Haren and Bourtange
These two places are in Holland by the way, just in case not everyone’s familiar with them.
The first is the place where our friends who we have been staying with live. Not far from where I was born and lived for 18 years, it’s always interesting coming back here (especially after a previous post where I just mentioned how I now feel like I’m coming home – but not quite – when visiting London or Melbourne… seem to have collected a few “homes” around this planet…). Again it’s been great catching up with friends and a good chance to catch up with some homework (didn’t quite get around to organising that whole second leg of our journey around Japan, Nepal, China and Thailand before we left). I imagine it won’t be too long before we’ll be sorely missing knowing some good friends and being in countries where we speak the langugage and know where everything is. Oh well, plenty of that in Melbourne coming up.
The second place is a place not far from where we’re staying: to add a little touristy flavour to our otherwise social agenda, we went to a reconstructed fortress village called Bourtange. Not sure how to describe it really, it’s not exactly a fortress, but far more protected (with moats, drawbridges, etc) than your average village (was in 1742 anyway). Not a bad day out, but I’ve decided it’s definitely more interesting from the sky than it is at ground level: check out the google map from the Vesting Bourtange homepage.
Oh, and did I mention all the food? Gotta love stamppot met rookworst, snert, stroopwafels, pannekoeken (at Het Pannekoekschip of course), koek, Jonge Goudse, Fries suikerbrood, etc. Me thinks it’s time to go for another hike… soon.
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