Emmen

When we go on day trips in the Netherlands, we generally head south out of Amsterdam, along the Randstad (the corridor of cities from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, including Leiden and The Hague).

Last week Casey had a conference in Emmen, the largest city in the province of Drenthe, in the east. Casey goes out in this direction a few times a month for work, but I'd never been out there (except on trains to Germany). Tuesday I decided to visit him in Drenthe and see what I was missing.

For one thing, I was quickly reminded how small the regions are of different Dutch accents. (Just 10 minutes east of Amsterdam, people pronounce r's totally differently.) In Emmen I had a really hard time understanding people. *Really* hard. At one point I wasn't sure whether a woman was speaking Dutch or German to me, and I studied German for four years! Anyway, embarrassing language mistakes aside, Emmen was pretty mellow. And I got to see a hunebed! Hunebedden are ancient monuments made of stones left behind by glaciers retreating after the ice age. The structures date back about 5000 years and are burial chambers (Neolithic ones, at that). Today's picture is of hunebed D43: Schimmeres. It's a "long grave" and has two small burial chambers, plus a place for offerings. It's tucked away down a little path through some woods, which I never would have found without a map and good directions. As I was looking at the hunnebed, a guy biked up and said that he'd lived 500 meters away for a year and a half and never knew it was there. (Yes, I had trouble understanding him, too.)

De lente

Yes, another flower picture. "De lente" means "spring" in Dutch, and it is certainly spring now. The sun isn't setting until around 8, which makes my rowing lessons much more scenic than the first lesson (which involved about 20 minutes of rowing in the unhelpful dark).

Anyway, the picture for today was also taken at Keukenhof, on April 1st, during my mom's visit. Note the windmill, which was built in Groningen in the late 19th century and moved to Lisse several decades later. (Clicking on the photo brings you to a larger version.)

In unrelated news, we finally got the results from our Dutch exam. We both passed! My teacher said that this exam is not just for our language school, but also for a standardized national Dutch as second language evaluation. It's a nice bonus, to have an official evaluation from the government saying that I can indeed speak... a little bit of Dutch. Well, small steps. Or, I should say, kleine stappen.

Long time, no see

I've discovered the Catch-22 of blogging: when you're busy, you have no time to blog about what you're doing. Quick summary:

- Salsa lessons were fun, but we haven't signed up for the next level, because of upcoming travel.

- Our Dutch language courses were really excellent, but very time-consuming for the 6 weeks that they lasted. Class was 6 hours per week, and we were supposed to have about 6 hours of homework per week. I generally spent more like 8 hours per week on the homework, and even then, there was always something that I skimped on. Like the incredible amounts of vocabulary words assigned--my stack of flashcards topples over, and I only made cards for the first half of the course! But we definitely notice improvement in our everyday Dutch. It's easier to understand the announcements when trains are delayed or rerouted, we can read the free newspapers and entertainment magazines, and I'm even taking a rowing class that's mostly in Dutch (although the teacher does have to break into English occasionally, when it becomes painfully obvious that I'm not understanding).

- We had long weekends in Barcelona and Paris. Someday I hope to post some of those photos, because they were great trips.

Now to the present. My mother was visiting for the past week. I think it was a really excellent week: she got to see a lot of Holland, and Casey and I even managed to NOT give her the flu that we were both getting over just as she arrived.

For today I've chosen a picture that I took at Keukenhof, a garden in Lisse (the center of tulip production) that is only open for a few months out of the year: spring bulb time, and then again in late summer. (As always, click on the photo to see it large.) Keukenhof has more varieties of tulips than I ever thought possible: some were waist-high, some miniature, some looked like peonies, some almost like poinsettias... and it went on for acres and acres, with ponds and sculptures and quiet wooded areas and meadows and even a windmill overlooking a tulip farm. Most of the blooms were tulips; some were daffodils and crocuses, and there were just enough hyacinths to make breezes smell sweet. But today I'm posting crocuses, for you Bostonians and Chicagoans who are just starting to see springtime. Happy Easter!