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Author: Hanneke

I started my first blog when I left the Netherlands (my home country) for an internship in Alaska in 2004, to keep my friends and family updated on my adventures over there. Little did I know it would be more than 13 years before I'd move back to the Netherlands! I spent a year in Toulouse (France) before starting a PhD in meteorology at the University of East Anglia in Norwich (UK) in 2005. That's when I started this current blog, first in Dutch but I soon switched to English. I really enjoyed life in the UK, and was actually planning to stay there after my PhD, but "life is what happens when you're busy making other plans" and I ended up moving to Tromsø in Northern Norway in 2009. Tromsø is a photographer's dream, surrounded by spectacular mountains, with the light ever changing from the midnight sun in summer to the dark days compensated by aurora-filled nights in winter. I learnt Norwegian and got a job as a weather forecaster - I got thrown in at the deep end, doing radio interviews and speaking with fishermen with way-too-strong dialects straight from the beginning, before I was anywhere near fluent in Norwegian :D I survived though, and slowly started to do some research on the side. I got more and more involved in research projects and in August 2015 I moved 2000 km south, to Oslo where I started working 100% as a researcher. A year after moving to Oslo, I met Michiel at a music festival in Brussels :) and we started to travel very frequently between Oslo and Rotterdam, where he lives. You can't do that forever though, and I soon realized I found the perfect "excuse" to finally move back home, something I had been considering many times before. So since July 2017, I'm living in Rotterdam! I'm actually taking some time off before finding a new job, and I'm looking forward to lots of adventures in the near future - so stay tuned!
Paul's Birthday

Paul's Birthday

Hello!

It’s more then 3 weeks ago now, but here are some photos of Paul’s birthday 🙂

Making a sachertorte (chocolate cake) the night before, I almost took a bite!

Paul's birthday

I had to wait until the next day though 😉 Here is Paul with his cake! He wasn’t happy with the candles I bought, but I think he was lucky cause I almost had to buy 27 as they ran out of 6’s in one shop hehehehe….

Paul's birthday Paul's birthday

After eating cake, we went for a walk at a lake near Norwich. There are lots of swans and geese there, and some very cute baby swans! The lake is part of the Whitlingham Country Park, and there is also a very nice looking sports park where you can try all kinds of water sports, they rent out the equipment and also run courses. I like the building! It feels a bit like a tent.

Paul's birthday Paul's birthday Paul's birthday

We then went to the airport, I had booked a flight lesson for Paul! It was a big surprise and judging by the width of his smile, I think he enjoyed it a lot 🙂 He was so lucky with the weather on his birthday, it was the first nice day in a long time. The lesson was at Norwich airport and took about 1,5 hour including an hour of flying. I spent the time in the cafe that overlooks the airstrip and I took photos of 2 other planes before I found the right one 😉

Paul's birthday

Afterwards we went for dinner at our favourite place in Norwich: The Belgian Monk! They serve great Belgian beers (especially the kriek is amazing!) and – best of all – the serve Belgian food! The menu is half in Dutch, half in English, and they serve some of my favourite food that I really miss, like kroketten! We always order the same: kroketten and friet with mayonnaise 🙂 It’s so nice!! We also had dessert this time, and were very impressed by it. Paul had this enormous fruit kebab served with fruit beer sorbets, and I had a pancake with warm cherries and cream, SO good :))) It’s always served really nice as well, like the fries come in a kind of metal stand that looks really cool, see the first photo.

Paul's birthday Paul's birthday

Paul's birthday

We rented a dvd from the library to watch at home. It was called The Rocket Post. It’s based on a true story about a German rocket scientist called Gerhard Zucher who comes to live on an outer Hebrides island to develop a mail service to surrounding islands by rocket. Very impressive story and great scenery, I’d like to visit those islands one day!

Anyway, so that was Paul’s birthday… a really nice day!

Other than that, not much going on here. Summer is still hiding somewhere, it’s mostly raining (or pooring) or if we are lucky just very cloudy. Sigh… I am waiting for Summer! Especially since I have no travel plans this Summer! Well of course that’s not completely true… we are thinking about doing the coast to coast by bike sometime soon. This is a 225 km long trail from one side of England to the other side. Should be nice!

And I am going to do another course in photography! Tomorrow will be our first course, it’s a 4 week course on Travel Photography at the Norwich Art Centre. There are only 3 persons booked on the course (Paul, me and someone else) so that sounds good… I’m looking forward to it!

I’ve also been to my middle school again, for the last time this school year… I made a tornado-in-a-bottle with them, it was lots of fun! I’ll post some photos of that soon.

That’s all for now!

Hanneke

The Netherlands (again!!)

The Netherlands (again!!)

Helloooo!

