This summer I went to Holland (also known as the Netherlands), were the Dutch people live. Yeah I know, it is a complete mess with so many names having
nothing to do with each other. They speak the Dutch language, which is like a mixture of English and German. But they are all very good with languages and know almost all the main ones. Spanish, French, German, English, Italina... it was very impressive. Even the old couple we
did the exchange with had studied both German and English in school,
apart from learning Dutch of course.
Here is the wikipedia page on the Netherlands, if you want to look into their history and more details of their country.
We, once again, used the house exchange program with a nice couple who lived close to Amsterdam in a small town. They have great flat roads in Holland, and they are completely free! Everything has a very "maqueta" feel to it, with the windmills and all their cows, horses, sheep and goats. They have a great array of bird fauna too.
We went there by car and stopped in the way there at Bruges (Brujas in spanish) in Belgium. After crossing the frontier to the Netherlands my mother was looking at the map and ran over a small town very close to the frontier where we had crossed named Galder. So we stopped at the small town that shared name with me.
After a small stop there we drove to the bi-familiar house where we would live for almost a month. It was a nice smal
l house. Though throughout all Holland they have very narrow and short stairs. This is because traditionally, the houses themselves (all packed up in the middle of Amsterdam in between channels) were very narrow and thus the stairs were too, to maximize the living space in the house. This made it impossible to carry up the stair
s furniture and other big objects. So they carried this things through the window with the help of a rope and hook, which is the reason for the Dutch houses to be fal
len to the side, so the things being carried upwards do not bump with the building on their way up.
In the Netherlands we visited many cities and country side. The one we most visited was Amsterdam, which is very pretty with all its channels and very chaotic with all the bicycles, trains and cars. It feels like a very anarchistic city. We also went to watch the parade of gay pride day, which only takes place every four years in Amsterdam.
We also visited Utrecht and the Hague which are beautiful. The Ha
gue feels more different as it lacks the channels that decorate so many Dutch cities. It is very pretty and is a great city, we even went twice there. We also visited Rotterdam, which is more industrial and a completely new city they built in an area they took from the sea a few years ago, but it felt very "dead" and cold.
We also visited the great dams in the north, the one that separates the countr
y from the sea and runs for kilometers over water. Though even there the sea is very peaceful, as small islands and other obstacles block the sea wrath further into the sea.
Well, that is what I mostly did during my vacations in Holland. I had a lot of fun and this were memorable vacations.
