Previous – The Dunes

Last couple days of my trip were upon us, and at some point we decided to take the second-last day and go to an outdoor historic theme park called Archeon. It’s kind of geared towards kids, but Tharash was like “you’ve got a lot of inner kid” and I acceded to his assertion.

The park is built on the outside of Alphen aan den Rijn, a bit southwest of Amsterdam, and one reason we decided this would be a good activity was because our friend Betameche was coming to visit from Belgium, and this would be less far to travel than all the way to Amsterdam. Tharash met him while sailing last year, and invited him to join our D&D group, and he’s a fun guy to play with… if somewhat chaotic as a gamer. When we met him at the train station, he was wearing a nerd shirt that said “Woke-on-LAN”, which he explained to me: “Wake-on-LAN” is when you wake up a computer from sleep mode via a LAN connection, but his shirt showed a computer port and a rainbow.

Archeon is arranged into several areas of differing sizes. The first area is ‘prehistory’, and the first subsection is Mesolithic, which had several thatch huts which they rebuild by volunteer every few years to keep them fresh. I think all the reenactors on site are volunteers. They also had several log dugout canoes to paddle in, and the boys wanted to go in one. I regretted it, it didn’t feel very stable and I was not keen on getting wet even if we’d left our phones on shore (look I was wearing my nice linen top okay). Betameche was more worried about all the campfires in the early sections, that the smoke might bother his lungs.

The Roman area was very large, like it’s half the park. We had lunch at the taverna, which sold the food cafeteria style. We all coincidentally got hummus broodjes, and they were very good. Then after strolling a bit, we went to the first presentation on the park’s schedule: a Roman legionnaire demonstration.

After the demonstration, we went over to the bathhouse next door. For some reason I didn’t take any pictures, even though it was really nice to see a non-ruined bathhouse after having seen several ruined ones in Trier. Although the feeling of being in a theme park never left me while I was here; even if the buildings were accurate, I didn’t feel like I was in a town of any kind at any point. I always felt like I was in a display, and that meant that even being inside buildings didn’t bring me a sense of time travel like I was hoping.

They have a workshop where they are partially restoring a real Roman river barge. As in, they’re using all the original that they have found, and then adding new parts to show the completed form.

They have a small forum/market and an ‘army camp’, where the legionary re-enactors whom we had just seen were showing their equipment and more besides. We had a nice chat with a couple of guys who showed us some ballistas, explained how they work, what kind of ammunition they had, and so on. They also had the shields just in the middle of camp so you could pick them up and try them. They’re heavy. But you also carry them vertically, so you don’t really need to lift them.

Then we wandered over to the ‘residential’ area, which was two adjacent houses like a duplex townhouse, one for a potter and one for a weaver, and there was a lady hanging out there who showed us how to play some Roman board games. They were like variations on tic-tac-toe, but more complicated. I declined to play because I know the guys are a little bit competitive, and I’m not into PVP. So I hung out and enjoyed the atmosphere while they gamed against each other. There was also a dice tower (D&D nerds are not the inventors of this, news to me), and a marble ‘race’ game, like an ancient arcade game.

During this time, there was a bit in the forum where smaller children could ‘sign up for the army’. It reminded me of a time at Fort Henry in Ontario where my parents encouraged my brother and me to participate, and my brother was so small (seriously, back when he was knee-high to an ant as the saying goes) he thought that my parents were really actually packing him off to go join the army and he was very sad – but he was determined to go through with it if that was what they wanted. So he was a bit surprised at the end when they handed him a certificate of participation and then said “you can go back to your parents now”. (Really it was just an opportunity to have small children put on replica British redcoat jackets and march around in July weather for a bit.) So this seemed about the same, I heard the centurion teaching the kids how to scream a warcry which was hilarious. They also got cardboard legionary helmets to wear.

This was partly killing time while we waited for the next scheduled event, a ceremony at the Temple. This was great, all in Dutch but with Tharash and Betameche standing on each side of me I got the gist of it. There was an assistant, who explained procedures, and then the actual priestess emerged from the temple with great flair and drama. “Begone, heathens!!” “No, no, they are here for the ceremony.” “…okay then, they can stay.” And we all had to say “Ave” in chorus.

The ceremony was to present ‘offerings’ to Nehalennia, whom you may remember from my blog post about Leiden a couple years ago as she’s featured in the Museum of Antiquities. So they asked for sacrifices from the audience, which they could forage from the garden, but not to take too much because they had to keep doing these ceremonies, you know, tomorrow and all summer. So a lot of people put in leaves, a feather, Tharash put in an acorn, one little girl put in a tortilla chip which the priestess found very odd.