I’m sorry for the delay in getting new photos uploaded 🙂 Three weeks ago we went to the Netherlands – again! My aunt was turning 60 and my parents had organized a surprise party for her, so they asked us if we’d like to come. We only went for the weekend, flying on Friday evening (slaloming around the thunderstorms) and coming back on Sunday night.

On Saturday we went to the Hague to visit the Escher museum. First we walked around the Dutch government buildings:

The Netherlands The Netherlands

The museum was in a palace, quite pretty! They had combined the Escher prints with some weird lighting made by an artist. I did like the shadows they made on the wall, but in some cases I thought the lights were too bizarre (a skull??) and didn’t really match with the palace or the museum. The museum was claiming to be an interactive experience rather than a traditional museum, but apart from the top floor (and the cloak room, see the first photo) I don’t think that was true. On the top floor, they did have some games to play, a room with distorted perspective (we had a photo taken where I appear a giant next to Paul, unfortunately their printer wasn’t working 🙁 ) and – the coolest thing – a virtual reality walk through Escher’s world! Anyway, here are some photos:

The Netherlands The Netherlands

The Netherlands The Netherlands

The Netherlands The Netherlands

I did really like the museum, Escher was such a genius, I just love his work! After several hours in the museum we walked around The Hague for a while. There was some arty thing going on:

The Netherlands The Netherlands

We also managed to take this photo inside The Sting (clothes shop) before the security noticed us and told us photos were not allowed…

The Netherlands

On Sunday, we all got up early and we left for the beach. My aunt was there with her friend Guusje, who was also turning 60 just 5 days later. Guusje is an amazing person, she also makes great art. They were staying in a beach house and thought they were hiding from everyone – hehe. My parents had bought a special cake, normally only for people who turn 50. In the Netherlands, when you turn 50, you are called “Sara” or “Abraham” and there are lots of traditions involved, this cake is one of them. My aunt managed to hide from everyone 10 years ago, so we made it a Sara+10 party! Paul was hypnotized by the cake 😉

The Netherlands

These photos were taken on the way to the beach, I’ve never seen such big onion flowers! Very pretty.

The Netherlands The Netherlands

We had some Dutch flags with us, and this is how we all walked to the beach house:

The Netherlands The Netherlands

My sister had bought them these wind-up grannies, they were hilarious!!

The Netherlands

Most of the morning was spent playing with them 🙂 they even made a board to race on!

The Netherlands The Netherlands

My brother was brave enough to take a dive, even though the weather wasn’t very inviting. He didn’t stay in long 😉 Here he’s running back to the warm caravan with my sister and his girlfriend Kaya:

The Netherlands

All the old ones (hihi) – my parents on the left, Guusje in the middle, Marianne and Els on the right.

The Netherlands

After the party, Bart, Kaya and Paul took us to a kind of festival in a mental hospital. Euh yeah that is quite crazy 🙂 They open their doors once a year and have a big festival with games, fun fair and people selling art. It’s a beautiful place! This one guy came up to me: Do you like polished nails? And before I knew it, I was asked to choose a color (Paul chose the most horrific pink possible!!) and he polished my nails. Not for money, just for fun… It was cute! It did end up everywhere so I was glad my mum had nail polish remover at home 😉

The Netherlands The Netherlands

That’s all for now, I have many more photos, following soon… (really!)

Hanneke

Sailing & Mist

Sailing & Mist

Hello!

We went sailing last Saturday. Paul has a small sailing boat (an enterprise) that he keeps at a sailing club at Rollesby Broad. This lake is not connected to the rest of the Broads (though you can get to one other lake), and there is only one sailing club using it, so you can have the lake to yourselves sometimes! We sailed to a pub at the far side of the other lake, enjoyed a drink and sailed back. The weather was very calm, so it was easy sailing / sunbathing 🙂 On the way back there was hardly any wind left so it took us a long time to reach the sailing club.

After returning, I got out and took some photos of Paul sailing, as he didn’t have any photos of his boat and the lake was beautiful at sunset.

Sailing Sailing

Sailing Sailing

I had a go as well! I took a sailing course for a week in 1999 and I hardly sailed at all after that, so I’m still (re)learning. I had never sailed a boat just by myself but when there’s hardly any wind there’s not much you can do wrong 😉 Paul’s boat is very different from the stable boats I am used to though – it’s quite common to capsize this one!

Sailing Sailing

Here we were getting the boat back on land and cleaning off all the “sea” weed 😉 (lake weed?)

Sailing

While we were busy taking the sails down etc, I happened to look at the lake, and mist was coming in at a very high speed! It was bizarre… in a few minutes a thick mist was everywhere. The sun was just setting and it was a spectacular sight, I ran to the jetty with my camera to get some photos.

Sailing Sailing

In the second photo (below) you can see the mist front moving over the lake. I’ve never seen mist coming in so fast!

Sailing Sailing

That’s all for now, hope you all had a nice weekend 🙂

Hanneke