Friday Oct 28

This is a beautiful place. We were at the beach again yesterday and Rebecca commented that the workmen were replacing summer flowers with more hardy winter flowers. Even a winter pansy can survive here. Can you imagine flowers all year round?
For those of you who are ready to pack your bags and move here, I will tell you the routine of a young mom here. Up early to get kids ready. If they are small, you ride with them on your bike while they peddle theirs. Littler ones are in bike wagons or seats behind mom. You pick the kids up for lunch again on your bike then return them after lunch. During your 2 hour break, you shop for the day at your local store, put your groceries in your back-pack or bike saddle bags and go home. Pick the kids up from school and go home to start dinner. Stores close at 6:00 most nights so don’t forget anything as no Walmarts here open evenings!!
Yesterday Rebecca had company over so we took a tram to a bigger store in the centre of town and home again. Her back pack weighed 50 pounds or more and I’m not exaggerating!! I lifted it to even it out on her back . I was dragging my butt just from the shopping trip and she was carrying 50 pounds of stuff home!




Her company took a tram to the central station and then decided it would be a nice stroll to walk here from there. This was a mom and her three kids (youngest 4) and the distance is probably about 2-3 miles. The kitchens are tiny so shopping is every day or two as there is no room for a weeks worth of stuff and besides you couldn’t carry that much at one time.
I tell you these people are in shape without Shapes, the Y, or a gym….which reminds me ……I haven’t seen any of these in my travels!! Bye for now.

Wednesday

Wednesday we did not have to get up early but Rebecca was up at 5:30 and I woke up at 6:00 a.m.. We chatted and were going to go back to sleep but Rebecca’s fun friend Lisa came over with some nice fresh baking so Rebecca made coffee and we chatted. When Lisa left we did nap. Rebecca took a picture of her rose “Fred” in her back garden, as there is a beautiful bloom on it. Rebecca is trying to keep her foot up today as it is swelling again. I went to the P-mart to pick up a few groceries---BY MYSELF!! I didn’t get lost and found my way home but it was scary. WE bought Swedish Pepparkakor (cookies) at Ikea yesterday. Rebecca is discovering how addictive they can be!! We’ll watch British tv this evening and have an early night as we are off tomorrow early to Corrie Ten Boom house.

Tuesday

Tuesday morning we got up, ready, and by nine thirty we were on the tram on our way to Delft. This is a college town that has cute small shops and apartments. We toured two very old churches where Royalty is buried—literally-- under the floors of the church. The dates on record there started in the 1200’s. William of Orange conquered England, Scotland and Ireland in years past. The present Queen still is of the Orange family. Both churches had many rows of stained glass windows.
Delft also has canals running through the town. We walked through the square and the churches and then took a taxi to IKEA!! They are building onto the present IKEA and will train people here to work in Ikea’s. It is a large store already but will double in size. We ate Swedish meatballs and potatoes with gravy and cranberry sauce. YUMMY!! We caught the train back to Den Haag then the tram back to Rebecca’s house. We arrived at the house about 3:30 and I was exhausted. In Canada this would have been a ride to the Mall, shop, and drive home….much more boring but easier on the body!! These people have to be in shape just to do every day life. That is all for today.

Brooke and other grandbabies

I want to describe to you what it is like to come to Rebeeca's house. The houses are all side by side like yours only with no spaces between them. The side walk is RIGHT under the windows up against the buildings. Cars park partly on the sidewalk and partly on the street. So there is about a 2 foot path to walk on. The side walk is a shade of redish brown cobble stones. The street is narrow like your back alley only made of cobble stones that are brown. Next there are red brick paths that are for bicycles. Then more parked cars and sidewalks up against the windows on the OTHER side of the street. The other morning a garbage truck as big as ours came down this NARROW STREET!! The garbage men appeared at the window to throw garbage just as I was walking into the living room, wearing my PJ's, and carrying my morning coffee. They were SO CLOSE just across the room, outside the window that it scared me, and I yelled "ahhh" and spilled some of my coffee!! I'm not used to having anyone so close to my window.
It is nice that the foot paths and bike paths and car paths are all a different colors so you know which one to go one. Many families do not have cars so they ride bikes to school and church and shopping and carry things home in back-packs or in bike bags
That's all for now. LOve you all. Grandma-mama.

