Winter Fun

We are back in Amsterdam after a trip home to Australia, and yesterday headed off with our friend Jess to Eindhoven in the middle of the Netherlands for the 'Winter Festival' being hosted in that city.

The feature of the festival this weekend was song, with small choirs and bands appearing throughout the city. We had lunch listening to a choir singing Christmas carols, giving things a very festive feel, and around each corner was another performance (if they all came from Eindhoven, it's certainly a very musical city).

The centre piece of the festival was the ice sculpture exhibition. This was a stunning sight - a range of beautiful sculptures created from ice and snow. The photo shows Nicky standing next to Puss in Boots (the whole theme was fairy tales). Of course the photo hides the fact that she is shivering! No it's not that cold in the Netherlands!!! The whole exhibition was held in a hall chilled to a cosy minus 8 degrees - suddenly being outside in the rain didn't seem so freezing! We rapidly adjourned to the coffee lounge next door for a welcome hot chocolate.

Next stop was the ice skating rink that had been set up on the town market square. I am a terrible skater – the last time I went was nearly twenty years ago, and on that occasion I broke my wrist - but Nicky was keen, and I am stupid enough to try anything twice, so we hired our skates and went for it. And it was quite fun! Again there was a band, and suddenly all those northern European traditions we grew up with felt just a little bit real as we swished along the ice to the sounds of Jingle Bells, Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, and I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas. (Actually 'swished' is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but at least neither of us fell over). It was certainly a world away from the 35 degrees and beating sunshine that we left behind in Australia less than a week ago.

Embarrassingly quickly we were all skated out (not the same muscles as triathlon), so we retired to the Central Hotel, a very gezellig* little pub next to the skating rink. A few warming drinks later, we headed out, jumped on the train, and headed back home to Amsterdam.

Shane

* 'gezellig' is one of those Dutch words that has a few uses, but generally means cosy, warm or inviting.