February 6, 2012
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Amsterdam, Netherlands
The city continues to be a deep freezer. The weather was very nice today, but goodness me, is it cold! A picture posted on Facebook this morning by one of my Facebook friends showed a sunken house boat on Zwanenburgwal, which is a canal very close to where I live. So, in the afternoon, while the sun was shining beautifully, I decided I could do with some fresh air and a walk. Besides, I needed to pick up my Caroline still, after I had parked her close to Zuiderbad when the snow on the bike line was getting a bit too tricky for me (and my backpack with two laptop computers in it.)
And as it happens, my walking route went past Zwanenburgwal, where, indeed a house boat was lying a bit deeper in the water than usual. When I was a kid we were already told that ice can seriously damage the side of a boat and cause it to sink, and at school they told us that therefore house boats needed to be kept clear of ice as much as possible to ensure they won't get damaged by the ice (keep in mind that I lived in a hilly part of the country where house boats were about as rare a sight as ostriches or whales.) I took the above picture and straight away posted it to Facebook with that explanation of why the boat had sunk. When I was watching the 8 o'clock news on Dutch TV they showed the house boat and the explanation they gave was different from what I had learned in school. Apparently a water pipe inside the boat had frozen and then burst, and water had escaped from the pipe into the boat's interior, causing it to sink (the owners were on holiday.) So, that's the last time I believe anything teachers tell me.
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