Dutch Big 5 Missing in Action at Hoge Veluwe

This week Thursday we had a departmental day out on the beach! We are part of the Kavli institute and once a year there is a guest speaker and a fun day out. This year we headed to Scheveningen beach near The Hague for some fun beach activities. The program started with lunch at the fancy hotel where we also had a talk by the guest speaker (the heavy physics stuff is always way above me! lol) and then it was time for the fun to start!

I chose Djembe and Sandcastle Building as my two activities. Djembe is the African drum made of wood with a stretched goat skin across the top and I was impressed to see the pile of real Djembe’s they had! We started off slowly but by the end we had learnt a whole ‘song’. It was very encouraging to hear the people around us clapping! For our sandcastle we chose to build a light house. It was quite fun and I learnt the trick to sand sculpting is use lots of water to make it hard and compact it together! After activities there was a barbeque dinner and more socializing time. While Bron was at Scheveningen, Justin watched SA convincingly beat Namibia at the Irish pub.

Djembe! 

Our lighthouse sandcastle! My team was mostly people from Quantum Nanoscience.

Another groups Colosseum sandcastle. On the left in the blue jacket Xander, new post-doc Mina lee kneeling down, our group head Nynke Dekker in the centre with the spade and Jennifer on the far right.

The weather for this weekend was forecast to be warm and sunny so we decided to make the most of it since we are not sure how many good days we have left! A work colleague of Justin’s told us about the Hoge Veluwe National Park so went to check it out!

Hoge Veluwe is in the province of Gelderland near the German border and close to the towns of Ede, Apeldoorn and Arnhem. It is bit of a mission to get to by public transport but after two and a half hours we made it! In the park there are 1700 white bicycles for use in the park free of charge. We had a really nice day cycling around enjoying the sunshine; I think we cycled about 30 km! There is apparently a lot of wildlife in the park but we only saw one red squirrel all day! Lol. We have never seen a red squirrel before so it was nice to see one but it would have been nice to see more than just one squirrel! Some other animals that live in the park include Red Deer, Doe Deer, Wild Boar and Mouflon (type of wild sheep). One magazine article advertised the Dutch Big 5 but we are still trying to work out what that is!

The other main attraction is the Krőller-Müller Museum which has an impressive Van Gogh collection. Helene Krőller-Müller was an avid collector of art and started collecting works by Van Gogh before he became famous. She privately collected 180 drawings and 87 paintings by Van Gogh. Not all the Van Gogh’s are on view, we only saw one drawing and about 30 paintings. Some of the better known paintings on view are The Potato Eaters, Café Terrace at Night, A Meadow in The Mountains, Country Road in Provence by Night, Pink Peach Trees and one of his Self Portraits. Work by other artists in the museum include Pablo Picasso, George Seurat, Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Piet Mondriaan, Isaac Israels and others. There is also a large sculpture garden outside the museum with work by Auguste Rodin, Aldo van Eyck, Kenneth Snelson, Mario Merz and others.

Rows of white bicycles! 

Views in Hoge Veluwe

Getting some speed!

Van Gogh's in the Krőller-Müller Museum

Bron's favourite Van Gogh at this museum, Café Terrace at Night. 

Rodin's Crouching Woman in the sculpture garden

The Needle Tower by Kenneth Snelson

After a busy day out yesterday we took it easy today catching up on home admin and some other things. It was another lovely day though so we went out for a little 20 km cycle towards Delft around some farm areas near Schiedam. Was really nice and peaceful!

Not much planned this week except that Justin has a business trip to Israel from Saturday till next week Wednesday. We were super keen for Bron to join Justin in Israel and then take some time off to explore together but unfortunately it hasn’t worked out that way. Justin’s office took so long to confirm this project, the prices of flights have gone up a lot in that time and Bron would need to get a re-entry visa since her Residence Permit hasn’t come through yet. So we decided to leave it this time round. Maybe for the next trip…

In other news, congrats to our friends Rich and Jen who were married in Cape Town yesterday. Congrats guys! We are super happy for you =)

Till next time! Have a good week!

x

The Oldest Town in Holland

This past weekend saw us back in the Irish pub for more rugby but we also headed out to Dordrecht to for some exploring!

Dordrecht is the oldest town in Holland and was the most important harbour and commercial town of the region in the 1500s before Rotterdam overtook it. Dordrecht is only 15 min from Rotterdam by train so on Sunday we went to check it out!

