Tiffany Goes Travelling

On November 14th and November 21st, I attended the arrival of Sinterklaas to the Netherlands from Spain. For those of you who don’t know, Sinterklaas is like Santa Clause, but he comes on December the 5th rather than the 25th, and has two famous helpers: Black Pete and his white horse Americo.Yes, I said Black Pete – for more on that, you can look here and here.

A few weeks before December 5th, Sinterklaas officially arrives in the Netherlands from the sea, and apparently just chills out until the big day. Both of the arrivals were filled with little children dressed like Pete and Sinterklaas, singing and dancing to Sinterklaas songs and eating lots of traditional dutch seasonal candy. The Den Haag arrival was nice, except for the weather – it was windy and rainy. There were lots of company sponsored Pete’s around handing out candy and acting goofy. The Leiden arrival was smaller, but the weather was nicer and there was a chocomel van giving out free drinks, which makes this arrival my favourite.

You can see pictures here, below are highlights.

While Tom was still in the Netherlands, we went to Amsterdam for a day trip, and whilst there, we visited the Heineken Brewery for the Heineken Experience.

The Heineken Experience consists of a tour of the old Amsterdam Heineken brewery (it has ceased to function as a brewery) and includes many different exhibits including art work, movies, a ride where you feel what it is like to be bottled like a beer, TV commercials, interactive exhibits, lessons on the process of making beer and of course, free beer.You get to stroll through at your own pace, which makes for a no stress, relaxing an interesting experience.

My favourite part was the ride where you feel what it is like to be bottled like a beer. If I tell you what it is like, it’ll ruin the ride for you when you get there. Rest assured, it is lots of fun. I also enjoyed the free beer – my favourite of which was the extra cold edition, 0 degree beer. Very refreshing.

A ticket costs 15 euro, and included in that is three beers, plus a souvenir bracelet. Tom and I had a wonderful time, and it is something I recommend for anyone heading to Amsterdam. Be sure to set aside at least 90 minutes to stroll through the exhibits. Tom and I spent 2 hours in there.

The photo’s with captions are posted here, but here are some highlights:

On Oct 31st I celebrated Halloween the Dutch way – not at all! Instead, I went on a day trip with the international students network to an ancient dutch castle, Slot Loevestein.

Our trip started out with an 1 1/2 train ride to the Dutch city of Gorinchem. It is a typical dutch city, old buildings, large churches, canals and windmills. At this point in my trip, I was not terribly interested with the small country dutch town of Gorinchem, especially since I knew we were going to a real live castle, and all this small town stuff was peanuts compared to castles. We ate lunch in the town which consisted of sandwiches and a drink of choice. I had hot chocomel; chocomel is a popular dutch chocolate milk, you can order it hot or cold. It is the best damn hot chocolate ever, you will never go back to powder after chocomel.

To get to Slot Loevestein, we had to take a ferry (I say “had to” like it was some chore when it was really super awesome)(mini break – it took me SOOOO long to figure out how to spell “chore”. I kept getting back “choir” or “chord” when I tried to find it on google). The ferry ride was delightful and even better, it was heated. A very relaxing ride.

The castle sits in the middle of a beautiful little green island, surrounded by not one, but TWO moats. Other security measures include some naked sheep (it took me SOOOOO long to figure out these were sheep. They were past the first moat, and I couldn’t really get close to them. They were small like sheep, and I could hear “bawwwing”, but they looked like cows! All white and black checkered. After a long time pondering it, I deduced they were indeed sheep, but naked, and the white and black was their skin colour. Yay for brains) and short horses (not ponies I suspect, just short).

Once inside the castle -as if being inside a castle was not enough to blow your mind – they had a large array of costumes that visitors could wear while they were strolling around. VERY COOL! Everybody in the group dawned medieval attire, it really added to the experience. The castle itself was built somewhere in the 1300’s, but must have gone through many restorations, because we had free reign to touch practically everything (not like those stuck up museums in Paris). I sat in thrones, crawled on furniture, opened doors, closed doors, and overall had a very lovely time.

After the castle, we headed back to town and relaxed at a bar, where I had two more hot chocomels, because the student group had saved a lot of money by people having museum passes to the castle, and they wanted to throw back the savings to us. Thank you ISN for yet another lovely trip.

You can find all the photo’s from my trip here, but below are some highlights: