Beautiful Women

Cabin 275 - Het Land van Bartje - Ees - Drenthe - The Netherlands

Crocus vakantie. Oh, what a beautiful thing. No one likes February. Everything is boring in Feburary. Christmas is over, and spring isn't coming, and isn't coming, and isn't coming. School isn't over yet, it isn't even almost over. Everything is just so: bleh, normal, boring, gray. And then, then comes... the crocus vacation. A week in February with no school. Heaven. We'd been planning our vacation from last week for a while. It started out with Milja, me, Anita, and Isabel- Anita's daughter, and then we decided to Adrienne (14) and Joleen (9) to come too. Then we had to decide where to go.

The Netherlands is really tiny, which is why it's still so suprising to me that if you drive for an hour, the landscape is different, the weather is different, and the people speak a different dialect of Dutch. For our vacation we ended up two and half hours away from Akersloot; in Drenthe. Drenthe is a province of the Netherlands in the most northern part, next to Friesland (where they speak Fries... no one can understand it!). The landscape is a lot the same as here, but there's less cars, people, buildings, and cities. Almost everything is farm land, and the houses are white stone cottages with thatched roofs. The older houses are built attached to the barn's or "kop, hals, romp" (head, neck, butt) like Milja had learned at school. There's the house, an area between, and then the barn- all built together.

This is starting to sound a little bit like we drove right into the wilderness and spent a week living with the cows and the sheep. That's not really how it was... with six people we stayed in an eight person house. There were two bathrooms, a bathtub, a tanning bed, a sauna, and four two person bedrooms. So, we weren't sleeping in a barn stall or anything.

We left for Drenthe on Monday afternoon and drove straight to The Land van Bartje (the park where we stayed).

Every morning we slept in, showered, and ate a long slow breakfast. By the time we were out the door it was usually noon or so. We'd do something in the area, or drive a little ways, and then come back and cook dinner. One of our afternoons was spent walking in the woods, another one grocery shopping, and playing games. One afternoon we drove around the entire area looking at "hunnebedden" these piles of rocks (to put it eloquently) where people were buried under during the ice age. I'm trying hard here, but I can't work up all that much enthusiasm for the hunnebedden. The first stop was interesting, but after a few stops I'd pretty much had it.

Though, in defense from the hunnen (who made the hunnebedden), I have to say that it was probably pretty hard work to pile all those rocks on top of each other. And they are an improtant part of Dutch history. So, I suppose I'm glad I got to see them.

The day after we went to the hunnebedden, we drove to a seal nursery about 40 minutes away. A woman started the seal nursery from her house with just a few seals, and it's grown into something huge. People from all over the Netherlands call this nursery if they find a sick or injured seal and then the volunteers come get them. The seals go through all of these different phases of rehabilitation, and once they're healed they get released back into the wild. Seals are much cuter and more exciting than hunnebedden. The ones outside in the water, that were going to be realeased soon were super active. They made noise, and rolled around, and played with each other a ton. After we spent a little bit of time by the seals we drove back to our "Drenthe huis" through a big city called Groninge. In the fall I ran a four mile race there, but I didn't get to see very much of the city or anything. This time we walked through the centrum and went in a few of the stores. We drove back home in the dark, and everyone collapsed on the couch.

On Friday we started the drive back to North Holland, but we made a few stops along the way. Our route was through Friesland, so I can check another province of The Netherlands off my list. The first stop was a town called Sneek, where we drank coffee and Anita bought a ton of things to hang up in the garden of our school. The next stop was much longer, and that was at a planetarium in a small town. The man who lived there had built a working model of the solar system in the 1600's. Don't expect an explanation of how he did it, but the earth, the sun, the moon, and all of the planets rotated around each other at the same speed that they actually do. It was a sort of huge clock made out of 10,000 rotating pegs. There was a weight hanging from a pendulum, and the weight made the pegs move and everything else with them. There were clocks that showed the date, the time, which star sign it is now, and the year. There I was in Friesland- looking at our entire solar system!

After we left the planetarium we made another very short stop by the afsluitdijk. It's a dike that separates the North Sea from the Ijsselmeer. The road is 32 km long, and that's all it is. The road, on water on both sides. We got out of the car for about 30 seconds, took a picture, and then got back in. The wind here is nothing to laugh about!

There you have it. A week of vacation in Drenthe, the Netherlands. Now when I read about the things we went to see, it doesn't sound like that much, but it was vacation, and what made it vacation wasn't running around all day long seeing even more hunnebedden, and museums, and who knows what. What made it vacation was being able to sleep in until 8:00, and sitting at the breakfast table for two hours. It was playing games when it rained outside, putting on mud masks, drinking cappucinos, sitting in the bathtub and the sauna, watching the younger girls get incredibly hyper from all the candy they ate, and baking chocolate chip cookies in the microwave. Vacation can't get much better than that.

FYI

For everyone who has just been dying to know.... I passed the Dutch test! 78 out of 83 points, so it wasn't as much of a problem as I thought is was going to be. Whew! I'm so happy that's out of the way. Not that there's any real consequences for not passing the test, but like I said before: I would have been SO embarrassed.