As it turns out not much happens in Dordrecht on a Sunday! We only got there after 12pm but everything was very much closed and nobody was around. It was quite strange, lol. Rotterdam is very vibey even on a Sunday so it was quite different. The old city centre is quite a small part of the town and is easily covered on foot. There are many beautiful old buildings, similar to those we saw in Brugges. We wandered around and found the old harbour area complete with old-school boats. We also saw the old city gate or Groothoofdspoort which is near the harbour area. One of the main sights to see is the Grote Kerk. The church is huge and built in the gothic style. It has many beautiful stained glass windows in quite a modern style. After a coffee break we headed back to Rotterdam for a quiet afternoon at home =)

In other news our oak tree Leif has survived the winter and is growing again! When Dad Blake visited us in Cape Town over Easter in 2009, we visited the wine farm Vergelegen and he picked up some acorns. We planted the one he gave us and it grew! So we have a little oak tree and we named him Leif =) He grew really fast during his first Summer but not too much during his second Summer last year. When we left SA to come to the Netherlands, Leif went to live with Bron’s Dad. When we skyped recently he showed us Leif and we were surprised at how much he has grown! He has new leaves and looks like he is making his first side branch! It is fun and rewarding to watch green things grow =) Thanks for looking after Leif for us Dad!

And finally our SA tax returns are done and sorted! After being a student all these years Bron was registered as a SARS tax payer the year she leaves the country, sigh. So now I have to do a SA tax return every year forever. Efiling is the easiest way to do your tax but try registering from overseas when you no longer have a South African address, phone number or bank account! But we got it right and completed the tax return on time. We were surprised at how fast SARS were at processing our returns; Justin’s was done in two days and Bron’s in less than a day! You can always trust the receiver of revenue to be organised hey. Wish home affairs was the same…

On Thursday Bron is going to Scheveningen for a departmental day on the beach. Hope it doesn’t rain! Thursday is also ‘Prinsjesdag’or the opening of the Dutch parliament by the Queen. Saturday is supposed to be a nice day so we are planning to go to Hoge Veluwe, a national park near Arnhem. See the next blog for more info!

Hope you have a good week!

x

Some interesting art next to the train timetable

Some of the old buildings

Town hall

The Grote Kerk

Enjoying the view at one of the yacht basins

Some more old architecture and a funky bridge

Groothoofdspoort

It wouldn't be the Netherlands without them...

Mammoet!

There is currently a huge construction project underway to re-build Rotterdam Central Station. It is a major undertaking including extending the metro line, making a new metro station at Central Station and putting the entire station under cover (at the moment most of it and the platforms are open to the elements). The covering will also have solar panels in them similar to Berlin Hauptbahnhof.

The project started in 2008 and is scheduled to finish in 2013. At the moment the station is in a chaotic mess! We don’t really know it any other way but think it will be really nice when it is finished and not a building site anymore.

We have been really amazed at the rate of progress and how hard people are working on this project. By the time we arrive at the station at about 7:40 each morning, they are already working and when we get back in the evening, ~6:00/6:30-ish, they are still working! Last week when we had dinner in Amsterdam we got back to Central Station at 10:30 and they were still working! Crazy. But you can notice the progress each week, it is amazing! I don’t think construction would normally happen at that pace in SA unless there is a serious deadline, e.g. the Soccer World Cup! Lol.

One of the kewl things at the site we noticed was a crane called a Mammoet! You guessed it, a Mammoth crane! And they really live up to their name, they are HUGE! They are always red and tower over the normal yellow cranes making them look like dinky toys. Mammoet is a Dutch company specialising in heavy lifting equipment and make the largest cranes in the world. We added up the counter weights for this crane and came up with about 400 tons! Crazy. I scoured their website for more facts n figures on their website but specific information was sparse; their cranes are flexible and they offer custom solutions so there isn’t a one-size-fits-all-here-is-the-answer type info page. But I did find that they have cranes with a capacity of up to 4, 400 tons! i think the crane we saw at Central Station is a Ring Crane and that it has since moved on to the Erasmus Medical Centre were they are currently building as well.

And then it was weekend again! Yay! We don’t have too much planned for this weekend. There will be some home admin, rugby watching and a work friend of Justin’s is coming round on Saturday evening to tell us more about his recent holiday to Turkey and show us some pics =)

Have a kewl weekend!

x  

Mammoet! Notice the counter weights.

Mammoet at Erasmus MC. Notice how it towers over the building and how small the yellow crane is in comparison! 

