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01 Logbook of a century
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We started going on holidays when my husband retired as well. To Lourdes and to Switzerland, and to the Küssnacht lake, where Queen Astrid came to grief. In those days the association of old age pensioners started organizing daytrips; we went by bus to Paris and we'd see the Seine, the Eiffel tower and the Montmartre, and we saw all of that in one day. But you did have to leave at 4am, then.
(Mathilde Coeckelbergs, ° 7 June 1899)
Yes, we wanted to take the last train to Ghent, but we missed it. (...) And so we stayed there all night long on a bench until the first train to Ghent left again. And we went to visit family there for a couple of days, and we stayed for the night here and there. And that was our honeymoon!
(Anna Huyberecht, ° 13 July 1899)
Honeymoons did not exist. I have never been on a trip in my entire life. The furthest I ever went to was Scherpenheuvel. With my mother, by train.
(Nel Lambregts, ° 12 October 1898)
The trip lasted three months. First we went to Shanghai by boat, and then with the fashionable Train Bleu to Peking. The Belgians were very popular in that train, because they had constructed the tracks. (...) From Peking we would take a train of lesser qualité to Chinese Mongolia, and then a six day journey through the desert was waiting for us. Our luggage was on a small tilt-cart, and we were walking on foot, next to the cart. (...) While en route we would sleep on the barren soil. We rolled up in a duvet, and lied down in the desert sand.
(Sister Marie Willemsen, ° 7 March 1900)
When did you go to the sea for the first time?
That was when I was eleven, in the year seven, in other words. And of course I played in the sand there, but we also went into the sea itself! First we hired bathing suits, they were all red and white striped suits, the same for everybody. And then you had to rent one of those wooden cabins on wheels, they put a horse in front of the cabin, and then they rode the cabin in to the sea. There were cabins of five franks, ten franks and twenty franks. The one of five franks only had a board to sit on and a couple of nails to hang up your clothes. The one of twenty franks was the most luxurious one, it had a mirror as well, and a curtain in fine lace. When we'd only just got into the sea, you'd open the door and then you had one of those small ladders with five or six rungs. The adults would just step into the sea like that, and they would be in the water until their waist. I went down that ladder as well, but all of a sudden the water came till my neck! I got so scared there, whoopsy-daisy, because I didn't know how to swim! It took years before I dared going into the water again. Yes, the sea, it gave me a bad souvenir!
(Elza Tersago, ° 12 August 1896)
| Elza | |||