vrijdag 18 juli 2014

Back to the European life (EN)

Over two weeks ago I got back to my little Holland, and already, I´m missing Canada. The Netherlands is a country a little big bigger than Vancouver Island. Vancouver Island has a population of about 800.000, where the Netherlands has a population of about 17 million! So as you can see, it´s pretty crowded over here. That also makes that we have no nature, forest, wildlife or even a centimetre that is not touch by humans in this country. Don´t get me wrong, it´s still a great country, but I do miss some space, nature and mountains. Oh yea, that´s an other thing, the highest point in the whole country is 320 metres above sealevel, so you can´t exactly call that a mountain, also keeping in mind that Prince George is already at 575 metres above sea level, it´s a little different living here. 

Like I said, it´s not like the Netherlands is an ugly country, even though everything is touched by humans, it still has it´s beauty. Like when I woke up at 6 AM because of my jetlag, the sun was just rising and it was all foggy outside, which created a certainly not ugly view. Also I can finally see cows and horses again by just looking out of my window and jump in the water whenever I want since I live right next to a (man made) channel. 
6 AM view from my balcony
Yesterday we went on the river with our little fishing boat enjoying the nice weather, the river here is nothing like the Fraser river, it's way calmer and smaller and very busy with boats on sunny days. Even on the water you see people all the time. 

In our little harbour
On the river
Because of the lack of space on the land here, some people also live on the water in so called ''woonboten'' (livingboats). It might sound strange to you if you are not used to it, but you can kind of image it as a trailer,but then on the water. It's not like there is a lot of people living in those boats, but it's not unusual either. 
The little white thing on the left is the side of  a ''woonboot''
Living in such a small country definetly also has it's advantages, like great public transport and getting anywhere in the country never takes longer than 3 hours. So I thought that I might actually use that an take the trein to Leiden, a city close to the beach. From there me and a friend from Leiden went to the beach for the afternoon, and I saw the sea again for the first time in a year! 

On the beach
Also, since everything in Europe is so close I went to Disneyland Paris with about 600 students from my school here. It's only a 6 hour drive to Paris, so at 4 in the morning they guided 600 sleepy students into 10 busses so we could be in Disney by the time the park opened. After a couple delays we arrived around 11 in Disney and had all day in the park. It would have been amazing, if it weren't that it did not stop raining for a second all day. We still had fun, but by the end of the day we were soaked and cold, actually I take that back, after an hour we were soaked, and after 3 hours we were cold.


Who said that only little kids can go in the carousel?
I notice that while I was in Canada, nobody knows ''the Netherlands'', everybody calls it Holland. So here is to the people that call The Netherlands Holland.

Since I live in Europe again I can be in pretty much any European country with a 2 hour flight max. So tomorrow I'm flighing out to Rome, Italy! 
See you later! 

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