The police is interviewed about the shooting

Back in Alkmaar again. In this small city near Amsterdam you can find all the Dutch clichés: windmills, flowers and canals. But besides the peace and quiet, there's also an ugly side to Alkmaar. Bar fights are quite common here, especially on evenings when everybody is drinking a lot. Murder is not so common, but it happens.

My first weekend happened to be one of those weekends where everything went wrong in Alkmaar. In Stockholm I haven't seen one fight in the entire quarter. On Saturday already I saw a fight at a nearby festival and at closing time somebody almost died because of alcohol poisoning. These things don't happen every weekend, but they aren't very surprising either.

But it gets worse. Today at the trainstation, 5 minutes walking from my parents house, there was a shooting. A woman was killed on the stairs. The murderer tried to shoot himself in the head and was wounded. The entire station was barricated and trains stood still for hours. It was on the national television as well.

Before I lost my heart to advertising, I thought of becoming a journalist. The curiousity for sensation and news that is still left in me made me run directly to the trainstation to make photographs at the crime scene. As I said before, an event like murder is not so common. Alkmaar is a safe city, but sometimes things can get a little extreme. Well, so far for the peacefulness of Stockholm, I'm back in little Sin City.