Click here to New Years holiday pics
To celebrate the New Year, I went to a vacation cottage in Limburg. We had a festive group of 8 adults and 3 kids. Rob and I went with his parent Jan & Nettie, sister Femke with her husband Thomas and 1 ½ year Quinten, and family friends Rene and Miriam with 3 year old Rika and 4 year old Sven.
In the Netherlands, everyone has they’re own box of fireworks. No danger of wildfires in wet Dutch landscapes. We all lit sparklers, and our own cans of fireworks. Everywhere you looked you see bright fireworks lighting the sky. A local resturaunt had an elaborate display of high flying, spectacular fireworks as well.
We stayed in a 400 year old manor house. They converted the former barn into a cozy vacation cottage, and we also had some rooms in the main manor house. I stayed in a room in the main manor house, in a room with seemed like 200 year old wooden shutters and pretty view of the courtyard. The vacation house had an antique koo-koo clock that was the highlight of the kids’ hour!
On Saturday, we went in to the pretty town Maastricht. It is the most southern town of the Netherlands, and has some Belgium characteristics as well as Dutch. We visited a beautiful 600 year old church, where they burn offering candles to brighten the dim interior of the church. There were 100s of people out shopping the day before new year! We also went to a café where you could pick from about 30 kinds of chocolate to have fresh chocolate milk made from. Yummmm!! On Sunday afternoon we went for a nature walk and petting zoo with the kids.
In the evenings, we played board games and read by a warm fire. I love board games, but playing in Dutch was a new challenge! Some times, like for pictinary, I had to have the word translated before I could draw it. For another board game, we had to make exceptions for me – like all the sport questions were who won the Dutch/German soccer match of 1997, which team did some famous soccer guy play for (not Beckam unfortunately, the only Soccer player I know). We also played a Dutch kind of “shuffle board”, with a long wooden board and about 30 wooden disks to get into slots.
It was a very fun weekend!
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Happy 2007!!
2 comments:
So, I just realized something's missing from your blog. Pictures of your house! Pictures of your neighborhood! Pictures of your school! Your blog tagline claims that it will show people what it's like to "really" live in Holland. Let's see what your day-to-day life looks like!
J<
Hey Laurie, do you have a dog?
Dutch pet shop owner comes up with a brew for dogs
Associated Press
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- After a long day hunting, there's nothing like wrapping your paw around a cold bottle of beer.
So Terrie Berenden, a pet shop owner in the southern Dutch town of Zelhem, created a beer for her Weimaraners made from beef extract and malt.
"Once a year we go to Austria to hunt with our dogs, and at the end of the day we sit on the verandah and drink a beer. So we thought, my dog also has earned it," she said.
Berenden consigned a local brewery to make and bottle the nonalcoholic beer, branded as Kwispelbier. It was introduced to the market last week and advertised it as "a beer for your best friend."
"Kwispel" is the Dutch word for wagging a tail.
The beer is fit for human consumption, Berenden said. But at a bit more than $2 a bottle, it's about four times more expensive than a Heineken.
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