09. The holiday 假期 (1977)

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We went to my grandmother's house. A lot of my aunts, uncles en little nephews came to see us. For me it was the first time back in the Netherlands for many years and of course the family wanted to see this Chinese girlfriend from the big nephew from abroad. Barbara was amazed by the size of aunties, they were very big. And when they sat next to each other on the couch it was fun to see how they struggled when one of them tried to get up.

My grandmother lived alone and enjoyed our company. She cared for us, but left us alone. She told us that when she was young she would have liked to have done the same as what we were doing.

For us it was a perfect time. Being together 24 hours a day, being free from any interference from others.

During the day we travelled around in Holland, visiting sites, taking pictures of things we thought that could be part of a culture excursion and making sure that I wasn't on them. It was one of these holidays that things never went as we planned. When we went to Amsterdam, we took a trolley the wrong way. We only noticed this when we reached the end of the line, at a suburb. We took a few pictures from some sculptures in a local park and went home again. We never saw the old city of Amsterdam.

Another day we couldn't get the door open when the train was at the train station. We missed the place we wanted to go. Another time we stepped out at the wrong bus stop and had to walk for miles. We wanted to go to craft museum which looked interesting to us. It took us half a day to get there. Only they exposed things the local hand craft society had made like hand knitted table cloths and things like that. Not the art we had in mind.

We didn't care if things went wrong. It made our holiday more exciting.

Every evening we went to the same local pub sitting in the same quiet corner. There Barbara wrote a dairy she made especially for this holiday. Ironically is that Barbara always did the writing about our relation in her dairies and now I am doing the writing about our life together.

Barbara and my grandma 

假期

我们一同去了我奶奶的房子。许多叔叔阿姨和小侄子都来看我们。对于我来说，这是多年后第一次回荷兰，当然，我的家里人都想看看他们国外的大侄子和他的中国女友。翁美玲被我阿姨们的体积所惊讶，她们身形都很高大。当她们紧挨着坐在沙发上时，看她们试图站起来是件很有趣的事情。

我的奶奶一个人住，她很喜欢我们的陪伴。她喜欢我们，但没有和我们待在一起。她告诉我们，如果她也年轻，她会喜欢做我们现在做的事情。
对于我们来讲，这是个绝佳的时刻。待在一起每天24小时，并且能免于其他人的干扰。

在白天，我们在这个国家的旅游景点旅行，照了许多照片，我们想那能成为文化体验的一部分。但这也是个超出我们计划的假期。当我们去阿姆斯特丹时，我们搭错了电车。当我们到达终点站，城郊时，才意识到这个问题。我们在当地公园里照了些雕像的照，然后又回家了。我们从未见到阿姆斯特丹的老城。

还有一天，我们不能在车站打开火车的大门。于是我们错过了我们想去的地方。还有一次，我们下错了车站，不得不步行几英里。我们想去一个看上去很有意思的手工艺博物馆。这花了我们半天才到那里。但是他们仅仅展出当地的手工协会的作品，像手织的桌布之类的东西。并不是我们想象的那些艺术品。

然而我们并不在乎当事情超出预料，或是当我们没有到达我们想去的景点。这些只是让这个假期变得更加刺激。

每天晚上我和翁美玲都会去当地同一家咖啡店，坐在同一个角落里。翁美玲在那里写关于这个假期的日志。有点辛酸的是，以往都是翁美玲在日志里写我们的情感关系，如今，确是我在记录着我们那时的生活。

(translated by Zhi)