The Netherlands - Day 3

We arrived without incident at Broekhuizenvorst, The Netherland around 9:00 p.m. on Friday. The flight was a short 1:10 minutes from Edinburgh to Amsterdam and the drive to our vacation home took about 2 hours. We are located south east of Amsterdam and are only about 10 kilometres from the German border. We stopped at a nice restaurant on the way to Broekhuizenvorst, and the meal was blog worthy, as three of us had a sweet and sour schnitzel with lots of fresh vegetables, while Kate ordered plain penne with cheese. Kate’s large plate of noodles came lathered in tomato sauce with cheese and to our amazement she made a pretty good dent in it despite her vegetable phobia.

Our house is really nice with high ceiling, modern furnishings, lots of nice art on the walls, well equipped kitchen and good fast internet. The village of Broekhuizenvorst is small and quaint. It seems everybody rides bikes everywhere. All the roads either have bike lanes painted on them or a separate paved bike trail running parallel to the road. In the countryside, most narrow roads have a bike path designated on both sides of the road, and the cars share a middle lane, pulling over when they meet another car.

On Saturday we went for a drive and ended up quite by accident at a small town of Arcen. We saw a huge parking lot filled with cars so we decided to see what was going on. The parking attendant said it was a “Koi Show”, but still not really knowing what we were going to see, paid our 66 Euro entry fee. It turned out to be a “Koi Show,” the Japanese Carp that you see in garden ponds. There were thousands of people there, hundreds of portable tanks for displaying the Koi, a group of judges picking out the red ribbon Koi and hundreds of booths where anything you could ever want or need to raise Koi was sold. We found out later the event is the world’s largest Koi Show and has been running for 17 years and last 3 days. There was also a large display of Japanese Bonsai (miniature trees). This location was chosen as it Arcen has a large park called Kasteeltuinen with some really nice Japanese Gardens. Who would have ever thought that you could have a tradeshow focused on goldfish?

On Sunday, we decided to venture to Cologne, Germany which is located about one hour’s drive away. Cologne is famous for its Cathedral which was started to be built in the 1200’s. It is a huge cathedral with high vaulted ceilings. Being Sunday, church services were on, so we couldn’t tour the cathedral and had to be content with a quick look from the back. I remember in Argentina the church service never prevented us touring the cathedral there.

Another recommended stop was The Memorial Gestapo Prison in the EL DE Building. It was a fairly small prison, but is one of the best preserved detention centres from the Nazi Period. The small prison cells are all covered with inscriptions that had been carved into the walls by the prisoners that occupied them. Although primarily an “interrogation” prison used to find those disloyal to the Nazis, near the end of the war many executions were also carried out at the prison. They also have a good display on the rise of National Socialism in the city of Cologne.

We had lunch in the one of the many cafes that line the pedestrian only streets. Of note again is that we ordered a wiener for Kate, thinking it was a hot dog, but it turned out to Schnitzel, which to our surprise she ate. We were able to convince her to eat it because of next promised stop was the Chocolate Museum. A museum focused solely the making of Chocolate. Kate and Chris were in heaven. We made it out of the museum shop with only a few bars, and then made our way home.

A quiet week planned – a trip into Amsterdam, maybe one into Belgium and maybe a bike ride or two like the natives.

Cheers for now

Ian

The Netherlands - Day 3