Since it's almost next weekend, I think it's about time to write about last weekend. Friday night was another non-fitness night for Milja. When I first got here, she told me right away how she likes to go the the fitness center every Friday after work. Well, that hasn't happened in about two months. T'here's always SOMETHING, and even though I won't take the blame for every Friday she didn't get to work out, I do have to say I'm probably responsible for the majority of them. I had worked out earlier in the day, so by the time Milja came home I was completely showered and ready to go watch salsa dancing in Amsterdam. Anita loves things like salsa dancing and concerts, so we all (Milja and me, Anita and Isabel, and Anita's friend and her daughter) got tickets to go watch some salsa dancer in a theater on the Leidseplein (sp?). Basically the only place's I've really been in Amsterdam are the Dam, where the main shopping street is close to, and the Red Light District. The two most important places, right? I'd never been to the Leidseplein before, and I don't know if it's just a really different part of Amsterdam, or if everything changes at night, but I had another one of those "I'm SO in Europe right now" moments. There were lights all through the streets, and all of the restaurants and cafes were full of people. It's hard to explain; there's not just one thing you can point out that makes it feel so Europy (yes, I just made that word up), it's more of a feeling. And the feeling was definitely there. Before we went to the theater we ate at a Mexican restuarant. I was a little bit surprised at how many English speaking people there were walking through the streets, and ordering food in English. I guess not all of the tourists that come to the Netherlands come to Akersloot where I can see them.

After eating we walked to the theater and went in right in time to sit at the last of three tables. Other than that it was standing room. At first we thought we were really smart for coming so early and getting a table, but as soon as the theatre started to fill up we realized that we had to stand up anyway, or we wouldn't be able to see anything. Once the dancers started, though, I forgot that I was standing up, because watching them was so interesting. The group was about five girls and three guys. A few of the girls could speak enough Dutch to tell the crowd what was going on, but all of the songs were in Spanish. The beat to salsa music is so fun to listen to- you don't get bored at all. And watching them dance is amazing. When they first walked into the theater the girls just looked like normal people, and after they started dancing they were incredibly beautiful. Their dancing has inspired me to be a salsa dancer in my next life- since we all know it's definitely not going to work out in this one. My favorite song? First, the one about bon-bons, because everyone likes chocolate (I take mine liquor free though) and second, the song about going on a diet. They sang about all of the amazing Dutch foods that make them fat when they come here, and how they always say that they're going to start on a diet... tomorrow.


Saturday was a quiet day. I slept in, went to the fitness center, did a little bit of homework, and grocery shopped with Milja. For dinner we ate fish by Opa, and everyone was in bed early. On Sunday, Milja, Peter, and I drove to Haarlem to do a walking tour of the "hofjes." Haarlem is another big city about half an hour away from us with the car- in the same directino as Amsterdam. "Hofjes" are houses from the olden days that are all really small and built around a type of courtyard. I did learn a little bit more about the "hofjes" than that, but I don't want to explain it innacurately, so I just won't try at all. When we first got to Haarlem in the morning it was all misty outside, and there was no one on the streets at all. Everything was so quiet and pretty, and we looked at the houses on the canals, and all of the hofjes. The "I'm SO in Europe right now" feeling came back again for the second time in the weekend. We took a break about halfway through the morning and sat in a cafe, then kept going on the route. The streets got a little bit busier as we went along, and before we went back at the end of the day we went in a few of the stores that were just starting to open. In the afternoon we watched Taiana play handball and Opa came and ate dinner with us.

Another important thing this week: I finally started running with TDR again. The physical therapist wrote a two week program for me, so I get to go to the practices, but not do all of the same things that the rest of the girls on the team are doing. I don't feel like I'm doin very much; the training plan involves lots of slow repeats and lots of resting, but I guess it's important to start slow. Mostly I'm just happy not to be spending my Tuesday and Thursday nights on the stationary bike anymore. Or worse- in front of the t.v. Hopefully it won't take too long to get back in shape, and I'll stay healed and inury free!

A Few Moments...

Strange Things

It doesn't feel that long ago that I walked out of security in the Amsterdam airport, went home with some strangers to their strange house, in a strange town, in a strange country. I ate some strange food, heard a strange language, went to a strange school, talked to strange kids.

Slowly it became a little bit less strange. The strangers became my family, the strange house became a home where I lie on the couch and leave my clothes on the floor. The strange city became a place where I wave to people, the strange country became a place I don't want to leave. I cook the strange food, the strange language rolls off my tongue, I find my way through the strange school, and the strange kids want to come to Wisconsin someday.

And just after the strange things all stopped being so strange, and I started getting used to them not being strange, I realized that ten months was halfway over.

There's a pink piece of tagboard hanging on the kitchen door with things I still want to do here. Lots of people have written things on the list, and it's getting so full it's going to be a strain to get even half of them done. I want to do all of the things on the list, and much more than that. Also though, I just want to be here. The things on the list are all fun Dutch things to do, but most of the things that are the best for me here aren't the things that you think of when you think of the Netherlands, they're just... "life things" and people, like sitting for an hour after dinner and talking, biking to school in the rain, grocery shopping in the tiny grocery store, candles on at night, drinking tea.

But then I miss the "life" things at home too, and the people. There's a million little things a day that make me think of home, the most random things bring this wave of memories over the tiniest, most unimportant "life" things that aren't a part of my life here. The other day I missed the Cosmopolitan magazine I always used to get in the mail so much. And eating out a few weekends ago made me think of my mom and how when we were little she always used to tell stories about what was going on in the kitchen while we were waiting for our food to come. The sound of bike wheels on the pavement still says "Dad" to me and the youngest kids in school with their gameboys and tough swagger are so Joakim. I see my friends in everything too, and even things that remind me of people I didn't even realized I missed.

Strange things that aren't strange anymore, "life things" I'm going to miss, "life things" I do miss. There's no way to describe everything going on my head. How incredibly happy I'm going to be to go home again... and how incredibly sad I'm going to be to leave.
Deciding to come here was the best decision I've ever made in my life.