2023-09-30 11:35:43
The church is no longer a church, and Robin Hagedoorn was never a preacher, but as he sits there at one of the long tables in the converted nave, he already has something of the good soul of the congregation. He hasn’t said a word yet about his wondrous hotel, where guests float up in a glass elevator next to the old organ; the world’s problems are already on the table: smoldering wars, rising temperatures, the injustice he’s currently witnessing that screams to the heavens again in San Francisco, where the tents are getting closer and closer to Union Square and cheaper and cheaper drugs are killing faster and faster. But here, at the restaurant tables in the light of the colored arched windows, people come together: the bank manager sits next to the homeless man, and the cleaning staff joins the hotel guests after their work with an à la carte breakfast – actually sad, how much that affects you stirs.
The world is out of balance, it’s hard to ignore that. If you ask for a solution, a word has been mentioned for years that is losing value faster than the euro in times of persistent inflation: sustainability. Everyone now wants to be sustainable, ecologically and socially: governments, companies, cities. “A sustainable visit to Utrecht,” is how the Dutch tourism office advertises a trip to “one of the greenest cities in the country.” Is this just the sales strategy of a city vying for attention in the shadow of Amsterdam? Or can we learn something from this city of 370,000 people in the center of the Netherlands and maybe really have something like a sustainable vacation there, not far from our border?
#Sustainable #vacation #Dutch #city #Utrecht