On Friday, Sep 12, Flavia and I were supposed to have a longly anticipated date in Brussels. We had prepared everything, exchange lots of messages clearly stating how much we had been looking forward to it, but then the bad luck struck and unbelievable and unplanned happened ... the Euro-tunnel between England and France went alight and as the fire was still pretty much alive on Friday, the chances of Flavia making it to Brussels on time were nothing other than none ... As a matter of a quick readjustment, we still luckily managed to book a flight with KLM from London to Amsterdam where I picked up my signorina in the evening ... And that's how we came about spending that weekend in the Netherlands instead ...

 

On Friday, we quickly assembled a weekend plan and on early Saturday morning we took a train to Zaanse Schanz, which is a small village 13km north of Amsterdam that even some of my Dutch colleagues never heard of, and the ones who did gave me a wide smile when I mentioned I visited the place. As nice as it is, it basically stands for one thing - TOURISM ;o)) ... The village has been maintained to resemble the life in the Netherlands in its very traditional way. The houses look like they supposedly did 200 years ago, and so are the wind mills. We did a tour in one of the wind mill producing colors and there were others to check out, which we eventually didn't find time for, i.e. wood cutting mill, flour mill, etc. ... One of the old-time-version of a shop I enjoyed a lot was the original Albert Heijn ... very nice ...

 

Later in the afternoon we took a train to a town - Haarlem, which is famous for its market at the town square accompanied by a cathedral. The city center is utmost beautiful and there are plenty of houses to check designed in the typical Dutch style of archtiecture. Flavia and I were sold on the food available at the market of course and apart from a great Italian bread, we also bought some cheese and given the misfortune with our trip to Belgium, we were desperately in need of some Belgium pralines :oP ...

 

On Sunday we did another early start and made it to Rotterdam, which is famous predominantly for its modern style architecture, after its town center has been wiped off the surface of the earth during the WWII by both German and then also the American army (if I got that correctly :oS) ... Many buildings were quite interesting and contrary to what I had been told by everyone I actually enjoyed what the city had to offer. We did a little bit of a disappointing tour of the harbor though, which didn't bring much new to the table apart form an endless view of containers, but well ... 9EUR badly spent, which isn't that drastic ...

 

In the afternoon we set out for the town of Delft, which was an exact opposite to what we saw in Rotterdam. The city looked very traditional full of the Dutch architecture we saw elsewhere, i.e. Amsterdam, Haarlem or even Zaanse Schanz ... We loved the center, the small shops, the pulse of the city ... it was just great, although Flavia expressed she could never live there as it was still too small for her needs, eheh ... what a party animal :o)) ...

 

On Sunday evening we took it a bit easy and landed on the beach of Scheveningen (I'm sure my spelling is wrong ... but well ...) ... It's a nice, cozy and cheese Dutch beach close to the Hague and it was a welcome relax after the weekend of sight-seeing around the country ...

 

Flavia left the Hague on Monday morning and I'm sure she had as much fun as I did, which is of course - LLLOOOOTTTSSSSS :oD ...