Bonjour!

Our apartment in Paris was really quite cool. I think that it was made for 1 person, because there are no doors, beside the one on the front door, and the one to the toilet. The bedroom, kitchen, living room, and bathroom are all open. The toilet and the bathroom are on the opposite sides of the apartment. There is only 1 bedroom, but the two chairs in the living room fold out as beds. The guy who owns the apartment was originally from Paris, but he has been living in the states for the ast 3 years. To get upstairs, we got a tiny, tiny, little elevator.

Traffic in Paris is INSANE!!! On some of the roads, they don't even have lanes. Around the Arc de Triumph there is a huge circle where you drive around, and there are no lines or anything. The drivers just attempt to find their way around the circle without crashing into someone else. On our way from the train to our apartment, it tookk us over 45 minutes to go a very short way. Crazy.

McDifference: The Netherlands

In this McDonalds there weren't a lot of differences. The had this thing called the McKroken. Krokens are like mashed potatoes with nutmeg and some other things that we couldn't figure out in it. Then in is deepfried. It turns out looking like a brown cylinder. This is a very popular fast-food dish in most places in the Netherlands.
The other difference was a Chicken Sate.
The colouring of the building was very subdued- browns and tan.

Anne Frank

Anne Frank and her family were jews in WW11. They decided to hide instead of trying to flee the country, which would probably end up with them being caught and killed. Anne's family and a few neighbours (there were 8 people in total) hid in the back of a warehouse that was part of where her father used to work. They lived in a total of 6 rooms, which were actually spacier then I would have thought. With the help of her fathers' boss and a few helpful others, they managed to remain safe for over 2 years. Then on August the 4th, 1944 they were found out by the police (who gave them up was never discovered). Annes sister, Margot, died soon after, followed by her mother, in a Jewish camp. Finally, only 1 month before liberation, Anne died too. Only Annes' father Otto lived through the war.
During the war Anne kept diaries about her life in hide out, which the building they called The Secret Annexe. She also wrote stories and poems. She even started writing a book titled 'The Secret Annexe' based on her diaries after the Prime Minister announced that he would want diaries and letter refering to the war when the war was over.
After the family had been taken away, one of the familys' helpers came back to keep what belongings she could in case she found the family again after the war. Among these things, she found a crate with all of Anne's writings in it. When it became clear the Anne had died, she gave these writings to Otto. Otto answered his late daughters wish to be a writer, and he published a compilation of her diaries a few years later.
The house itself is quite drab and unfurnshed (as Otto meant it to be), but they gave portions of Annes' diary pages to read, as well as quotations on the wall to read, and some artifacts from the war. Anne had had a great interest in movie stars, so she had had several posters and such on the wall of her room, and Otto had cut them down when they had been doing renovations, and he put them back exactly where they had been when the renos were done. Since the rooms were unfunished, the people who ran the museum made little models of the rooms so you could see what the house had originally looked like.
I bought the original book of the publication of Anne Franks Diary. But at the book store there were actually several different variations, including one of just her poems and stories. All in all, quite an interesting trip.

Day on the Town- Prostitution and Marijuana

Amsterdam is full of canals. So we decided to take a canal cruise through them. It was pretty cool. They spoke English, Dutch, German and I think French. They took us down several canalsand told us the names and reasons behind different canals.

On the canals their were all of these people living in canal boats. Some of them were in really bad shape.

They also pointed out different buildings. There were these two, same colour with different coloured shutters, that one was slightly taller than the other, that they called the Father and Son houses. The tiniest house on the river was 1 door wide, and 3 windows (stories) high. I have no clue how someone could live in that!

We went to the Red Light Distict. Woa! In the Netherlands, being a prostitute is comletely legal. They figure if its going to happen anyways, they might as well make it legal and be able to control it, rather than run after it. All of the prostitutes have to go to a doctors at least once a year to get a check-up. On the street were all of these buildings that had these huge windows where women (and a few men) of various sizes, colours, and ages were posing in lingerie. And of course all of these were connected to hotels and such. On that street there were also buildings that housed 'Peep shows' and such enterainment like that. I find it kinda sad that some people sell themselves to make a living.

Another thing that is legal is Marijuana. According to the law everyone is allowed to grow up to 5 plants for their own pleasure. Everywhere there were cafes that you could walk in and smoke pot. They even had starter kits to help you grow Marijunana, and suckers made of the stuff.

Just to say, people in Europe smoke waaaaay more than they do in Canada. At least Ireland has managed to ban smoking in their pubs.

The Rijks Museum

The Rijks Museum is tied with the Van Gogh Museum for being the prodominant museum in Amsterdam. Most of the paintings in it are from the 17th century, when the Netherlands were quite powerful.

