is Dutch for Moomin. I loved those books as a kid, and still do.

We had another meeting today. We, in this case, means the small group of BookCrossers who are conspiring to bring the 2010 BookCrossing Convention to the Netherlands.
Present were: Fotomiep, LuieLezer, pvanoort, Phoenix-Flight and me. Joanazinha, boekenxnl and chris147 could not make it, the first two because they'd both come down with terrible colds.

It's all going really well. The information that futurecatnz gave me has been sent on to the other conspirators, and we find it very valuable. We'd still like to get the written part of your presentation, by the way! It's worked once, it may well work again.  ;-)

Here's what we've got so far: Phoenix-Flight came up with a venue. It's a theatre, and we can actually afford it. It has all the room and facilities we need, including wireless internet for our guests.
I'm not telling you the location yet, but it's in a place that you furriners will love.
There's plenty of things to see and do nearby, it's easily reached by public transport, and there's free parking space for those who come by car. There's a fancy hotel close to the venue, and better yet: a camping/hostel combination for the outdoorsy types and those who travel on a limited budget! You can bring your tent, but you can also rent a bed in a hut if you prefer.
The city center is very easily reached (public transport) and offers something for everyone. You may well want to book your flight in such a way that you can spend some extra days. You won't regret it.

Another nice thing: it won't break the bank. No hard figures yet, but I can safely say that admission to the 2010 Convention may turn out even cheaper than it is for the 2008 Convention Londen (which I find quite reasonable).

We'll keep the location secret for a while, so as not to spoil the surprise. You can all start saving up now, because I feel quite certain that we have a good chance of winning the bid!

We just had a very nice BookCrossing meeting in my city yesterday.
I was the organiser, and since we have two OBCZs here, I thought it would be nice if we could visit both of them. They're within walking distance from each other, so that shouldn't be a problem. But couldn't we make that short walk a bit more interesting by releasing books along the way?
This is what we ended up doing:

First of all, some BookCrossers came to my house to pick up some boxes of books for registering and releasing. They had a jolly good time digging around in the Book Room, and it wasn't easy to get them out by the time we had to leave in order to meet the others. I practically had to grab their feet and pull!

We all met at two o'clock at OBCZ Manu.

We were welcomed by the two owners, who are very BookCrossing-friendly, and who had started their OBCZ themselves.
Even though it was quite crowded, we somehow managed to fit in (there were about 15 or 20 of us). Each of us had something nice to drink and chatted for a while. I handed out some small maps of the city center so no one would get lost, and I had marked my favourite release spots on them.
People formed small groups and started their walk through the city centre, most of them were carrying books to release.
It was great fun thinking of good release spots, and then finding some of them already taken by other people's books! Over a hundred books were released all in all.
We all met again in OBCZ Bazoeka around four o'clock.


By the time I got there (about ten past four) some BookCrossers were huddling on the doorstep because the place opened a bit late, but as soon as we were inside that was forgotten. We settled to exchange release stories and leftover books, one of our most appreciated members (nrrdgrrl) showed up from South-Africa and a good time was had by all.
Finally we decided to go for a meal together. Some of us had gone home, but there were twelve BookCrossers left, including Stoneshop who met us at the restaurant.
After a very pleasant meal, everyone went their separate ways again.

You'll find some pictures of this meeting here, on BookCrosser LuieLezer's website.

I got a free messenger type bag from my bank today, because I put some money aside and filled in a form  ;-)
It's a nice shoulder bag (not that I don't already own oodles of bags, but hey, it's free and I'm Dutch) albeit rather blue.
It has a transparent part in front, where you can put something you'd like to be visible from the outside.
Of course, that makes it totally suitable as an instant BookCrossing bag. Pimp my bag!
The slogan reads 'Read and Let Read'.

I co-manage an OBCZ in a nearby city, which is why I don't often go there. It's not far, but I hardly ever have anything else to do there during the opening hours of the OBCZ, so I can't often combine it with other errands.
But the Go Hunting page showed that there hadn't been any books released there in three or four months, so it was high time someone did something. Stoneshop and I decided to go down there with a bag of books.

Kind of a rant, I guess.