Day 6

Gail this blog is for you. I wanted to show you what you would be doing things if you were here. I took a picture of Rebecca’s washing machine. I put my hand on it so you could see how SMALL it is!! Then she hangs her clothes on this clothes horse and blows it with a fan. I also took a picture of Rebecca’s pretty little garden standing in the doorway of her dining room. It is beautiful but SMALL!! Can you imagine trying to look after your active little boys here?? Rebecca was on her bike going to her bank. Would you ever have believed, when she left Canada, that she would be going out in public dressed like this. We went shopping again in The Centrum, the centre of town. We went shop to shop along long strips like Main Streets used to be only this is like a huge square of many many shops. It was raining quite hard today so I had to use an umbrella, walk a LONG way and carry stuff in rain!!! I was EXHAUSTED and wet when we got home. Rebecca built a nice fire in the fireplace when we returned. Can you see the wall plaque above her fire place?? It is remarkable—hope you can see it. That is all for today.

day 5

Today is Sunday so we got up and dressed and were picked up for Church by Charlie and Lisa. Rebecca wore her stiletto heels for the first time since her broken foot. She walked ok until later this afternoon—then she started limping. The church was a nice seeker sensitive bunch of people. I heard a lot of Hill Top music like they play at Spings. The speaker reminded me of how the Meeting Place used to share. Scripture mixed with personal testimony. Lisa drove us to a pancake house for lunch. The new pastors 2 daughters joined Lisa, Rebecca and I. We went down to the town centre to shop for a few hours. Upon returning to Rebecca’s we checked on Hurricane Wilma but it hadn’t hit Florida yet, Now we are ar home by the fire at home again,

To Brooke, Conlan, Rebecca, Isabella and Cael

Hi Brooke,
You must read this blog to your brothers and cousins. I am near the North Sea in Holland. I went to the sea with my friend Rebecca and we watched the ocean. It is not hot here like South Africa but the sea had nice big waves. It is holiday time here so kids were at the beach with their moms’ and dads’ and grandparents. Everyone here rides a bike. I saw a grandma with 2 grandchildren about the same age of you and Conlan. They rode their bikes to a pond by the Queen’s palace and fed ducks and pigeons and other birds and then rode home again. There are a lot of flowers in the shops here. We saw 20 beautiful roses for sale for 4 Euros which is about 6.50 Canadian. I love you guys and miss your smiley faces, but am having a nice time here. Ask Auntie Cheryl to print this for you to keep.
Love and hugs and kisses --Grancma

Saturday Day 4

I slept in this morning then chatted with Rebecca and her dad (on the phone) and then slept again. We are planning a down day today. The dog Rebecca has been 'dog sitting' is now on his way home with his owners, Lisa and Charlie. They were in Berlin and returned last night. Let me think a minute about the differences between here and home.
The weather changes very quickly from lovely to rainy and back again.
Everyone seems to own a dog and take it everywhere with them.
There are a million bikes per million people. EVERY toddler to senior owns and rides a bike.
The bikes are parked by the TRAM (hear that Rebecca) tram station. It literally is a half acre of bikes all stashed together. How they find their own in that pile is beyond me. I can't even find my CAR in a parking lot half the time!!
There are little shops on narrow streets, not big stores in and around a mall. I can't believe these narrow street are TWO WAY streets. Drivers park on both sides of the street with cars parking either way so you can have two cars parked facing each other.
I think I've seen 5 or 10 different smart cars in this small area of town every time I've gone out. I think we have like 3 in all of Winnipeg. I've hardly seen any mid-size cars but then they probably couldn't pass each other on these streets.
Enough for now. I'm going to drink tea by the fireplace!! Bye

Day 3

Today it is a little rainy. I am useless with an umbrella. It keeps going inside out. Rebecca had to teach me how to use this umbrella---how pathetic. We walked to the grocery store to buy ingredients for dinner. After Rebecca put dinner in the slow cooker, we went off to the train and then the bus and went to the church office where Rebecca used to work. The public transport is great here. We can get very near any place we want to go by train or bus and they run quickly and often. After I met Rebecca's pastors we walked through the "Haagse Bos" (the Hague woods) to the Queen's palace. She was at home because her flag was flying. We took pictures of her palace and her palace quards and then walked back around a big pond in the woods. We sat for a while at the side of the pond and a whole bunch of pigeons came and landed at our feet. We had nothing to feed them but they kept coming back. A Grandma and her grandkids came with bread and then the pigeons were joined by ducks and a haron to eat the kids treats. We walked back to the church office as Rebecca's pastor Marilyn offered to drive us home. Turned out we had a great chat and prayed together before Marilyn drove us home. It is obvious her pastors love Rebecca dearly. We are home again now. We need Art here as we made a fire in the fireplace last night to warm up, and now Rebecca is almost out of fire wood.

