Heading South

After the wedding we all headed South to Posterholt which is where Maaike’s parents live – close by the border with Germany and Belgium.

On the way we visited a really interesting music museum. Unfortunately my camera had run out of batteries and have misplaced the cable to get pictures off Maaike’s camera.

But, the music museum was really excellent. Basically a physics prof had collected instruments over about 60 years – donated them all to a museum and now runs it with his wife. There were some amazing artefacts there – and really interesting to see the development of various instruments. I will put up pictures and video’s later. But here’s a pic of the building.

Also worth pointing out is that houses in The Netherlands make extremely efficient use of space. In fact, I suspect that some of the best interior designers are probably Dutch in origin. Here’s a picture of Maaike going down stairs in the B&B we stayed in.

This is typical of houses here.. I can only imagine how many foreign necks are broken on a drunken night out in this country. Seriously – very very steep!

Another interesting thing you see all over the place is bike paths, and signage.

These ‘paddestoel’ or mushrooms are dotted about the place. They give you a marker number (on the top) and then distances with arrows to localish towns and villages. The number on top is also on maps & guides so you can tour about using these points.

These mushrooms are being replaced by more modern maps and signposts – but the basic idea stays the same. Very clever.

Finally.. it’s time for:

Oddity #2 : Toilets.

Here is a picture of a (clean) Dutch toilet.

Note the ledge. This has two major effects that I can think of:

• No Splash
• Smell

(sorry to be explicit mum).

Personally, I think the latter outweighs the former, but I’m open to eloquent, reasoned debate on the matter.