Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Simon's Oma's next door neighbour's sister knitted me a scarf...

Hello all,

Its been and interesting week. We caught the train from amsterdam to nunspeet (I lost my ticket and had to try to explain that to the ticket man who didn't speak english) to stay with Simon's Oma for 5 days until his dad arrived to help us organise a car and show us around the Netherlands a bit.

Oma has fed us some pretty heavy dutch food, basically carbohydrates with some stewed pears or apples thrown in. We have done a lot of riding, a lot of riding, a lot of riding. This included lots of picnics in the 'forest', which seems like a bit of messy botanical park to me, learning to ride (drive on the right) in a country where there are very few lines on the road, seeing people wearing clogs for real and farmers using actual old school scythes in the paddock (like Death in Terry Pratchett). We have explored some pretty awesome 'historical' towns thanks to the friendliness of dutch neighbours and their willingness to drive us round and buy us fish and appelbak and give us scarves from their sisters...

Since Bert arrived we have been doing lots of neccessary things like organising to hire a car, (we aren't able to buy here =( ) getting a sim card for emergency calls and finding second hand bikes to take with us. I haven't minded too much because it has rained the last two days. Today we drove from Nunspeet to Emlichheim (in Germany) and are staying the night with Simon's Aunt and Uncle. They are great, he is a chef so we are eating well! And it is nice to meet some of Simons other family seeing none of them live in Tasmania.

Well thats it, I miss you all, and I miss the drama of Australia (in the scenery and the people) but there are some awesome things here (24bottles of pilsner for 7 euro, and a quarter circle of bree for 4 euro...)

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