There were some exquisite portraits (and some of some very fat Lords), beautiful still life paintings (my favourite being one of flowers, fruit and bugs- they all seem to have bugs in their still life paintings), and even some extremely detailed doll houses.

Doll houses back then were not just for children. Full, adult women would commision extrordinary doll houses as a sign of wealth and status that they could show to thier friends and acquaintances. One woman even had almost all of the pieces of furniture, dolls, china, etc. in hers made specially so everything was exactly to scale.

The most famous artist their is this guy named Rembrant, who was apparantly very popular in his time for his work with shadow and light on his subjects. He, unlike many other artists, also had several different styles, ranging from coarse, quick strokes to small, detailed strokes.

All in all, the Rijks museum was quite fascinating.

Amsterdam!

We left Rose and Johannes on train. We landed in Amsterdam 2 hours later.

Amsterdm is a very large, bustling city. They have several types of transportation, but above all: bikes rule. Everything comes after bikes. They even have their own seperate roads parallel to the other roads. Bikes come first, then the Trams, after that the padestrians, and finally the poor cars, vans and normal buses.

There, we finally rented our first apartment. It consisted of 3 rooms: a bedroom, a kitchen and a bathroom. The bedroom was a good size, but once squished with 3 beds, it seemed little fairly quickly. The kitchen was very nice, with a full sized stove, a small oven, a microwave and a tiny fridge. All of the cupboards were an awesome bright red. The bathroom reeked of cleaner. I think that the cleaning lady didn't wipe up after herself all that well. That definately hurried my showers in the morning!

McDifference: England

Sorry, this is back a country, but I forgot to do it before! ;D

England's McDonalds is quite similar to our McDonalds. But there are a few twists which seem quite English to me. They have pancakes, and they have something called Oatso. I'm guessing that's something like porridge. They have bagels and jam, and tea, which I think we both have, but they are shown much more predominantly here. English McDonalds also has a spicy veggie sandwich, fish fingers, donuts and a fruit bag (gasp, I know!).

Julie-anne worked at McDonalds, and she allowed me to take a picture of her uniform.

Rose and Johannes's

We left Mennorodes sadly, saying goodbye to all of the staff, but happy to get onto the next leg of the trip. My family took a train from Nunspeet to Acruum, which was a mere hour and a half. We we were picked up by Johanis.

My mom was a trainee in her youth, which means she came to Germany and exchanged with a German youth to expercience german life. During this year, she met up with many other Canadians including Rose. Years later Rose and her husband Johannes now have been kind enough to allow us to stay with them for a few days.

Among the things we did while we were there: go to a cool museum and that made it look like we were underwater, see a Dike that split a lake and the ocean, and see the church and home of Menno Simons, the person who started Mennonites.

Church in the Nethelnds

Church in the Netherlands. I'm sure that churches vary greatly across the country, but we managed to find one of the most conservative churches out there.
At the front, there was a parking lot for cars, and a another 5-6 racks just for bikes. There were all of these people biking in their Sunday dresses, with little kids sitting on the back, just biking to church. It was kinda bizarre.
We had driven around to see which churches hadn't started yet, so we were only a few minutes early to the service. We assumed that we could just sneak into the back. No way, hose! That place was PACKED. There was almost no space at all. I think that all of the familys had their own assigned seat. The Usher, after frantically looking around, managed to finally squeeze us between an older man and a woman with a bunch of kids. They gave us a bible and a hymn book, and were done with us.
Unlike, my church, were people can pass wearing a nice shirt and jeans, these people were in complete sunday gettup. The only colour was black or grey, besides the one brave boy who had a blue shirt under his grey jacket. All of the women (children included) had hats. All the way from Burrets to elegant flowered hats. My sister and I felt very conspicuous not wearing a hat.
Personally, the most interesting thing about the service was the singing. In the hymn book, all there were were words. There were no notes at all. When they started singing it was incredable! Every person was singing as loudly as possible, and the church was filled with a kind of unearthly beauty. They sang e-v-e-r-y s-i-n-g-l-e s-y-l-l-a-b-l-e. They held every syllable for at least a 2 seconds. It took such a long time. Luckily, my Mom could figure out where the song was on the page, so we could follow along.
Besides that, I found the service to be quite long and not completly enjoyable. (Btw, there were 64 lightbulbs on the chandalier above me).

Dykes

The Netherlands are almost completely surrounded in water. So, when the water rises, it does terrible damage to the country. In the early 50's there was a terrible flood where a bunch of people died, and even more were displaced from there homes. Because of ths, the Government decided to begin something called the Delta project. This project pretty much just means that they built dykes across almost all of the rivers that flow into the ocean so that they could moniter and change the amount of water going out to sea, or coming into the rivers. This project took about 14 years to complete.
We went to go see one of these dykes. To build it, they made these huge diamond shaped pieces of concrete, with big holes in it, that they strapped together with pieces of metals to create it. We got to take this tour that took us through it. Inside there are these huge hydrolic motor thingys that help lifts the arms to moniter the water level. It is pretty huge :D The view from the outside is pretty amazing as well. The ocean is a very mysterious thing to look at. There was also an a nice view of some wind mills :D They have those everywhere!! I think that Wind and Water are the Netherlands primary source of energy.