The priestess took the bowl of offerings and walked to the sacred flame. “Ohhhhh Nehalennia, please accept this offering!!!” [takes single leaf from bowl, puts it in the flame] “Ohhhhh Nehalennia, please accept this offering!!!” [takes feather from bowl, puts it in the flame]

The assistant: “This should probably be sped up, a lot of our guests are hoping to go see oiled-up men at the arena shortly.”

The priestess: “…Ohhhhh Nehalennia, please accept these offerings!!!” [dumps the entire bowl into the flame at once]

The assistant: “Did she accept them?”

The priestess: [looks around, squints at the flame, then at the sky] “No. The goddess is overstimulated.”

Then, yes it was time for oiled-up men at the arena, because there was a gladiatorial match scheduled. This part was a bit overstimulating for me, they had divided the crowd into two halves and each side got a cheerleader with the name of a gladiator written on a board, trying to rile up their side to support their guy. Our cheerleader was a cute girl with dyed red hair and she could do backflips. At one point she went and stole the other guy’s board and ran away with it. It was very silly. And very noisy with all the cheering. And two people in the little hut on the side banging on drums with all their might (one of them was the lady who taught us how to play the boardgames).

The opening ceremonies featured all the kids who signed up to be Roman legionaries marching in, followed by a super-‘drunk’ official (who had been the announcer at the first show!). He made a few jokes about how he liked his fights like he liked his wine, but I forget the punchline. Also none of the fighters were actually covered in oil, I was disappointed.

The first fight was the warm-up; it was between a ‘Briton’ – a woman in basically a fur bikini with blue facepaint, and they spoke English to her because she’s from ‘Britannia’ – and a guy in very puffy armour and a helmet with a giant plume that he didn’t actually use. It was a very clumsy fight, I think on purpose.

The second fight was the one with the guys we had been conditioned to cheer for, and it was actually pretty well choreographed, using different weapons, being creative, actually looking like they knew what they were doing. Our guy got a wound on his chest, I think they had some red dye hidden up the armour sleeve, but in the second round our guy won. I guessed that would be the narrative after he got ‘cut’.

When the battle was done, they all went outside the arena so you could chat with them. But we headed over to the Viking area and played around with the hand-pulled ferry and the kids’ water hopscotch, since all the kids were over in the Roman playground now, and there was a small fries stand so we got some fries. Unfortunately the picnic table was under a blackberry bush and Tharash sat on a blackberry by accident.

The next area was a medieval town, and we were there just in time to see a piper still performing, and the young folks who we’d seen earlier were dancing to it. But already everything was getting packed up. It was only like 4 in the afternoon, but it felt like after the gladiator show, the whole park just died, even though technically everything is still open until 6. The town had a bunch of animals, and you could still look at the outsides of the buildings, but they were taking down the archery range.

Okay we still had time to go inside the rich pottery merchant’s house. But there was also a baker, and a carpenter, and a weaver, and I think a smith, and a barber/surgeon, and they were all closed.

But I still wanted a pancake from the ‘monastery’, so we headed over and got a ‘boerenjongen’ (farmer boy – raisins and rum) pancake (and whipped cream). There was some miscommunication between us on how to serve/divide/eat the pancake; for one thing, Betameche doesn’t consume alcohol. But eventually the pancake was eaten. Singular pancake, it was like 12″ across and quite thin – but not a crepe.

By that point it was an hour later than we had intended to be home, so instead of getting Indonesian take-out, Tharash’s parents had made us all Indonesian food: chewy tofu in a peanut sauce on green beans on rice, with add-ons like ketjap, fried onions, and ground coconut. Which was about the same as Tharash had intended to get from the restaurant, and since we were late and his parents had already eaten, it just meant we weren’t squished five to their little dining table. He’d just hoped to save them an evening of cooking. It was really good, though.

Then we took Betameche up to Tharash’s bedroom where he’d be staying the night, showed him some Honkai Star Rail (because I had a big Argenti keychain and had been telling him about it earlier) (I can no longer recommend HSR as a good experience, Amphoreus story arc is some of the worst video-game writing I’ve ever watched (not played, there’s very little gameplay involved in the main story anymore). Sunday’s interminable yapping was only a foreshadowing of things to come.). And then we planned what we were going to do on the next and last day.

Next – Haarlem