Diksmuide

Went to the museum today.  Very interesting.  Would have been great if we did not have to share it with about 3 huge parties of school kids - 99% of whom were not in the least bit interested,  ran around shouting and shining torches in each others' faces, and ours - just being totally obnoxious!

The tower is 22 stories high, you go up in a lift to a window lined room at the top with a 360 degree view over the landscape.  Around the top of the room there is a panoramic painting of how that view looked during the war.  Nothing but of blasted buildings and craters.  The trenches on each side of the canal were clearly visible in the painting.  Here is a map I found elsewhere.

We also went out onto the open terrace at the top to take some photos but it was rather cold and windy, didn't stay out there too long, but took a photo of our boat down below.

From there you walk down flights of stairs to a different exhibition on each floor.  Two of the floors were reconstructions of the trenches, very dark, very low (Ian had a problem, I didn't!), one of them re-enacted the sounds of the men choking on mustard and chlorine gas, the other depicted the sleeping accommodation and living conditions for the men, sometimes as much as 40m below ground level.  They lived like this for 5 days at a time.  Horrible. 

And this is where those young hooligans were running around with torches and shouting to each other!  Hooligans!

I had no idea there were 4,500 kms of these deep trenches.

It was money well spent (€8 each).

Outside there was a reconstruction of the above ground conditions: boardwalks across the marshy land, broken carts and dead horses (no, not real ones), barrels,  sand bags, and other detritus of war.  As we walked across the board walk we heard the whistling sound of the bombs falling, the explosions (this is what we can hear from the boat) and jets of water as the bomb landed. 

How did those young men come out of that war and go back to normal life?  PTSD was unheard of in those days; no counselling; no group therapy; just go home and get on with it. So Sad.

In the afternoon we went shopping.  There is a Lidl supermarket just 300m away so we stocked up on staples like coffee, sugar, tinned tomatoes.  Not very interesting.

Opposite the Lidl there was and EcoStore - a second hand shop.  Ian was in his element!  It was huge, and on 3 levels.  Everything you could possibly imagine including a vintage motorbike, I'm guessing from about the '50s, for €650.  Thank goodness we don't have a bigger boat!  

But we did buy new covers for the bicycles, plain white, no more blue polka dots!