Nisse mail

As it turns out, -nisse is a common ending of Dutch town names, such as the village Stavenisse where Leontine's parents have a vacation home. Interestingly, 'nisse' is Danish for a certain kind of gnome (particularly associated with Christmas) and 'stave' is Danish for spelling. When we were out for a walk, Drew noticed this mailbox and was of the opinion that it had to quite the special mailbox - Leontine disagreed. In fact, she thought it a typical mailbox and through-out the rest of our little walk around the village, we noticed several mailboxes identical to this one.

Trouwen in Zeeland

The 'real' reason for our trip to Holland was or course Drew and Leontine's wedding party in Zeeland. Apart from a welcome chance to see them again this also gave us an opportunity to visit rural Holland. And yes: it's flat and there's a lot of wind mills, canals and flower fields...

Bezoek in Rotterdam

Despite not having had our summer vacation yet, we've been doing quite a bit of travelling lately. Two weeks ago, after a short stop in Copenhagen to enjoy a wonderful Laurie Anderson / Lou Reed concert in Denmark Radio's new marvellous concert hall, we flew onwards to Holland and started the weekend by exploring Rotterdam.


It was the first time Lisbeth was back since she studied one term there, and the first time Tue was there at all. Disregarding menacing clouds, Lisbeth 'dragged' Tue through her old 'hood':


.. and into the more central parts of town:


Unfortunately it poured down all of Saturday morning so we didn't make out into Rotterdam this day; on the other hand we had plenty of time for savouring the breakfast buffet at our great hotel and taking in the impressive view from the 15^th floor. But since also Tue liked all that he saw, we'll probably have to come back some day...

Koninklijke TNT Post

Connoisseurs might recognise the logo of express delivery firm TNT on the Dutch mailboxes. TNT bought the national Dutch postal service in 2006 and they are still in the process of exchanging the mailboxes from the old red ones (like the two in the picture) to the new orange ones (apart from the colour identical to the old ones).

Amestelledamme

As already mentioned we spent the last half week of 2008 in Amsterdam. The weather was very sunny but cold which is why we didn't manage to go in to see Anne Frank's house because the line to get in appeared to us to involve too much standing and freezing. For the same reason we were grateful for the tickets Diego got us for the van Gogh museum allowing us to skip the line there (we couldn't apply the same trick for the line to the wardrobe, but at least we were indoors by then). Overall, most of our time there was spent getting warm again after strolling around in the cold: cafés with warm snacks, restaurants, and a canal tour (in the afternoon dusk) with mulled wine.


One of our many stops in cosy places was in the company of Ann who we both know from when we were living on Sixth at the Hørhus dormitory - and who we think has been living in Amsterdam for almost 10 years by now. It was also our first time meeting Ann's Mark. Hopefully, it won't be the last...

Happy New Year!

Originally the plan was to meet up with Drew and Leontine in Amsterdam for a couple of days - on the occasion of their being in the Netherlands to visit Leontine's family - and then returning to Geneva to celebrate the new year in our little home. Already during September we planned to surprise Drew by also meeting Diego and his wife Lea in Amsterdam. Despite lacking an actual plan for the execution of the surprise meeting we managed to have Diego and Lea walk into a café where the other four of us were already sitting and talking.

Diego - Drew

Lea - Leontine

The last part of the plan didn't go quite as smoothly - when we reached Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in the afternoon of the day of New Year's Eve we realized that our flight to Geneva was delayed: expected departure some 4 hours later than originally scheduled. There we were, and decided to start killing time by shopping in the many stores in Schiphol. Afterwards we used the food vouchers the airline had given us, first for ice cream, then some pasta and salad. All this while the restaurants and shops in the airport were closing one by one and most of the remaining flights of 2008 were cancelled. The last couple of hours we were sitting in an increasingly empty hall and reading a little. Around the earlier estimated time of departure the aeroplane that was to take us to Geneva finally landed, and we learned that the late arrival was caused by Geneva's airport being closed for 3 hours due to a snow storm.

mmmmm... ice cream!

We took off around 10 pm, landed around 11 pm and were happy to see that trains were still running from the airport to the city. Of course it took a while to get the luggage and getting through passport controls, but we got on the train 11:47 and got off at Geneva's main station some 6 minutes later. Midnight stroke just as we were unlocking our bikes to get the last bit of the way home that way - the sky was lit up above our heads with accompanying blasts and we stopped for a few minutes to behold the fireworks. Home at last about a quarter of an hour into the new year we decided that the day had already been long enough and postponed the champagne and the steaks purchased prior to the trip for a New Year's Dinner on New Year's Day.