Dan, Diarms and Shaz come to visit

We had great food and great company this weekend. Danny, Shaz and Diarms came to visit us and we had a lovely night in on Saturday, enjoying wine and home-cooked dinner. It's always nice to have a dinner party with old friends. We took a late night stroll around the city before tucking into dessert.

Ship in a bottle museum

On the way back from Edam, we went to the maritime city of Enkhuizen. We bought some takeaway fish and chips (and pickled herring) and sat at the harbour and watched the boats going in and out. We also visited a cute ship-in-a-bottle museum (top photo). It was a really fascinating museum ranging from the tiniest bottles where you had to use a magnifying glass to see the ship to huge wine vats with extravagant ships. We bought two bottles to bring back to our home and they now have a home on our bookshelf.

Beach at Bergen aan Zee

Our first time hitting the beach in the Netherlands left us quite impressed. A wide stretch of white fine sand and some trendy beach shacks/cafes right on the sand with cushy lounges for chilling out. A couple of chilled beers and the weekend newspaper....almost feels like being back in Oz.

Cheese Tasting in Edam

According to our guidebook, Edam is one of the prettiest villages in the Netherlands. Although we haven't explored many villages yet, it is indeed a very beautiful one, flanked with canals, gorgeous old houses and a lot of delicious cheese. We went to the VVV (tourist office) and bought ourselves a little booklet outlining a pleasant walking tour through the village. It was a really lovely trip and has inspired us to see more of the Netherlands during our weekends.

Fancy a game of bocce?

Sand was being shovelled onto the pavement outside our apartment and we assumed that it was some council works, re-paving the streets. Later in the afternoon, it sounded a bit too much fun for paveworks and we looked out the window and saw people playing bocce. Most weekends, we have very little clue what's going on in our home town. The local gazette with all the news and events is in Dutch, and we've been too lazy to try to translate. The upside is that we're alway pleasantly surprised when we wake up on the weekends and notice fun stuff going on.

A Polish Wedding

We spent a four day weekend in Poland to attend Paul's colleague's wedding. There was a small Dutch contingent that made the trip over to Poland. It was fun, fun, fun! A ceremony in the town hall was followed by a reception in a grand palatial venue, dinner started at 6pm and the food continued until the wee hours of the morning. The Poles certainly know how to throw a good party with 110 litres of vodka for only 106 guests. And to help consume more food and more drink, there was a lot of dancing to a Polish band. The first dinner reception lasted until about 6am in the morning and the die-hard party people managed to get 2-3 hours of sleep before the second day of partying. One of the highlights of the first night, was the roast boar. To celebrate his daughter's wedding, the bride's father organised a wild boar to be roasted and at midnight the guests were advised to gather around the dance floor for a special surprise. I was expecting a bridal waltz or the wedding cake cutting ceremony. Wrong! The chef wheeled out a trolley onto the middle of the dance floor the roast boar and two massive candles in the middle. The bottom photo is about 15 different ways of preparing pork on a large platter (not from the boar but a regular pig). This was part of the feast from the Sunday (Day 2) reception.

And here's Yasmine

A few weeks ago, the delightful Yasmine was born in Adelaide. She was a whopping 4.11kg at birth and apparently is a hungry little one. Congratulations to my sister Viv and brother in law Giorgio. Thank God for skype. Paul and I were able to meet our little niece on the computer screen as mummy and grandma propped her up and zoomed the camera into her face for a full view.