Scott's trip, Cirque du Soleil and Boom Chicago

Scott arrived late on Tuesday night (after the big Easter weekend). He had with him a crunchie bar! And some Reece's peanut butter cups.... mmmmmmm.....


We set him up a foldout bed in our lounge that we borrowed from one of the managers at work.


During the day he explored the city (he was here on secondment two years ago but they travelled so much he hadn't done the touristy stuff in Amsterdam!).


On Wednesday night all the NZ secondees, plus Scott plus Aussie Jen went to Cirque du Soleil - Varekai. It was AMAZING! The music was fantastic too, and I bought the soundtrack! I was terrified the whole performance that one (or more) of the performers was going to smack into one of the lighting towers while swinging around in mid-air, or that they'd fall off the strings or nets that they were holding onto. Kind of stressful to be doing all that worrying! But they were all very talented and amazing, no one fell or anything. The show was beautiful and the strength of these performers is just amazing. It has convinced me that I'll definitely be going to another Cirque du Soleil show, probably in Las Vegas.


On the Thursday night Kinga, Scott and I went to Boom Chicago - a comedy club run by Americans in the centre of Amsterdam. It was so funny! Some of the stuff they said was so true, they mentioned a number of things that had happened to me since I've been in the Netherlands. The same club has a late night show, which we're planning on going to for my birthday in a few weeks time.


Friday morning Scott jetted off to New York City - just a fleeting visit from him. He's off to the Cayman Islands to work for a bank. Bye!!

Easter in Spain - Part Three (Easter Sunday and Monday)

EASTER SUNDAY





Sunday was Day Two of our hop-on/hop-off tour. It was a gorgeous day so good for some blue sky shots. We saw the palace (including these columns at the bottom of the street that leads to the palace:

The road on the way to the palace -

And here's the palace itself -




It was pretty nice (from outside). We sat in the sun and I visited the most disgusting public toilets I've ever seen in my life - quite an experience!

Then we went up this gondola on the hill to a castle - the views over the city were gorgeous.



In the afternoon, the others went to a soccer game and I wandered around the markets buying gifts and looking at the artwork. I loved being immersed in the Spanish (and Catalan) and would love to go back!

EASTER MONDAY

Monday was for more shopping - lots of things were closed but I found this excellent little art/souvenir store. I wanted to buy so many things but there was the small issue of the fact that my suitcase was already packed full to the brim!

Easter in Spain - Part Two (Good Friday and Saturday)

GOOD FRIDAY

To our surprise most of the shops and things were open on Good Friday. Amanda and I looked around at the mall, had a wander up La Rambla, and generally hung about.

The first thing you notice on La Rambla is the crazy busker statues that are up and down the street. The costumes are elaborate and look like they'd be impractical in extreme temperatures.

Here are a couple we saw:

One of the first things you notice about Barcelona is that most of the 'landmarks' were created as part of the city's revamp for the 1992 Olympics, including this

And this...

The Spanish sure do love their monuments. The entire city is littered with them (most of which I have no idea what they're for).

Near the waterfront, at the bottom of La Rambla there is a statue of Christopher Columbus. He seems to be pointing out towards the water - it was put up to remember him setting off towards 'The New World'. Unfortunately he's actually pointing in the wrong direction, but never mind.

The waterfront is very pretty:

Amanda and I sampled some real Spanish Paella for dinner and then headed back to the hostel to find the boys had had a few too many beers and causing havoc in the hostel bar. We gently encouraged them to head off to the clubs, and hit the sack for an early night - it was going to be a big day on Saturday!

EASTER SATURDAY

Rebecca, Amanda and I got on a hop-on/hop-off tour around Barcelona, and saw some amazing stuff. The architecture of Spanish favourite 'Gaudi' is all over the city, including in 'Parc Guell' which was where he lived. Here are a few of the crazy things he designed -

Casa Batllo

Casa Mila (La Pedrera)

La Sagrada Familia

La Sagrada Familia is this huge cathedral, started in 1882. It was left unfinished at Gaudi's death and construction halted during the Spanish Civil War in 1932. In 1940 construction started again (so the photos are all littered with cranes) and they expect to be done by 2026 (yes that's another 18 years!). All the construction is funded by donations and by the entrance tickets of tourists - no government or official church people are paying for it. Randomly, the Executive Architect is actually a Kiwi, called Mark Burry.

