Advertisement
Published: October 24th 2008
Edit Blog Post
Fred & Alie
Daniel's Uncle and Auntie from Zwolle, Holland Hi all,
Today's update will have to be in two parts as Daniel and I have been living seperate lives for the past week 😞 But now we're back together again - yah!
MONIQUE'S WEEK
My week was rather dull and boring I'm afraid. After coming back from Holland I spent 3 days and 2 nights in London on a course. The first day was an induction course (even though I've been here for over a month) and the other 2 days were an audit course. At the audit course I managed to somehow befriend an Asian lady who is over from China for a secondment for 1 year. She didn't really speak English, so that made dinner, breakfast, lunch, dinner, breakfast, lunch, and the train-ride conversations interesting! I had to draw the line at her suggestion of leaving my own hotel room to share a room with her!
Anyway, after the course I met up with some girls from work and we went to see the show 'Eurobeat'. Apparently it is a take off of a popular talent quest show called Eurovision, where European countries compete in singing and dancing acts. Anyway, it was a great laugh,
Biking with Oom Fred
He's the one in the red pants. Watch out for all the bikers! and even though I didn't get all the jokes (because of my lack of time living in this country and having never seen the actual TV show) it was still lots of fun. We each got allocated a country when we came in, I was the UK (totally picked randomly!), and I even got a UK flag to wave around. 10 different countries did mock acts, from horrible dance routines with no singing, to guys stipping off to little bright lepodard things, to a mock of the back street boys and everything in between. It was heaps of fun, and for our bargin £10 tickets we even got seats right near the front stage. The people that introduced the acts were funny and even mocked people in the audience during the show who came back to their seats part way through the show after using the toilets! At the end of the performances you got to vote using your cellphones, and the points were announced from each competing country with a mock of a person actually being in that country, i.e. the Irish at a pub talking really, really fast, the lady from Iceland wearing her animal fur hat (the
The Spanish Ladies
...from the horse festival in Vianen presenters asked for their money back (since a major bank in Iceland has recently been holding all the UK savings funds in suspense)), and the Russians, with gun fire in the background being told to pretend it's fireworks! Yip, lots of fun. In case you're wondering, the Swedish Backstreet Boys take-off won the show that night, followed by the UK.
In the weekend I did lots of shopping. Bought some new outfits, even a new dress for Nathanael and Rebecca's wedding in March (super organised). Also went back to the mega craft store in Woking and bought a few more things.
The rest of the week was work. Even now, I am writing this from work! It's 10am and I doubt I will have any work to do for the day. There are quite a few people sitting here with no work to do, so at least I'm not the only one. I have to say though, this is the most easy, cruzy job I have ever had! I think I'm going to be in for a big shock when I get back home!
DANIEL'S WEEK
Hi all. Monique told me that I have to write a
The Spanish Men
...from the horse festival in Vianen blog entry about my time in the Netherlands.
Most of my time in Holland I spent visiting family. I started with Tante Alie and Oom Fred in Zwolle. I got to eat food, drink wine and look at old photos of my Dad. Later on in the day Oom Fred and I went on a bike ride on real Dutch bikes around Zwolle. We cruised along dykes and down cobble stoned streets. Quite nice really. Holland is fantastic for biking as there are dedicated cycle tracks everywhere complete with bridges and tunnels under roads and you don’t feel like you are going to get mashed by cars like you do in NZ. You may however, get mashed by trillions of bikes cause there’s tons of them.
After my day in Zwolle I carried on south by train to Utrecht where my Tante Joke and Oom Teus picked me up from the train station. The next day in Vianen (where they live) the town had this horse festival. Apparently most people take the day off for this. The festival consists of markets, horse shows, ring ridding; in which teams compete on horse and cart set ups with various themes
and rides. The traditional food eaten on this day is Smoked eel, pea soup and oily balls. In the evening there was a Spanish horse and rider display.
The following day I went to Amsterdam with Uncle Teus in a Dekker van to deliver a sample board to a shop there, so I got to see some of Amsterdam. The day after that I went with Uncle Teus to The Haag to deliver some stuff at the Dekker factory/offices there. On Saturday we all went to Utrect and had a look around the city centre there. After a bit of a wander round we went on a boat cruise which went around the canals and water ways in the city. We went under a total of 25 bridges, past a floating dope cafe, past the old prison just down from the dope cafe (now drug rehabilitation centre) and also saw some Nazi gun posts from WW2. In the evening I got dropped off at Oom Johan and Tante Nancy’s to stay with them for the remainder of my time in Holland.
On the Monday Oom Johan and Tante Nancy took me out to see the Delta works in
Zeeland. The Delta works is a series of manmade islands and dams which can be opened and closed to control the water in the bay. It’s quite impressive. On our way round in Zeeland we stopped for some salted herring which is a Dutch food. It’s basically a raw fish prepared with salt. It wasn’t too bad either. Also we visited a seaside town called Vlissingen. A bit of a wander around proved a bustling town with heaps of shipping activity. We found a nice bar too and had a beer. The rest of my time in Holland was spent visiting more family and eating.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.121s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 11; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0486s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Rochelle
non-member comment
Delta Works expo
glad to see you didn't waste your money doing the Delta Works expo .... wasn't worth it!