Day 2 Holland

Rebecca made me breakfast with a wonderous coffee. We dropped off some laundry at a shop and the went for a train ride down to the sea and saw the piers and 2 harbours. The sea was rolling with waves so there were wind surfers and para sail people doing their thing. We bought fresh fish from a fish shop and had tea in a cosy little diner, with a fireplace, on the beach. I took some pictures especially for Art which I have asked Rebecca to post. I saw a young girl on the train with some very different but cute shoes. I will see how much they cost. In the shoe shop at the Place Promenade at the beach they were selling mucklucks--real ones-- how funny as there is hardly winter here. The grass is green and Rebecca says it is green all year. A few trees are turning orange but they are mostly green. It rained a bit but my jacket dried in about 10 minutes after the rain stopped.
Rebecca is looking after a little white dog that looks like Gail's Mitsy. He is fixed but he humps everything in sight! How strange. Tell Donna and her girls this as we had the same experience with a dog on Lloyd's farm. We left here at about 10:30 in the morning and now have returned at about 3:00.
Rebecca tried to put the pictures on and her computer went down so I will post without the pictures.

Americans!!

While I was waiting in the London airport two older American ladies were talking about health care. This was the jist of the conversation. In Canada:
If we phone for an ambulence, they will ask our age and if we are old they will take their jolly time arriving to help us.
Our people go to the states and pay big prices to have opperations that Canada can't do
THEY sure don't want to mess up their health care to have government health care as pathetic as ours.
They also used the words arrogant and rude descibing services. HA this from THEM!!!
Anyway being a "polite" Canadian EH---I just thought "HOSERS" and walked away fuming!!

Over to HOLLAND post 1-- Lurkers welcome.

Leaving Winnipeg with it's patch-work quilt farming areas, evenly layed out, we were soon above the cloud and could watch a near full moon. We were traveling east into the sunrise so even though I obediently took one of Gaily-Poo's good drugs, I only slept 3-4 hours. The big plane to Heathrow played 'Mr. and Mrs Smith' and 'The Matrix'. I woke in time to see Neo's character take Mr. Smith APART from the inside out. I LOVE that!!
I saw clouds and ocean. Then flying over land again in the UK. I saw what reminded me of one of Mom's crazy quilts. Mom would take scraps big and small, any old shape and size and "fit" them together. That is what the land looked like from the sky. Any old piece of land big or small with hedge rows dividing them. No pattern, no symmetry , large at one end and small at the other, put together and marked by trees. When I flew over London, I thought -Hey another city for Floyd to love. There were trees every where. The row-houses (like in Laureens 'Coronation Street') were taller than our houses so the houses were not hidden by the trees. The row houses looked like train cars all in straight rows, or going around corners, or in crescent shapes. Also Floyd and Brooke and Conlan, I saw a huge soccer (or football) stadium from the sky. I spent about 4 hours in the London airport. Erica and Yvonne, they had all those 'highbrow' shops you like to visit. I just walked by---the one that especially stood out was Harrod's--I'll leave that kind of shopping to you girls. The airport had some lounge chairs like we would use at the side of a pool only much sturdier. I laid on one of them for about half an hour. It was great to have my feet up. Flying over the North Sea to get to Amsterdam, I was surprised at the distance. What was in my mind was seeing the documentaries of boats going across the English channel to land at Normandy and it didn't look like such a distance. Flying over Holland the land was once again uniform, in rows with straight lines. Instead of TREES between the plots of land, there is water. Sort of like ditches filled with water. Some are large enough that there are small boats able to sail in them. Rebecca met me at the airport limping on her sore foot. It is swollen some but she says it is better than before. We took a train from the airport to her station in Den Haag. Travelling along there were tiny cottages ,like we would have at the lake, only much smaller. Rebecca said they are garden cottages where people go for the day to get away and work their gardens. Rebecca's house has three floors. Her apartment in at ground level. This is a row house like I saw in England so it looks like a house and not an apartment. She even has a garden. It is 4:40 in the morning here right now but I haven't adjusted yet so here I am talking to you. Bye for now.