The design is incredibly detailed and very grand - there are three facades and will eventually be 18 towers. To look at it, you could stand there for hours. For starters, its huge. And you can walk right around it and see close-up literally hundreds of little features that Gaudi has designed for it. There is so much to look at and its not even done yet! It was very amazing, but the line to get in was so long that if we had gone inside we wouldn't have seen anything else of Barcelona!

We saw a few other bits and pieces too, like

The Arc de Triomf

The Building that doesn't reach the ground

and Spanish Starbucks!!

That night, we went to a Flamenco show and had Paella for dinner again (but at a different place).

Easter in Spain - Part One

Easter in Barcelona - when booking the flights I realised that it was very expensive to fly from Amsterdam directly to Barcelona, so made the choice to fly from Brussels (because it saved over 100 euro and then I could fly back on the same flight as Milli and Bex too).


Driving to Brussels is usually a 2 hour drive (2.06 if you ask GPS Bonnie). However.... driving to Brussels on a Thursday afternoon at about 4pm, when its pouring with rain and horrible weather - NOT a 2 hour drive anymore! I left at 4 for a 9pm flight - check in closed at 8.25pm, so I thought I had AGES. I didn't stop the whole time (except for petrol once and a bathroom stop once or twice) and yet it took me over FOUR hours to get there!


I was THE last person to check in for my flight, and I went straight from check in, through security to the boarding gate. Where the flight was delayed. But there was no food. I had maltesers for dinner. Mmm, nutricious.


After arriving in Barcelona (and waiting what seemed like forever for baggage to arrive) I got a hot baguette and met Amanda.


We got to the hostel at 1am and had to fight with the front desk for about an hour before finally going to bed. The idiots wanted us to pay the full 900 euros for the whole stay of all of our group, even though most of them weren't arriving until the next day! Ugh, morons.

Sculpture Garden of Kroller-Muller

Ok so my last post was a total novel so here's a separate one for the sculptures!!



They're all pretty strange actually, but really cool too! There were these balls:





These huge metal sticks (which are more impressive after you realise they're about 40 metres tall or something):

There was also this sculpture which Kinga was obsessed with - from outside it looked like this:

But there is a staircase underneath it, and you go up and come out on top (in the middle) of it. It is kind of like an igloo, there is no flat surfaces anywhere and the lines that are painted black aren't straight either. Some kids were running around on there as we were leaving, and someone said 'that's going to end in tears'. And wouldn't ya know it? Before we were out of earshot we could hear crying from one of the kids falling over.

Here's Cherilyn and I inside the museum after eating some hearty Dutch pea soup.

Kroller-Muller Museum and biking in the rain

Yesterday Cherilyn, Kinga, Karen and I made a trek out to the Kroller-Muller Museum. It is in a National Park in between a few towns in the Netherlands, like Arnhem and Otterlo. We went to the Otterlo entrance, cos its closer to our house!

Here's the front museum entrance sign - note the puddles and general drizzly day!

In the front yard there are some random pieces of 'art', like this one -

The museum was started by the wife of a rich guy about a hundred years ago when she started collecting 'contemporary' art (she was probably bored!). She liked Vincent Van Gogh a lot, and decided to make a large collection of his work because she thought that it would give his work more weight if someone had a collection of it. The Van Gogh collection is the second largest in the world (second only to the Van Gogh Museum).

Around the 1950s the museum was donated to the state, the grounds and art included. Since then, they've added to the collection every year with new 'contemporary' art.

This is 'Man with Guitar' - see if you can find him. It took us a few minutes of squinty eyes before we worked it out - its weird!

The coolest thing is that you're allowed to take pictures of whatever, you just can't use your flash. Excuse the random photos, they probably need some cropping, but you get the idea.

I saw some pretty amazing paintings, like the original of this one:

And this pretty windmill painting too:

Then there were some weird 'art' things, which I kind of question whether they're art (quietly).

Like this - it looks suspiciously like something my brother drew when he was 8 and entitled it 'The Boncing Elephant' (spelling mistake and all).

Then there was this weird wooden thing:

And this giant alligator-type thing - big huge stuffed animal. The signs said don't touch so we didn't, but Cherilyn did hide behind it. And consider trying to smuggle it on board her flight home as carry on luggage.

