What to do in Enschede

Author’s note:  This post covers the day of July 10^th.  I wrote it on the train to Brussels on July 13^th.

So I slept pretty late into the morning, about 10:30.  And after Smith left to go to work, I have to be honest, it felt pretty good to be lazy for a while.  I checked up on news, facebook, sports and whatnot.  Eventually though my mind convinced my body to get up and go, that this would be the only time I would be in Enschede so I should make sure I see and do everything possible.  But after spending a few days here, it doesn’t seem like that would take much time at all.

I went to the tourism office here.  Chatted up the ladies there and tried to get any inside info at all about what there is to do and see here.  After them telling me how jealous they were that I had been living in Florida and was just in Brazil (the summer weather here has been predominantly cloudy, highs of 65, lows of 55, and a daily 30 minute rain shower), all I was able to get was 2 recommended restaurants, and suggestions to see the market, the synagogue, and the Twente museum.

So I went to one of the restaurants for lunch, had an open-faced ham and salmon salad sandwich.  It was okay.  Walked around the historic downtown and up to the Twente museum. 

The museum is located in an area of town that burned down in the 90’s in a fireworks disaster.  So this whole area of town has been rebuilt using crazy modern architecture.  Here are some of the houses.

 

The museum was alright.  It was just a history of the area from the ice ages down to modern times.  What did I get out of it?  Well, apparently Enschede is incapable of justifying its own existence.  It was always just a farming community.  Then Belgium separated from the Netherlands and the Dutch lost their textile center of Gent.  So, the government decided to make Enschede the new textile capital of the country.  The way the museum tells it, paraphrasing of course, “Then the Dutch workers began demanding higher working conditions until the industry could no longer and can still not compete with Asia and Africa.”  So, the government then decided that since Enschede could no longer be competitive in textiles, they needed another reason to exist, so they put a university there, making it the only university in all of Holland with its own campus.  And that’s all it is now, a small city with no real industry to speak of, and surrounded by farmland.  But before you say, well it must be a fun college town, know that it’s not really a college town the way we would think of it in the US.  Their college experience is different, so they don’t really have anything resembling Gainesville or Chapel Hill.

The region around Enschede is known by a couple names.  Twente is the name that locals prefer to use, but it is not an official name for the region.  Kind of like “The Triangle”, it refers to a region and makes the locals feel they have an identity, but there is no official border or government body overseeing it.  The official region (our version of states) is called “Overijssel” (I hope I spelled that right).  It’s pronounced “over-eye-sull”, and just means, that it’s on the other side of the River Ijsell.  It’s over Ijssel, no one cares about it really, because not much is going on over here.

After seeing the museum I biked home.  Smith made dinner and then we went to watch a movie.  It was a long bike ride, but we passed the canal, the FC Twente stadium, and a wastewater treatment plant where they tried to do some weird art by labeling every part of the plant with lighted red lettering on a post sticking up from that tank or machinery.  We saw “21 Jump Street”.  Yeah, I know that came out months ago in the US, but neither of us had seen it, and it was the perfect buddy-buddy flick for when best friends reunite.  We were also able to buy beer in the movie theater, which was awesome.  But they had an intermission, which seemed odd for such a short movie, but Smith says that’s par for the course here.  We rode back after the movie, and that was the end of Tuesday.