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.)