There and back again

Hello again! I am writing from my aunt and uncle’s house again… hopefully this will go through. :) It’s been two days since I last wrote. I have been all over Holland in those two days! Not being a very big country, that’s not hard to do. Let me try to sum up… Yesterday we went to Freisland which is where my father grew up. Freisland is a Dutch province but it has its own language that, to me, sounds exactly like Dutch, but Mom tells me it is not at all the same. I got to see where my father grew up, where he was born, where he went to school etc etc. It was soo fascinating. We also went to this graveyard in Schraad where all my Elgersma ancestors are buried.. Man, I’ve never seen so many dead Elgersma’s in one place! I have a new reason to love Holland… this country is full of wandering cats! They are everywhere!!!! We walked through a little fishing town today called Markem and I saw at least 4 or 5.. most of which were friendly. Yesterday too I made friends with many a cat. And if there are no cats then there are sheep, chickens, horses or cows! I love it! My family was joking that while they’re here to see the sights.. I’m here to see the animals! :) Today we headed back to my aunt and uncle’s house but we took most of the day to get there. We stopped in a World War Two museum that had 7 bunkers from World War Two. You could walk through them and stuff.. It was soo incredible! I managed to smack my head on one of the entrances – yeah, that one smarted – that was hard cement. I don’t know how I managed to do these things. While at the museum, my dad ran into people that knew his family.. we talked to all the volunteers there.. each for about 10 minutes.. what friendly people! Too bad I can’t understand their language. One of the men knew my dad’s uncle .. and then when we were watching the video in the museum, my dad’s aunt was one of the 5 people who was interviewed in the movie!! She lived across the Iiselmeer (big lake) from the bunkers. You could see her house from the top of the bunkers (she’s no longer living so we didn’t visit her). So that was really neat… it made me proud to be an Elgersma! Other than that we have been relaxing. Tomorrow Trish and I leave for England. I’m a little nervous because we won’t be getting much sleep… by the time we get to our hostel it will be about 1:00 and then we have to leave again around 6:30… Oh well, we can sleep in the train. So I don’t know if I’ll be able to write for a couple days.. I believe our first hostel does not have internet access and we will be there for 2 nights. I’ll have to fill you all in when we get to Killarney. Holland is such a wonderful country, but a little wet right now. For the most part, the weather has been good, but we have hit rain more than once. Today at the bunker museum, we left to go to the car and it started to pour buckets… and since we were on a dike it hit us hard! :) We had to cross a bridge and walk a little bit to get to the car so by the time we got there we were absolutely drenched!!!! I hate sitting in the car in wet clothes. We stopped at the first gas station we could find and changed in the bathroom… they gave us some weird looks! Speaking of bathrooms, it’s kind of a game here to figure out how the different toilets here work. For the most part, they have a button on the top that you push, but my aunt’s house has a cord and other ones have been different too… nothing like in Canada.Anyways… I have been enjoying all the time spent here.. Trish and I slept in the loft yesterday which was pretty fun.. We watched a lightening storm from the top of the house. I actually finished a book which surprised me – Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. A very good read I might add. Well, time to go watch the Olympics.. in Dutch. We have found out that Canada now has 6 medals! PROPS -- Way to go! Although we’re still not beating this tiny country over here… But we still don’t know what the medals were for.. if someone wants to email me with some info I won’t mind. Alright – talk to you later… doeg