Outside the museum, there is a scupture garden and outside of that there is the National Park, with biking paths and other things to see. We biked the 10k path in the rain before meandering through the sculpture garden. Of course it was raining the whole time, but we didn't let that get in our way.

I get around

Round round get around, I get around (and this is how).

This is my 2006 Citroen C2. I will be sad to leave this behind!!! It's small, it's zippy, and it plays my music LOUD! Now that Franz has sorted out the back seat it can carry FOUR passengers! Its dirty as hell from being snowed on (and driven all over the place) but that's fine with me! You won't catch me outside cleaning it while its less than 10 degrees outside!

Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer

This morning Cherilyn and I went to 'Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer', which are the global flower auctions (and a convenient 15 min drive from our house). This is where the price of roses are set, based on supply and demand, for the whole world!



Its basically a huge warehouse full of little pallets of flowers (and other stuff too, we saw some stuffed animals and some fluffy donut things which you can poke flowers into). The people working in the warehouse have these little forklift things and they buzz around on them so fast! It looks like absolute chaos, but they never seem to hit each other.



There's also a monorail-type transporter for the flowers (they get a ride!). The pallets are picked up by this machine and flown through the air for hundreds of metres. The flower auction grounds are the size of several football fields.



Here's the flowers moving around the warehouse:

Here's the auction room - only registered wholesale buyers can purchase, not any old Joe like you and me! There are also online and telephone buyers in other countries who are also participating in the auctions. The two big screens are each an auction, and the goods are paraded past the bottom of the screen as they're being sold. The auctions are a Dutch clock auction, with a wheel starts high and then goes around while the price gets lower - when it gets to the price you're willing to pay, you hit your buzzer. Then you've won the auction.

Here's a bunch of buyers sitting there - looks like a lecture theatre to me! Tourists come and go through here all the time, so it was surprising that they seemed rattled by us staring at them!

London - Round Two

After a late arrival (thanks EasyJet) I finally made it to Vanessa's house in London, and Bex was already there.

On Saturday we did Part Two of the London Lightning tour designed by Vanessa (although it included a few things that were in Part One, because Bex hadn't seen them).



We went past the London Eye, Big Ben, Parliament Buildings and Westminster Abbey again. We also stopped off at the Tate Modern gallery which was pretty cool - the bottom floor was an earthquake exhibition, where they had actually cut a hole in the floor! We stopped for lunch at the food markets. I forget the name, but its where Jamie Oliver buys all his food - or is it Gordon Ramsay? Well anyway they were pretty impressive, and the giant pile of paella was tasty (although we didn't quite eat the whole thing, haha).

We also stopped by St Paul's Cathedral. We went inside briefly but the lightning tour didn't allow for us to walk up to the top (and our stomachs were full of paella!).

On Saturday night I kicked off my 'cousin tour' with dinner with Stephen and Carissa. One cousin down, about fifty to go I reckon.

On Sunday, we went to Greenwich - the exact middle of the earth (famous for 'Greenwich Mean Time'). Here's our feet in the center of the world!

It was good times, and I was sad to leave London. Maybe see you again in a couple of years!

Team Claire - Victorious yet Humble

Last night we went out for a Global Mobility dinner (with all the short term secondees and some of the Dutchies who had recently returned from long term secondments).

The food was really tiny and posh, and the boys all complained that it wasn’t really a meal. We had a course of bread, a course of mostly raw tuna steak, a course of fish with a pasta noodle (yes just one), a course of onion soup (weird) and then a course of some sort of steak (tiny of course). Dessert was a course of some custard-type thing with ice cream on it followed by little chocolates/sweets.

There was a game of ‘human bingo’ where the characteristics were like ‘someone from NZ’ or ‘has more than three kids’ and you had to get a different person to sign off each box on the bingo. Claire (from South Africa) and I teamed up and were the first to complete the challenge.

Later in the evening all the entries were drawn and we won!!! The prize was two free entrances to Keukenhof, this cute little tulip park where you can cycle through and look at all the flowers (LINK). Plus, we get a free poster each when we go. Which is brilliant, because we were already planning on going for my birthday weekend! Very nice indeed.

Here's some of the others enjoying the food (not) -

More Snow

It snowed more overnight. Here’s the view from our house when I woke up this morning.


My poor little car was all covered with snow when I took it to go to the gym this morning! Had to spend a good 20 minutes warming her up and getting it all off so I could see! Didn’t want to end up in a five car pileup (like someone did a block from our house last night – I went past it on my way home).

Snow

It's snowing here. I'm cold.

The luck of the Irish

On Sunday, Amanda and I decided to trek out to a mall that she had been to before, Dundrum Shopping Centre! Unfortunately she'd only been by car, so we didn't really know where we were going to find the right public transport (it's really strange in Dublin). We were heading for the Luas (kind of train/tram thing) when we were stopped at some traffic lights waiting to cross. Then a bus goes past us with 'Dundrum Shopping Centre' on the front of it. So we looked at each other, and knew what we had to do.


We ran. Reasonably fast. In heels (and boots). Not ideal. We did get the bus, because lots of people were getting off it at the next stop. And it dropped us right outside! Fantastic.


We had a super day and went to the movies again (oops) and got heaps of bargains like €1.50 knee high socks (for inside my boots) and a €7 carry-on sized weekend bag (black and white).


I also managed to find a great dress for the boyfriend's sister's wedding in June back in New Zealand! Sorted!


On the way to the airport on Monday morning (at an extremely early time of the morning which I would rather not discuss) my taxi driver was Indian, but had an Irish accent! It was so strange - the look didn't seem to match the accent!

Top of the morning to ya!

This weekend I went to DUBLIN! Where, incidentally, I did not hear a single Irish person say ‘top of the mornin’to ya’. They do say ‘Thanks a million’ and ‘grand’ a lot. And when they swear, it sounds funny. However, I’m a little off topic here.

I flew into Dublin on a flight that got delayed by almost an hour, so poor Amanda and Mia had to wait for me in a McDonalds in town (cos that’s where the bus was going to drop me off) and were practically falling asleep there! Although I think they were kept awake by the extreme PDA that was going on around them.

Their apartment is kind of questionable… it’s a brand new building and it has had numerous teething problems (including no hot water for four days, the phone that doesn’t receive calls, and the case of the appearing coathangers and washing baskets after the girls had bought their own). One thing that is hands-down awesome is the bedding! Amanda and Mia each have a Super-King sized bed, it’s seriously massive! It’s the comfiest, most cloud-like bed I have ever slept on and I never wanted to get up again after I lay down. The duvet was super warm but not really bulky and heavy.

On Saturday we had a wee sleep in due to the seduction of the fantastically comfortable bed, and then headed into town to get breakfast/brunch/lunch/whatever we could find. Amanda and I tracked down some Potato and Leek soup (very Irish, I’m told) and some soda bread (apparently also quite Irish). After that we had a wee poke around in some stores, looking at cellphones as Amanda’s has thrown a fit and is showing her the mirror image of what it should show (when it shows anything at all).

We met up with Mia after that to get on our bus tour to Malahide Castle. This castle was AMAZING. The first part of it was built in 1185 A.D. and the Talbot family lived here for nearly 800 years until 1975 when the last remaining Talbot auctioned it off to pay the tax bill her brother hadn’t paid while he’d been the owner. It was bought by the council and now the grounds are maintained as a park and the inside is like a museum. They still use the banquet hall for special events today which I found weird (but also good). You won’t get that in most museums, huh.

Here are some of the piccies I took over the weekend:

What I also found really cute was all the Irish tourist stuff. Like little bears with green Irish jumpers on and all sorts of shamrocks on everything. I feel like we don’t have anything that cute in the Netherlands. Perhaps it is because of all the clog souvenirs. Oh well.

I didn’t realize that castles were added onto – I thought they were all built at once. But I guess it really makes sense. All the beautiful furniture and paintings were really interesting, and I got some decent interior design ideas from the (like for example, don’t paint entire rooms coral pink).

After the tour we hit the local pub for a good old fashioned pub meal - bangers and mash and a pint of Guinness for me. Then we went to the movies. I know, I know, I’m a horrible tourist. I’ve let down tourists all over the world. You’re not supposed to go to the movies when you’re a tourist! You can do that at home! You’re supposed to do things like stand in line for four hours to see a monument you didn’t know anything about and get your photo taken by it even though you never find out what its about or why its there. But we didn’t. We saw Juno. And it was really good! It was laugh-out-loud funny. And I did laugh out loud. In public. Reasonably embarrassing, really.