Sea Shanties and Shat Island
Oh, the Dutch do everything better than us. As a visitor, it’s hard not to feel inferior.
>They have a good football team (Apparently. I couldn’t give a shit, to be honest),
>They have the best attitude towards drug use OFFICIALLY. You want to smoke a leaf other than the tobacco one, then please yourself. I couldn’t give two hoots, and neither could the Dutch;
>They do good photogenic cheese;
>Their women are hardy, thick calfed, big breasted Amazonian specimens;
>Their (young) men are blonde foxes;
>They have no NEDS (none that I would class as such, anyway) This point alone makes me want to move to Holland. Permanent-like;
>Their cycle paths are to be envied in the extreme. It’s SAFER to be on a bike than it is on foot or in a car. We hired bikes to avoid being killed. And I’m NOT joking about that;
>The sheer engineering of the dyke/polder/dam system makes the Forth Bridge look like a pile of crap;
>The streets are as clean as a nun’s knickers;
>No-one learns or understands their language, so they can talk rudely about foreigners in front of their very faces with no fear of being punched. Every word they utter sounds like a swear word anyway, so you quickly get fooled into thinking, “He didn’t just call me a fucker, he’s just speaking Dutch.”;
All good stuff, I’m sure you’d agree. So it was with great disappointment that we discovered a chink in their otherwise superb armour (other than the condiment mania, but that’s subjective).
Buoyed up by the splendid Blijdorp Zoo experience we decide to spend a rainy day in “Arsenaal” in the sea town of Vlissingen, in most Zuid part of Holland. Billed as a fun park with a pirate/maritime theme and an aquarium we are naively expecting excellence.
You know how in Britain how you expect all theme parks to be poorly conceived, under-funded, urine-soaked, emporiums of mediocrity? Well Het Arsenaal was just that.
Imagine pirated up mannequins on pulleys. Imagine some fish tanks of a calibre that you’d maybe see round your mate’s house. Imagine an exhibition about pirates where your Dad has video-ed himself against a blue screen dressed up as a makeshift Captain Jack Sparrow, and then two model boats emit some dry ice and have flashing LEDs signifying cannon fire and someone switches the lights on and off a bit to make the whole thing look exciting.
But worst of all, imagine a tinny sea shanty of about 1min 30 secs duration played on a loop in every part of the theme park EVEN IN THE LIFTS with the sole lyrics of:
“ Yo Ho Ho! A pirate’s life for me!
Yo, Ho, Ho! A pirate’s life for me!” (Repeat until psychotic)
It was bad enough being a visitor, but those employees could sue under Human Rights violations.
And we also saw a couple of neds outside…..
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And so onto today’s rude sounding sign pic which comes from Arsenaal itself. The explanation for this belongs to Meeester.
He describes this as, “Fantasy Island but after a spell of food poisoning…”
