Today was a chance to catch up with family friends Magda and Ado. We had once visited them before in 1998 when they lived in a really cool house in Amsterdam.
In the past few years they have made a move to the North of Holland, a place called Zeewolde.
Without a car this trip would have been quite a hassle. As far as I know there is no easy transport there. Buses run throughout the area but Ado says the connections are no good. We have the car though so there was no problem for us - still it was about a 50 minute drive in the car.
Near Magda's and Ado's house (which feels like the middle of nowhere) we came across a big field of blooming tulips. We had to stop to admire. It was really hard not to pinch a few, but we did the rightey and admired with our eyes and not our fingers. There were some other people walking through the tulip rows but I didn't see them snatching any for themselves. Maybe they nabbed a bunch after we left.
In the past few years they have made a move to the North of Holland, a place called Zeewolde.
Without a car this trip would have been quite a hassle. As far as I know there is no easy transport there. Buses run throughout the area but Ado says the connections are no good. We have the car though so there was no problem for us - still it was about a 50 minute drive in the car.
Near Magda's and Ado's house (which feels like the middle of nowhere) we came across a big field of blooming tulips. We had to stop to admire. It was really hard not to pinch a few, but we did the rightey and admired with our eyes and not our fingers. There were some other people walking through the tulip rows but I didn't see them snatching any for themselves. Maybe they nabbed a bunch after we left.
From our tulip run we were soon at Magda and Ado's place. Just three years old the house is huge, really nice - but without much of a built up area and so many vast expanses of fields everywhere else I just couldn't place myself on the mental map of Holland that I have in my head.
We caught up for a while at the house and then they took us to the nearby medieval town of Hardewijk for dinner. This like so much of Holland was so nice, old and interesting. It felt odd to me that we had just been in a new development and then had driven to a medieval town further away. This oddness is because we had come from Zeewolde-Flevoland which is reclaimed land, so that's all new.
Dinner was at an Italian restaurant which was very nice. At 8pm we all had to be silent for two minutes as a remembrance for the fallen of World War II. This was another strange thing for us as we are so used to this type of remembrance being on 'Remembrance Day' - observed by the Commonwealth countries on 11 November, at 11am, and only for one minute!
Once dinner was over, we offered to pay. Ado did the classic 'No problems, I'll just go to the toilet first' trick. Of course in that time he had paid for us. Probably went to the toilet too to complete the ruse!
We are hoping to catch up again. How can I compete with that ruse - and how can you do that at McDonalds?
No comments:
Post a Comment