Holland
Alrighty... this is a quick run down of Holland. Only got a few minutes left so I'll make it quick. Firstly, Holland rocks! The Dutch are the second coolest people on earth (we still rock the most). After getting back into The Netherlands from Ulm/Koln, we had a reasonably early night in a very distant hotel. Saturday was 30-35C so we decided to hit the beach. We had to swap hotels and rather than using the trams, we chose to walk the "short"distance to the hotel....... so 50 minutes later we found it... large backpacks on, 35C heat!
Anyway, what better way to cool down than to hit the beach. We were told of a place called Scheveningen, near Den Haag so we went to check it out. (Interesting fact: The beach (Scheveningen) is like a small suburb (2km by 500m or so) and during the war - dodgy people were asked to pronounce the beach name as only the Dutch could say it right, German's would get it wrong and be ... presumably.. shot! (pronounced: Sch-khaay-ven-in-gar - that impresses the Dutch when you say it! ;> ) )
So had a fantastic day at the beach... beautiful day for it (obviously cos there were 20-odd million Dutch there!). Only problem was the water was FREEZING!! I mean... can't feel my legs freezing! But the ability to lie on the beach all day was more than enough to compensate! Unfortunately my orienteering skills let me down again as on the way home there was a massive traffic jam on the A12 - grabbing the map I insisted that I knew where we were and that there was a shortcut! (Needless to say, the trip home took roughly 1.5 hours longer than it should have!!)
The next day was spent up in Utrecht. We went to a pub to watch the Dutch play Serbia/Montenegro - I think I mentioned before that the Dutch are mad! But we did our best to imitate them - after passing a small takeaway food shop with a sign saying (well.. roughly saying - it was written in Dutch) Buy two beers, get free orange overalls; we went and picked up four beers and two pairs of overalls. Damn we looked hot!!
Just before we went to the pub, we stopped in at an Internet cafe to check for tickets... and... we got them!!! Three tickets for Australia vs Japan!!! Bloody awesome!! Kickoff for that game starts less than 24 hours from now and the place is about 500km away... interesting!
So after celebrating our newly aquired tickets... we went to a cool pub with a big screen and about a billion screaming, singing Dutch! A lot of fun! Unfortunately we had to bail fairly early to get back to Rotterdam to book our train tickets, grab some gear and rush to Kaiserslautern!!! (well.. to leave my passport at the hotel and have to get a taxi there-back to retrieve it.) The rush included a nice sleep at Venlo train station (outside, cold concrete floor, wearing only shorts, a singlet and thongs!)
PS - I fixed the phone number on the right!!! 2699, not 2899!
