Our European Adventure

Today we just hung aroudn the house and recuperated from our big night out. We went back to Lemmer to get some coffee and watch the boats sail by. It was a really nice day for it. Later on we went back to the Binker to watch a hot dog eating contest. It was a bit boring since it lasted for 45 minutes. It was funny becuase about half the contestants were out with us the night before and drank a lot of beer. They were not doing to well in the competition as you could imagine. The winner ended up eating 15 foot long hot dogs in 45 minutes. After that we went home and watched some TV. Daniela and I got ready to leave. We are leaving tomorrow morning.

Today Daniela and I went to watch Martijn play soccer with his team. He plays on his city's team and they were playing another city about an hour away. It was a perfect day for soccer. Unfortunately his team lost 0-2. I got a lot of good pics of him playing so that was good. Later that night we went to the local bar called "Da Binker" (that's the real name I did not make it up) to watch Czech Republic play Holland in a world cup qualifying game. We got to meet some of Martijn's friends there and they were still nice to me even after I told them I wanted the Czech Republic to win . Well the Czech Republic also lost 0-2. It was a sad day for soccer. I did get made fun of a lot after that. After the game we went to Lemmer, a town near Martijn's where we ate dinner the first night, for some dancing. The place was packed with people and the DJ was playing anything from Old American Rock to Dutch music. I never felt so short in my entire life. The averate height of the people there had to be at least 6'2" even girls!!! Martijn's friends had to pratically get down on their knees to have a conversation with me. They were shocked when I told them I was 24. I guess I looked a lot younger... oh well. We had a lot of fun dancing and hanging out with the Dutch guys.

So Daniela and I stayed up all night again in the hostel in order to catch our shuttle at 5:30 in the morning. We were entertained by some Australian servicemen on leave from Iraq. We explained to them we needed to stay awake and they did their best playing cards and telling us jokes to keep us up. When we went down to the street to catch our shuttle, we waited 15 minutes for it. I finally got fed up and went back up to the hostel to call a cab. I was pretty agitated becuase I did not want to miss the flight to Holland. The cab driver can right away and got us to the airport in no time. Once we got there we found out our flight was delayed, they told us due to weather conditions. We were both really tired and passed out on these really uncomfortable airport chairs. Two hours later we boarded our plane (Martijn told us later that the delay was due to a WWII bomb being uncovered at the airport). We finally made our way to Amsterday central station and then on to Lelystad where Martijn picked us up. He drove us to his town, Criel, which is a small farming town of about 2000 people. The drive was amamzing. There were windmills lining the road and on the otherside was the huge lake. It was so beautiful. Martijn has such a nice house right in the the center of town. It was so nice to be in a house again. We went to the market to do some shopping and I decided that I was going to cook for everyone all weekend. We did a major food shopping and completely filled up his fridge. We ended the night going out onto the dyke and looking up at the stars. It was really cool.
The following day after breakfast we went to see Martijn's farm that he works on with his dad and brother. It was really impressive. They farm tulips as well as seed potatoes. It's really high tech how the do things. They have machines to do just about everything. They rent out a piece of their land to a sheep farmer. As soon as I saw that I ran out into the field to pet some sheep. I love sheep. I walked up slowly to them as to not scare them and one of them came up to me for a scratch. It was so cool. That made my day. Later on we went to this really great seaside town about 10 minutes way to get some drinks. It reminds me of towns on the coast of Maine. There were really nice boats there. We finished the night with dinner and watched a movie on the couch. I love that the movies are in English here with Dutch subtitles so we can watch TV.