Recently in Harmelen/NL Category

Let's continue our trip through the history of Brain Tags at 1998, my second year of blogging.

I celebrated my birthday party in De Jeugdhof, and after cleaning the floor we forgot to close the fire hose. The next morning when we came back to finish cleaning we encountered a swimming pool instead of our cleaned floor. Oops...

I also went to Africa and visited the very interesting country of Lesotho. Of course, still being a rookie blogger I only slightly mentioned this instead of writing a post with high Google juice. Missed change indeed.

I also had the worst skin problems I remember and had to stay home for several days because my face was severely infected. I still don't know what caused it (allergy?, stress?), but fortunately it didn't return  after 1998.

Then there were of course some stories about Jong Nederland, such as kaderschouw, the Night of 16+, planning the EuroContact and the famous volleyball tournament of the Utrecht district.

You might also be interested in Looking back at 1997.

My good friend Berry started a new weblog called the Harmelense Nieuws Pagina to compensate for the lack of news about this village in the main stream media.

Clickety-click, and added to Google Reader so I stay up-to-date about what is happening in my old home town.

One more week to go until the start of our holidays. Yes, we go when everybody else already forgot about their holidays.

Our plans are simple: we are going to spend one week in the Netherlands, and two weeks in Andalusia. We've tried to visit my family before, but the flights were simply too expensive in the high season. So we decided to use part of our holidays to visit my family and our friends. As we have plenty of time, we will go up by car, saving a few bucks along the way.

After that we plan to spend some days at home to pick up our tent, and drive further down to Andalusia. In the almost five years that I live here, I haven't seen a lot of Spain besides Catalonia. Of course there is plenty to see over here, but I feel a little bit ashamed of my lack of knowledge about the other parts of this country. The two weeks we will be spend in the south will be a little start in getting to know more of Spain.

I feel good!

We just came back from a week's holiday in the Netherlands. The aim of our holiday was to relax, and we succeeded. Instead of running from one 'obligatory' visit to another, as we usually do when visiting my home country, this time we put the emphasis on what we want. This visit to the Netherlands has been touristier than any previous visit, and we loved every minute of it.

Of course the fantastic weather helped a lot; it was sunny every day so we could spend a lot of time outside in nature and on the terrace. We visited amongst others Amsterdam, Utrecht, 's-Hertogenbosch, Zeist, Amelisweerd, Lelystad, and Enkhuizen.

Now that we're back in 'real' life we are already looking forward to our next visit at Christmas time!

The main reason we went to the Netherlands last weekend was to visit our family. Finn is about a month old, so it was about time to meet him!

And babies are such a great subject for photos, so I uploaded some to Brain Pics.

Tomorrow morning I will travel to Harmelen again. It will be a short visit to see Finn, the newborn son of Esther and Terry, and of course to visit the party of the 'Vrienden van JN Harmelen'.
Until next week!

Today I will fly to the Netherlands for work. I will have some meetings with ---potential--- distributors and clients in the Netherlands and Germany. My schedule is quite full, which is a good sign for the future sales ;-).

I was always thought that the Netherlands have two languages: Dutch and Frisian. Besides these two languages, many dialects exist. Spain in contrary, has 5 languages: Castilian, Basque, Catalan, Galician and Aragonese.

Today I found out these numbers are wrong. Or not? The languages I mentioned above are the languages that have an official status in those countries, based on history and culture. The real number of languages (linguistically seen) is higher: there are 15 languages in the Netherlands, and 11 languages in Spain. So Spain, which has twelve times the size of the Netherlands has less languages ---and less water, but that is another subject--- than the Netherlands.

For the curious readers: in the Netherlands, people speak Achterhoeks, Drents, Dutch, (Western) Frisian, Gronings, Romani (Sinte), Romani (Vlax), Sallands, Stellingwerfs, Twents, Veenkoloniaals, Veluws (East), Veluws (North), Vlaams and Westerwolds. In Spain, the following languages exist: Aragonese, Asturian, Basque, Caló, Catalan-Valencian-Balear, Extremaduran, Fala, Galician, Gascon (Aranese), Quinqui and Spanish.

This is a message for every person in the world creating a form with a drop-down list to choose the country from: the country where I was born is called The Netherlands, and I expect it to appear in the list right between Nepal and Netherlands Antilles. I am not going to look at the H --- since Holland is only a part of The Netherlands ---, and neither do I expect it at the T --- if dictionaries would do the same, most entries would be found under the T!

Thanks!

Sometimes people ask me whether there are certain Dutch products I miss here in Lleida. The answer is: "No, I don't miss anything, since I am often enough in Holland to do some shoppings."

Most people can guess the most obvious items from my Dutch shopping list (Cheese & Dropjes), but there are some things which are not so obvious. Last weekend Berry and Manon told us several times that they would have brought it if they would have known it.

So for all my future visitors from Holland, here is our Dutch shopping list:

• Jonge kaas
• Dropjes (zacht zoet)
• Chicken Tonight
• Mix voor lasagne
• Cup-a-Soup Tomaat (Toscaans of Chinees geen bezwaar)
• Tijgernootjes
• Hagelslag
• Pepernoten (alleen in november en december uiteraard)
• Chocoladeletters (eveneens alleen in november en december)
• Brylcream (hier zijn ze zo modern dat ze alleen nog maar gel en wax hebben)