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:
