Hello Kitty rocks

I have just discovered THE best website for all my Hello Kitty merchandise desires :-)) First on my wish list is this fabbo HK tv/dvd player. Now we just need a new house, with more than one bedroom, so I can stuff one room full of pink Hello Kitty goodies! And one day in the far distant future, when I am independantly wealthy ;-) , I will just have to purchase all my Hello Kitty merchandise with my favourite Hello Kitty credit card!

Alli xxx

The weather makes the news (again!)

It's been a day of "chaos" here today - the train network throughout the entire country has been shutdown, major freeways are closed, a countless number of trees have blown over (killing at least 4 people in the process), roofs have blown off, and thousands of people are stranded unable to get home due to the lack of transport!!


The National Crisis Centre has warned everyone to stay inside and the icon you can see here was all that appeared this afternoon on the weather site!! For those of you who don't recognise the shape, the green splotch is Holland.

Yep, we have been having one big storm (mostly just lots of wind at up to 130km per hour) and some rain. It is still really difficult for me to comprehend that I am living in a country so small that EVERYONE can be affected by the same storm at the same time! Needless to say I wasn't too keen on cycling to school this afternoon. Luckily Jeroen was available to drop me off and pick me up :-))

Below you can find a couple of photos that give you a bit of an idea of what's been happening. I especially like the one of the new style "umbrella stand" ;-) Using an umbrella today was definately more of a con than a pro, with the risk of turning into Mary Poppins at dangerously high levels!

Alli xxx

For those of you who don't know...

...Jeroen and I are heading to Australia for a 4 week vacation in late October. Yep, thanks to the Dutch tax office, we have booked and paid for two KLM/Malaysian Airlines tickets to arrive in Melbourne first thing on 30 October - yay, yummy asian food here we come (in Melbourne I mean, not on the flight!)

Can't wait to catch up with you all :-))

Alli xxx

"It's a small world after all"...

Yesterday we paid a visit to the mini world of Madurodam, by the beach of Scheveningen in Den Haag. It is really like all of Holland in one little city, with miniatures on the scale of 1:25 of everything from Schiphol Airport to the Rijksmuseum (with its own mini paintings!), from the Valkhof in Nijmegen to the harbour in Rotterdam, and from windmills to shopping centres. In one of the photos below you can see Jeroen proudly posing next to the miniatures from Nijmegen :-) You are also able to see Hansje Brinker continuing his very important work by keeping his finger firmly in that dyke, and just how far away from Oz we are on this side of the world.

Madurodam was first opened back in 1952 as some kind of memorial to a guy called George Maduro from Curacao. He was killed during WWII and his parents wanted to set up something to honour him. One of the first miniatures you see as you enter the "park" is of the house he was born in on Curacao. The attention to detail is so lovely - you can watch "people" getting their haircut at the hairdresser, having a drink at the local Irish Pub, harvesting flowers in the flower fields, waiting for their train at the station etc etc It makes you feel just like Godzilla peering into all the little windows! There are funerals, weddings, boats crossing the harbour, luggage making its way along the conveyor belts of the airport, and a waterskier busy at the mini beach. Even all the trees are mini versions of the real thing - maybe some kind of Dutch bonsai :-))

It is also a well known fact that Pinkeltje, a favourite childrens' book character, visits Madurodam every now and then. Pinkeltje is no bigger than a pinky finger and looks a bit like a mini garden gnome. He and his mouse "brothers" arrive in Madurodam by toystore helicopter, landing at the airport, and he spends his days pretending to be a shopfront mannequin and generally getting up to mischief!

Alli xxx

Photos of Madurodam

Welcome to 2007

And we survived the war zone that was Nijmegen last night! New Year's Eve is the one time of the year it is legal for every man and his dog to buy fireworks - and every man and his dog does! Some people spend hundreds, even thousands of euros in the 3 days leading up to NYE at special outlets selling amateur fireworks. You can see some of the results in the photos above. I especially like the one of Dennis and Dennis (amidst all the smoke!) proudly unrolling the big whopper that ended up strung across a 20 metre long hedge! Apparently the total spend across Holland this year was expected to be about 75 million euros! It is such a big thing that even all the post boxes are fitted with special coverings so you can't stuff fireworks into them. Some post boxes are even removed altogether from the worst offending neighbourhoods.

The entire day yesterday was spent listening to random bangs as those who couldn't wait were setting off crackers, fireworks, and using old metal milk cans to mix calciumcarbide with a bit of water to create an enormous thundering boom, known here as carbidschieten. At one point during the course of the evening I was standing about 5 metres away from one of these milk cans as it went off, and I could feel the boom through my whole body!

BUT, that was nothing compared to what actually happens from midnight onwards. We walked over to our friends, Tamara & Dennis, had a couple of celebratory drinks at their place and then ventured out onto the streets just after midnight. Bloody hell, it was really like a war zone. Everyone in the neighbourhood, and I mean everyone, was out on the streets setting off fireworks of all shapes and sizes. The sounds, the sights, and the smell of gunpowder were amazing. It was a bit scary actually, and you have to be so careful to watch all around you all the time to avoid accidents.

Sadly, not everyone is so careful. I was reading in this morning's newspaper that a young boy of 14 here in Nijmegen lost his eye, and across the country there were a few skull fractures and very serious facial injuries from misfires, cars were burnt out, and even a couple of people died. Jeroen was very careful to make sure our windows were all closed before we left home, just in case a stray rocket made it's way in and we came home to our house in flames. It happens!! Once people get bored with the whole firework thing, after about 90 minutes, the fires start. Alot of people create huge bonfires on the streets with their discarded Christmas trees (and basically any other wooden junk they can find!) and then proceed to play some sort of cat and mouse game with the police who keep an eye on everything and finally have to call the fire brigade to douse the flames.

All in all, a very fun way to spend NYE, and very different to those relaxed BBQ's we have in Melbourne, but I wouldn't want to do it every year :-))

Alli xxx