La Hollande du nord !

It was 9.00 AM last Saturday and the bus travelling to the North of Holland was supposed to leave. Although it waited 1 hour for 2 Mexican students whom were LATE !! Can you believe that? 1 hour... NOT 15 minutes to give them a chance... 1 HOUR !!! Anyways, we finally left in a traveller's bus from Utrecht's Central station aroung 10.15 AM. We headed towards the Zuiderzeemuseum, an outdoor museum to which you have to travel by boat. There was a remake of an ancient Dutch village. There were real people wearing wooden shoes as well as hanging their white clothes on a clothes line. That day, the sky was the blue-EST of the blues, it was GREAT ! After 2 hours of walking around the make-belief Dutch village, we took the bus and stopped half way from Groningen; in Afsluitdijk. There was an autoroute that separated the Dutch sea. Beautiful ! Arriving in Groningen, we OBVIOUSLY didn't have as much time as scheduled because we had waited for 2 people in the morning for 1 hour... so we ended up touring the city real fast and unpleasantly. It was like if we had arrived during garbage day.. :( The grounds were dirty and the streets we took to get to the restaurant were boring and inert... Unfortunately. We ate supper at, get this, an Italian pizzeria... IN A DISCOVER HOLLAND WEEKEND !! HA HA Then we left for the hostel Lauwersoog, which looked like a cozy cottage, that was reserved just for the 62 people from the ESN. A home-party was planned... and the macarena was danced !

The next day, we got waken up by a very LOUD bell rung by an ESN member ... after everyone had ate and prepared their own lunch from what the ESN people had brought for us, we left with the bus to go towards the city of Giethoorn, which is called "Holland's Venice". That place was a cute little village often, maybe too often, visited by tourists. I don't think I would like to have a gift shop as my next door neighbour !! :p We had the chance to go around the canals surrounding the pretty houses of the neighbourhood in a boat rowed by someone and a long stick, just like in Venice, Italy. Cute afternoon, and very well appreciated.

We headed towards the Zuiderzeemuseum, an outdoor museum to which you have to travel by boat.

Now I'm off to London, the pictures will come on Saturday :) - Le texte en français s'en vient :)

Je suis partie pour Londres et j'écrirai le tout dès samedi :)