The Netherlands

Wandering around the Netherlands is an interesting thing to do :D All the people here are really nice. In school they all learn like 4 languages, so most of them can speak English, and are happy to do so, with an accent of course.
In the towns and cities all of the roads have parallel roads just for bikes. Bikes totally rule this country. When my mom and I went for a bike ride in the forest, the bike path was paved and the other road was all mud and in terrible disrepair. If a bike is in a cars way, the cars will wait, even on the highway, without honking or anything.
As a weekend activity, people will hang around their harbour and fish for fun! They just stand there and catch all the little fish and throw them back. All of these little 10 year old boys do this in groups, right next to the seniors. All of these towns have canals in them that lead into the harbours.
There are tons of quirks that this country has.

The Canadian War Memorial

In WWII the Canadians liberated the Dutch people from the Germans. Because of this, the Dutch people were very thankful towards the Canadians. They made a specific burial place for the Canadian soldiers who had died. There are these two big buildings on the side of the entrance that that have engravings that told of all the different parts of the Army that served. Along the wall, there were new wreaths of flowers that showed that people still cared about the sacrifices the Canadians made.

In the graveyard there were over 200 Canadian graves, and around 30 graves for English and American soldiers. In the centre there was a huge obilisk-like thing that had a huge sword on top of it at the centre of the graves.

It was very humbling to see all of the people who are buried over-seas, and all because of a cause that they believed in that saved (and lost) so many lives.

Mennorode

I Love Mennorode. I just had to get that out there :p Mennorode is this really big building, origianally a Mennonite retreat centre, but now since there are less Mennonites in Netherlands, it caters to a larger cliental. The building is surrounded by a beautiful forrest that is really different from our forests, because parts of the ground is completely clean from various debris and you can see really far into it, which is kind of disconcerning. The inside is pretty much white, but there are tons of windows and a really sweet display/show of pictures of abstract objects. The rooms are pretty standard, two single beds per room, a fairly nice bathroom and a t.v. that mainly has programming in Dutch. It is really wierd to hear Phineas and Ferb in Dutch.
The best thing about Mennorodes though, handsdown, is THE FOOD!!!!!!! Oh, it is AMAZING!! Heres a typical meal plan:
For breakfast there is a buffet table thing with like 10 different types of bread, some really delcious granola, and some not so delicious oat stuff, 3 types of yogurt, some kind of canned fruit, and a couple types of sliced cheese and meats. On another buffet table there is usually bacon, scrambled eggs and hard-boiled eggs and fresh fruit.

Lunch has that same buffet table of bread and granola and stuff, but the yogurt and canned fruit is gone, replaced by more sliced meats and cheeses. On the other buffet table is usually either some kind of noodle or rice mixed with various tiny pieces of meats and sauce and stuff, and something deep-fried. Once there was deep-fried cheese ( beyond description) once, fish sticks, and there is also this patty of chinese-like noodles with a delcious sauce that is deep-fried into this circular thing. Kinda wierd, but really good. There is also a salad bar, and usually two different types of soups. But there is never a large piece of meat.

Supper still has that same bread and meat buffet thing. This time though, you have to sit down when you come in, and these servers come and tell you the option of usually two kinds of appetizers (usually soup). After that you go to the buffet table and there is usually some kind of fish, some other kind of meat, something vegitarian, a couple types of veggies, and ofter several different types of potatoes done in different ways. There is still the salad bar there as well. After that delcious meal there is an interesting dessert. There is always, ALWAYS whipped cream. Like a plate of straight whipped cream. Then theres usually some flavoured whipped stuff. If your lucky there might be icecream or something.

Kay, I know its wierd I went into detail with the food, but it is just SO GOOD.
But to get to stay here we have to work. Mostly we are just washing windows, but we have also hoed a garden and washed some mouldy seats. Fun, hey?

Goodbye England!

I should really be used to waking up early, but 4 a.m. is still really quite hard to manange :p But we had to rise early once again to leave on a plane. Des was really kind, and offered us a ride to the airport. After a helpful moment with Erin (who gave us fruit and water) we were off! The flight went totally smoothly (thankfully) and was a lot shorter that we thought it would be. We landed in Amsterdam, Netherlands(Holland). We took a train from there to Nunspeet. A taxi was called, and we got a ride to our new, temporary home- Mennorode