London, Brussels, Amsterdam, and FRIESLAND

We apologize for the length of time it has been since our last post. We also hope that you can enjoy this post even though it is very long and covers over a week. Enjoy!

London, England
Heidi and I got into London about 11 in the morning London time. We got a day pass to jump on the subway and busses. We tested out McDonald’s…and just as expected, it tasted a little funny. We couldn’t figure out what it was that tasted different, but it did. The diet Coke…or Coca-Cola light tasted a little funny as well. As soon as we got to London we were ready to get to our hotel, and after a few hours of walking around with our back packs we needed some rest. We jumped on the subway and got to the stop close to our hotel. Unfortunately we took a wrong turn when we were walking and ended up about an hour’s walk away.
Our hotel was quite pleasant when we did get there. It was about 30 minutes from downtown London and it was near what appeared to be a national park. It was very woodsy and very quiet. Heidi and I slept well, but decided London was too expensive to stick around and experience. My relatives unfortunately were off to Spain so we had nobody in London to stay with to make it cheaper either. Because of that we decided to start our travel to the Netherlands a little earlier and stayed at a halfway point in Brussels, Belgium.

Brussels, Belgium (Heidi’s first blog writing :))

TJ and I enjoyed Brussels as soon as we arrived, even with the language barrier. TJ can read French, but can’t understand it with how fast and slurred they speak, but that has been helpful with trying to find our way and reading random historical markings. Their subway (Metro) was easy to understand and our hotel was right off the Metro stop, so it was easy to find and we were able to drop our backpacks right away. It is amazing how much more I like walking around a new city without my backpack! We didn’t have anything specific in mind that we wanted to see here, so we wandered around a bit just taking in the sites. But a few things we did see was the “Grand Place” which was the town square with huge old buildings. We also saw the outside of the Royal Palace, a huge sculpture of an atom, walked around a cathedral that took 149 years to build, ate Belgian waffles (which is on the dessert menu) and some Belgian chocolate, tried to find the famous statue of a little boy peeing. I don’t know why it is famous but there are tourist souvenirs of it everywhere. We never did find it. Their signage was quite poor and difficult to follow, but they didn’t even have signs for the peeing boy statue. We assume that it’s because the city isn’t very proud of this statue.

Amersterdam, The Netherlands

We had a little bit of trouble getting to the Netherlands, because we bought train tickets online from a French company (unknowingly), and didn’t know that we needed to get them from different location than the train station. When we arrived at the station we typed in our code in the ticket machine and were told to go to the main desk. After we went to the train company’s desk and waited in line we were informed that we needed to go to the general train ticket desk. We waited in line for many minutes only to find out that we were to go to this separate ticket location. The gentleman gave us gave us an address to get to the French ticket company, but we couldn’t read it. At this point we already missed our train. We couldn’t find it, but after asking around and looking online we found a RAIL EUROPE BENELUX office in a different spot, unfortunately it wasn’t open on Saturdays. Eventually we found the place, they were very kind, gave us tickets for a later train, and we made it to Amsterdam, but it was just a stressful morning. I did enjoy the train ride, to see the canals and windmills as they went by. Everyone has always told me that the Dutch people ride their bike everywhere, but I was still surprised by the massive amounts of bikes everywhere. Ria, one of my (Heidi’s) relatives here, says there are more bikes in the Netherlands than people because most people have 2 bikes, a casual bike and a sport bike. TJ and I went to Anne Frank’s house/museum. It is where she and 7 other people hid for more than 2 years during World War II. The goal of the museum is to show what they went through and to promote tolerance/acceptance of people that are different than you. I really in enjoyed it. TJ thought it was moving as well, that just one girl can do so much for motivating the world around her.
We were there for about 24 hours and then we tried to take a train to the northern part of the Netherlands to see my relatives. We got on our train and at the first stop there was an announcement in Dutch. We thought it was just about what stop it was and didn’t bother to ask anyone what is said since we don’t understand the language… well, unfortunately, we should have. Apparently they split the train there. The front half of the train went one direction and the back half went where we wanted to go. TJ and I were on the front of the train. The conductor told us we were going the wrong way about an hour later. TJ and I got off and found a bus station that would take us back to where we needed to go, but we were an hour and half late. Normally we wouldn’t mind, but my relatives were waiting at the train station for us. They also didn’t know what we looked like. I couldn’t get my cell phone to work because I didn’t know I had to type a “+” before the number, but we eventually made it. Who really would ever think of typing a + anyways. Fortunately, they were happy to see us. They made a sign for us in English that said “welcome Heidie and JR” which was really humorous.
We are staying at a delightful little bungalow of Ria’s friend, and many different relatives are taking TJ and I on little day trips throughout the week, which will be such a blessing. It is a strange feeling to receive gifts of their time and money and know there isn’t a way to pay them back. But I am very thankful.
Day Trip 1 in Friesland (Heidi’s Grandparents Homeland)
Henk and Tien, my (Heidi’s) Grandpa’s sister and brother-in-law took us around to different places from my grandparents’ childhood. We saw where my Beppe (grandma) went to school and where her house used to be. We also saw where my Pake (grandpa) grew up, went to school, his grandparents house (which is still there…and very huge), and also the farm he used to work on before he moved to the United States. We also were taken to a cemetery where my great-relatives are buried. They received the gravesites with the purchase of a piece of farmland, and have a long row of gravesites in the front of a church. They took us back to their apartment, made us a delicious dinner and explained many different types of windmills in the Netherlands. Henk’s hobby is to photograph windmills. He actually wrote a book about windmills of Netherlands, and the book is quite impressive…although it’s in Dutch so we couldn’t read it. They then drove us around to see a few windmills in person, and a huge dam that was built at the tip of the Netherlands to keep the ocean from flooding the Netherlands during big storms. On our way back to the bungalow they took us out to ice cream. They don’t normally speak in English, but they were did a great job at it. The only time they were taught English was in school. Since they are older, it is very impressive that they can remember English that well. TJ is better at communicating with them than I am, because I’m afraid of saying something that doesn’t make sense to them, whereas TJ tries to clarify things. Overall, it was such a wonderful day. We had such a great time with them.