Libelle Zomer Week: China Town May 2012 by Car­rie Lynn Salikin (aka Elfie Von Elf)

On May 13th, 2012 I had the priv­iledge of head­ing out to the Libelle Zomer week with a few friends – sev­eral of them being from our lovely Inter­na­tional Almere group. This was my first Libelle Zomer week and I was really look­ing for­ward to it. I had heard from var­i­ous sources that this was quite the event. In all hon­esty I wasn’t let down and had one heck of an amaz­ing time.

Where to start? I was expect­ing wall to wall peo­ple with lit­tle to no abil­ity to get to the stands, but to my sur­prise even with the large groups of peo­ple, every­one just sort of went with the flow and gave a great deal of respect to one another. Was it because we all had the same moti­va­tion? Was it because it was the last day of the event? Regard­less of the rea­sons – check­ing out the vast selec­tion of stands was not exhaust­ing or impos­si­ble. Truly this was a pleas­ant experience.

Be warned – bring your wal­lets. Even if you have no inten­tion of spend­ing money – oh how you will. There is some­thing there for every­one and truly some amaz­ing deals were found. Sev­eral stands sold qual­ity sur­prise bags. There were stores I knew quite well and a lot of new prod­ucts and stores were brought to my attention.

Trans­porta­tion to the event was also quite well orga­nized; from trains to busses to more than ade­quate park­ing, at what we con­sid­ered a rea­son­able fee of 6.50 euros per day.

The event itself was tidy; no over­flow­ing garbage cans or trash on the ground. Bath­room facil­i­ties were more than plenty and also very clean for an out­door event. My only minor com­plaint: the food selec­tion was quite lim­ited. I had come with an expec­ta­tion of try­ing var­i­ous asian cui­sine due to the signs posted every­where “China Town”. How­ever this was not the case. In the begin­ning we passed one loem­pia stand and a soup stand and for the rest of the time we came upon sev­eral La Place restau­rants serv­ing plenty of sand­wiches. But for the cost of a sand­wich I can rec­om­mend: pack your own.

Thank­fully later on in sec­tion 3 we found our­selves plenty of sam­ple food stands (the only time in the event things got a lit­tle chaotic, per­haps we were all crazed with hunger by this point). But once we had our fill of var­i­ous food sam­ples from rice, to chicken to sal­ads with dress­ings, potato chips, ras­patat etc., we were more than happy to con­tinue on our way.

Alco­hol sam­ples seemed to be a large part of the theme, but a lot of vari­ety and amaz­ing deals. My hus­band found him­self rather taken with the choco­late wine and could not help but pick up a bottle.

Will I return again? I can say with­out a doubt: yes! Our group of friends eas­ily found each other time and time again when we went our own ways.

For more infor­ma­tion on the Libelle Zomer Week “China Town” please vist the fol­low­ing web­site: http://www.libellezomerweek.nl/

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