Construction at Rotterdam Central Station. This frame will be for the overhead covering. This photo was taken two weeks ago and already the structure stretches out to the left even more. Notice the typical Rotterdam clouds....

Dinner, Rugby and Plum Jam!

This week we had a lovely dinner in Amsterdam on Wednesday evening with our friends Evan and Kerryn from Cape Town. Evan and Kerryn had been visiting Evan’s parents in the States for a month with their 4 year old son, Cameron, and stopped over in the Netherlands to visit friends on their way back. For those of you who were there, Evan played guitar and Kerryn violin at our wedding. We were fortunate to be able to spend an evening with them in their crazy two days in Amsterdam! Thanks for seeing us guys, it was really great to catch up and hang out! Thanks to Travis and Amanda for hosting us and for a very yummy dinner! Enjoy week in the Netherlands Kerryn and all the best for back to work this week Ev!

Four months ago I applied for a residence permit and last week I finally got the letter from the IND saying that it has been granted! Woohoo! We weren’t worried that it wouldn’t be granted, since I am married to Justin who is a British citizen they can’t really say no, we were just wondering why it was taking so long! Apparently home affairs and immigration services are the same the world over ‘~) So it has been granted but I am still waiting for the IND to let me know when and where I can collect, apparently that also takes time. Funny story though, I could read the whole letter in fancy Dutch but got one word wrong which changed the whole meaning of the letter, lol. I read ‘ingewilligd’ (granted) as ‘ingewikkeld’ (complicated)! One nice thing is the permit is valid for 5 years during which I can move freely around the Schengen states, yay! At the end of the 5 years I can apply for citizenship =)

This week also saw the start of the rugby world cup. Rugby is not very beeg in the Netherlands but we managed to rope together a few people to watch the first games! (They include another South African and an Englishman but that doesn’t matter! ‘~) ) We headed to Paddy Murphy’s Irish pub yesterday morning to watch England narrowly win against Argentina and today we were there in our SA rugby jerseys to watch SA unconvincingly beat Wales. I really hope the boys in green and gold get it together in the next few weeks! Justin is teaching people at work how the game works and has a friendly betting pool on Super Bru with some people from work. He will also arrange an afternoon to throw a rugby ball around and teach them some rules. Should be fun.

While I have been writing this blog I have also been making plum jam! I made a batch last week and since it turned out well and I have too many bottles left over I thought I would make some more! Except this batch doesn’t seem to be setting as nicely, hm. Hope it works out ok!

So not much to say this week but some nice news too =) Below is a step-by-step photo guide on how to make your own plum jam!

Hope you are well! have a good week and enjoy the overdose of rugby!!

x

PS: Thanks for 4000+ page views! =)

Guide to making your own plum jam! 

Step 1: cut up the fruit, remove the pips but leave the skins on. Add an equal amount of sugar to fruit and soak overnight.

Step 3: Bring the fruit/sugar mixture to the boil.

Step 3: Wash out bottles and lids and sterilise in the oven.

Step 4: Bottle the jam! Seal with wax wrap dipped in brandy.

The finished product =)

Wereldhavendagen

There was quite a lot happening this weekend in Rotterdam, there is a 10 day open air film festival at Museum Park and World Port Day at Rotterdam Port. And for a change the weather was really nice!

On Friday night we packed a picnic and took our fold-up chairs to Museum Park, not far from us for the Pleinbioscoop! We were expecting grass but found instead a concrete slab with a big screen at one end, lol. We arrived seriously early but enjoyed catching the last of the rays close to the canal. It soon became quite busy so we grabbed a spot and got cosy. But only a few minutes before the movie they asked everyone to please pick up their chairs and move forward 10 steps so that the late comers could find place at the back. What was the point of coming early to get a good spot then? Seriously. The Dutch are so good everyone got up and moved, no one in SA would have moved! But it caused a lot of chaos and when asked a second time less than half the people stood to move. And then a really tall latecomer decided to plonk his chair right in front of me! Fail. We asked him to move which he ignored and then the nice people sitting next to us asked him to move so he finally did with a lot of grumbling!

The movie was the 2010 western ‘True Grit’ with Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin and Hailee Steinfeld. The movie was about lone bandit chaser Rooster Cogburn (Bridges) helping Mattie Ross (Steinfeld) to track down the murderer of her father (Brolin). It was a typical Western with lots of action which can get a bit grizzly at times but it was pretty good. If you thought Jeff Bridges was good as Bad Blake in Crazy Heart then watch this one, he is even better!