This is a spin-off from a Chit Chat thread. I don't want to harp on about it there, because it might make the person I replied to uncomfortable, but harping on about something that bugs you is part of what LiveJournal is about, right?
Right. So, what I posted there was this:

> the resident grammar/spelling nazi

Sorry to interrupt, but I wish people would not use this expression.
I understand that its meaning feels differently to different people, but to me and many other Europeans (and, I suspect, many people in other parts of the world too) the word nazi can't be used casually. It basically means GENOCIDE to me. That is quite a different concept from 'someone who's fanatical about certain rules'. And it distracts me from what you're saying, to say the very least.

Can we please try not to use the word nazi in a casual way?

Now I know I'm not alone in this, but at the same time I know there are people out there who don't have the foggiest what I'm on about, or think I'm making a big deal out of nothing.
Except to me it isn't nothing.

The war happened, the Holocaust happened, National-Sozialismus happened. And it was (and is) a big deal. It's a deal that literally cost millions and millions their lives. (We tend to know about the over six million Jews, but we don't always realise there were probably over 26 millions of Russians who died as a direct result of this war).
See, this war I'm talking about wasn't really all that long ago. Lots of people are alive today that remember it. Even my own parents (and I'm blessed to still have parents) remember it. And it happened right here. The results can be seen in many places all over my town and my country.
(For those not in the know, I live within crawling distance from the bridge that was made famous by the book and film 'A Bridge Too Far'.)


Picture: what the center of my city looked like, just after the war, after most of the rubble had been cleared away. This is where I go to the market nowadays.

In any case, it's much too close in many ways (in time, in location, in the collective memory of my people and many others) to make light of it. And the word 'nazi' will never be just another word for me.
So if you want to describe someone who's a stickler for rules, in a humourous way, please think of another word, or make up a new one. Let's please not use this one anymore. There are too many memories (even though they're not mine). It's just too hurtful.

No, I didn't enjoy the 'soup nazi' Seinfeld episode much either.

Today, six Dutch BookCrossers met in Utrecht to discuss the Convention. Not the upcoming one in London, but the 2010 one. That's right, we're going to present The Netherlands as a candidate for the 2010 Convention.
Of course, we'll need to have a good story to tell in April... so we set up a small meeting to gather some ideas about that. What'll be on the programme, what kind of venue are we looking for, does anyone have contacts who can help us with that, who should we look to for sponsoring, things like that.
We had a lot to discuss, but it was a pleasant meeting as well. I'm really looking forward to the presentation of our plans in Londen. I'll probably get nervous as the date draws closer, but for now it sounds like fun.

To be continued!

As Christmas was approaching, we realised no one had invited us for a Christmas meal. Last year, we had family over for dinner; that was nice, but we didn't really feel like doing that again this time. So we decided to spend a few days away from home this time.
I found a nice short trip arrangement on the Stayokay, which is the former youth hostel organisation, website; as we are former youth ourselves, that seemed very appropriate.
I inquired whether or not there was room for us in the inn, and (also very fitting) it was almost full, but they had a room for four which we could have at a small extra fee for the empty beds, which they would not be renting to anyone else. So we had a room for four to ourselves. The downside of that was, of course: bunk beds. But I was sure we'd find some way around that.

We were going to Terschelling, which is one of the islands that form a string to the north of the Netherlands. It's 30 kilometres long. It's possible to take a car on the ferry, but that's fairly expensive, and besides, what for? There's nowhere to drive to.
We decided to take our bicycles instead, and get some exercise.


Of course, we also took our laptops and a small stack of books to release.
And since we knew about a BookCrosser who lives there and sometimes feels a bit left out (because it's much harder for her to attend meetings or hunt for books) we also took a banana box full of unregistered books, so she'd be able to release them all over the island, and possibly net a few new BookCrossers that way.

Aaltsje (that's her name) was waiting for us when we got off the ferry, and her eyes lit up when she say the full box!

It was already dark, but we found the inn quite easily. We had a nice dinner, a short walk around the village and headed for bed. Don't tell the staff, but we put the matresses on the floor. We're not used to sleeping in separate beds.

The next day was Christmas day. We spent it exploring the island by bicycle, which is nice, but a bit windy. We found a very nice old windmill, the one on the picture above, that is now a great place to stop for coffee and tea (although the tea tasted a bit salty!), and later on we stumbled upon the Wreckage Museum, which was full of things found on the beach or while diving. Very interesting and well worth a visit.
I took a few pictures that day, and you can find them here if you're interested, or click on the pic.