Going home

Ater a great six weeks in Holland, Italy and Scotland, it is also nice to go home again.

Houston, here we come!

 

 

Eating out of the wall

A trip to Holland wouldn't be complete without a visit to FEBO (Dutch fast food). In Holland we call this 'uit de muur eten', the literal translation would be, eating out of the wall.

Let me try to explain to those who have never experienced this. In the wall there are little windows with different kind of foods behind it. You put your money in the slot and then open your preferred window. The machines are filled with typical dutch snacks such as kroket (meat croquettes with different fillings), kaassoufflé or frikandel (a kind of sausage). Needless to say, not the most healthy option but nice anyway.

Cheese farm

As I said before, this summer we are trying to show the girls some typical Dutch sights. Now what could be more Dutch than seeing how cheese is made. So off we went to the 'Clara Maria' cheese farm in Bovenkerk.

Floortje got right in there and helped out the french (!!!) cheese makers.

Well done Floor, these cheeses should keep the farmer going for a while :)

We couldn't skip a visit to cows.

And we had to take the typical tourist picture!

Out on the boat

On probably the nicest day we have had this summer in Holland we were out on the boat. It was such a beautiful evening and we went out on the Westeinder Plassen and the Ringvaart.

Our peaceful trip was somewhat disrupted by the KLM!

After a nice sate and beer we headed back for the harbor, what a great evening!!!

 

 

Amsterdam Arena

Last year opa took the girls on a trip to the circus. He enjoyed that very much so he intends to make this a tradition. This year a trip to the Amsterdam Arena, home of our favorite football club Ajax, was on the agenda. Oma and mum were not allowed to come along!

 

Floortje in the press conference chair of Frank de Boer (Ajax head coach)

Amsterdam Boat Tour

'When in Rome, do as the Romans do'

I guess the above does not really apply to us this summer as I am trying to show the girls some typical Dutch things. However these are not the things locals do but the stuff tourists go and see when they come to Holland like Madurodam, Amsterdam, the flower auction and a cheese farm (more about that later).

One sunny Sunday afternoon we decided on a canal tour of Amsterdam. The last part of our journey to the city was done by train. Parking in Amsterdam is ridiculously expensive so this was a great alternative and the girls loved it!

 

Just outside Central Station, we boarded one of the canal boats that took us on a tour of of Amsterdam on the water. Amsterdam has more than 100 km of canals and over 1500 bridges! The main canals are Prinsengracht, Herengracht, Keizersgracht and - my grandma taught me how to remember the order: Piet Koopt Hoge Schoenen :)

Some impressions:

Bikes on every bridge

Don't forget to look up! Beautiful façades on all the houses.

The houses above are called the 'dancing houses'. Notice how they are not very straight anymore.... Most of the houses are small, tall and deep. The reason for this being is that the owner used to be taxed on the width of the house!

Hard to see, but you are actually looking through about six bridges here.

Of course a trip to Amsterdam wouldn't be complete without a visit to one of the many terraces - or as we say in Holland 'even een tarrasje pakken!'

 

 

Floortje, Norah & Pep

 

 

Aalsmeer flower auction

As Opa & Oma live in Aalsmeer a visit to the flower auction was well over due. And not just any auction! This is the largest flower auction in the world. The auction building is the 5th largest building in the world, in terms of floor space. The turnover in 2011 was almost 1.1 billion euros.

The auction is set up as a Dutch auction in which the price starts high and works its way down. Bidders get only a few seconds to bid on the flowers before they are shipped off to the new owner's business.

Some facts:

 

And just for your information, the most popular flowers in 2011 :)

Marc & Famke

Not the best quality picture but love it so much I wanted to post anyway :)

Hunebedden in Drenthe

One of the most typical things in the province Drenthe (this is where poezeoma lives) are the 'hunebedden'. So on a not so sunny Sunday morning we visited two of these very old monuments.

Some history from the website www.hunebedden.nl

Everyone has heard of Stonehenge in England and dolmens and menhirs in France. But who knows of even older and more numerous megalithes in The Netherlands? They are there for over 5000 years. Older than the Egyptian pyramids! Built of huge granite stones, some of them weighing over 25,000 kilograms, dragged to the spot and piled up to form a rectangular stonegrave.

There are still 54 of them. 52 in the province of Drenthe and 2 in the adjacent province of Groningen. "Hunebedden" as they are called in this country. But not built by Hunen (or huynen = giants) and not beds but graves as we know now. So Drenthe, in the northern part of the country, is the hunebedden-province. It's a province of outstanding beauty with sanddunes, woods, moors, heather, picturesque villages, 200 years old farmhouses with thatched roofs. And mysterious stonegraves..!

In Drenthe there are no mountains or rocks. But hunebedden are made of huge stones. Where did they come from..? The answer is: from Scandinavia. About 200,000 years ago, during an ice-period, most of northern Europe including our country was covered by a thick layer of ice. The big boulders of which the hunebedden are made of have been transported to The Netherlands by slow moving ice-glaciers. Even today, digging in Drenthe's soil, smaller and bigger stones emerge.

About 4000 BC the hunters that visited Drenthe before, changed their culture and lifestyle radically. They learned to grow wheat, to domesticate cattle and to build farmhouses. They settled here as the first farmers in the region. Archaeologists call this period the Neolithics or New Stone Age. This did not happen only here but also in the south of Sweden, in Denmark and the northwest of Germany. These farmers cut the woods with stone axes and cultivated the arable land. About 3450 BC they started building huge stonegraves using the big boulders that were scattered all over the place. They also made all sorts of earthenware, many of them in the form of a funnel. Because of that archaeologists say this people belong to The Funnel Beaker Culture.

 

Sheep

While visiting poezeoma, the weather was nice enough for a bike ride. On our (a bit longer than planned) ride we came across this herd of sheep, their dog and shepherd.

We stopped to pet the dog and talk to the shepherd. To our surprise he told us the herd consisted of 200 sheep! He told us that Jim, the dog, was able to keep track of up to 500 sheep!

The sheep help to maintain the local landscape (read living lawnmowers) and also to spread the different species of plants.