After a late night we had an early start and headed off to the World Port Day festivities! Wereldhavendagen is a weekend of celebrating the Port of Rotterdam with various activities and excursions planned and also entertainment in the evenings. There are about 100 different tours to choose from in Dutch but only 3 in English, lol. We joined a tour of the Euromax Container Terminal and boarded a bus at 9:30 am headed for the Maasvlaakte, close to where we had been before at the Maeslantkering.

Our guide had previously worked for the port and was a wealth of information, he did a really good job telling us about the history of the port and other facts n figures. The Port of Rotterdam is the largest European port, the fourth largest in the world and is one of the most important for Europe, especially Germany. The Euromax container terminal has been operational since 2008 and has 1500 m of Quay side. Extensions of the Maasvlakte are currently underway and when it is completed there will be 4 km of Quay side! The port currently handles 1.3 million containers a year which will increase to 3 million by 2030. Crazy! Shanghai is currently the world’s largest port and container terminal and handles an insane amount of containers each year.

The entire terminal is semi-automated and is operational 24 hours a day. When a ship arrives, people-operated cranes remove the containers and place them onto automated guided vehicles, or AGVs, which then automatically move them around to trucks or wherever they need to go. The AGVs are pre-programmed with where they need to go and also re-fuel automatically. The cranes are semi-automated in that they only need to be guided as to where exactly on the container to pick up it up and then everything else is pre-programmed. There is also a railway line, the Betuweroute, which is a dedicated 160 km freight line going from the container terminal directly to Germany. The building of the track was very controversial and cost 4.7 billion euro by the time construction was completed in 2007.

There were some demonstrations set up for the visitors including how the massive container-lifting cranes operate, how the cranes rotate to place/remove containers from/to trains/trucks and how trains change track after loading/unloading containers. The people were very friendly and we enjoyed the interactiveness of the tour. It really was an interesting tour and we thoroughly enjoyed it. We hope in future that they will increase the number of English tours available or that our Dutch will improve so we can join a Dutch tour!

Once back in the city we strolled around and soaked up the atmosphere. It was very busy and vibey on Saturday and hot and humid! We had lunch at the old harbour area near the market and where we stayed in February, it is actually the pub where Justin met his current cricket captain, lol. The pub next door had live music in the form of old sailor shanty choirs, was very cool!

We headed home and squeezed in a nap before heading back to the water’s edge near the Erasmus Bridge for evening’s entertainment. We had heard that there is always an amazing fireworks display at the end of the evening but didn’t care much for the rest of the line-up. There was a Chinese theme for World Port Day this year and a customary Chinese Dragon was placed on a huge ship on the River Maas. The dragon was 120 m long and colourfully lit up with many lights. The fireworks were set off from a platform on the same boat. The fireworks display lasted about 15 min and was really impressive! The display was roughly choreographed to music and included the theme song from Pirates of the Caribbean, a Vanessa Mae track, the modern version of Over the Rainbow, Queen’s We Will Rock You and ended off with Katy Perry’s Firework, very clever choices.

In true Dutch style today is overcast and rainy after a few days of comparatively good weather. Although the last few days were nice and toasty, last week was mostly quite cold and the forecast for this week is looking cloudy, rainy and super windy! Joy.

Plans for this week include seeing our friends from Cape Town Evan and Kerryn Torrance (and their son Cameron!) on Wednesday night for dinner in Amsterdam. If you were at our wedding ceremony, Evan played guitar and Kerryn played the violin. Really looking forward to seeing them =)

In other news Bronwen’s TU Delft officially started on Thursday, woohoo! In my four month contract I get 13.6 days leave, almost as much as Justin used to get in SA for a whole year! Lol. And Justin is potentially starting a new project in Israel soon which will include some travelling. At least it is better than Luanda…

Happy Spring Day for Thursday to everyone in the Southern Hemisphere! Although our good friend Richard Lange will tell you that Spring only officially starts on 23 September with the equinox ‘~)

Till next time…

x

View of construction at the Maasvlaakte 2

An AGV in the foreground and two different types of cranes in the background at the Euromax Terminal

Cranes lining the Quay wall at Euromax

Boibs at Euromax

Marph at Euromax! 

View of part of the Betuweroute railway 

The Reisbureau ticket collection point

Marph enjoying a cold beer after a long day in the sun! 

Fireworks!