From Osnabruck

we are away for a bit. we are now in osnabruck, germany, where we staying at the house of a friend and former colleague (while they are enjoying some time off in the netherlands). jaaajjjj!! the house is gigantic. there is a piano, and i already cannot count the number of hours tim has played... good its a free standing house...

photowise.... this is all i can show you from osnabruck. yep, thats quite bad.... but... we have had quite some rain and im not good at balancing my umbrella in one hand and the camera in the other. this i took from the car. this traffic sign tells you that you can only enter the environmental zone of osnabruck when you have the green sticker on your car. to get the sticker, the car needs to meet the german/EU pollution standards. even if your car meets the standard, no sticker means you can get fined, regardless whether you have a german or foreign car. so.... luckily it was quite easy to obtain the sticker at a local inspection zone (providing the license plate was sufficient, together with a payment of 5 euros).

today its raining again, but lets see, perhaps i will take some more interesting pics!

Ladies only

the first stop on the german highway (when we went for a little getaway last month) had 2 parking spots that were for women only (it says "women's parking place. please keep these 2 spots free"). tim didnt read and put the car right in the second one... and had to repark because i said so.... here he tried to pose as a lady with my shades on. but well....

wikipedia tells me its a typical german thing (although in the netherlands they have them too; but i never saw them). its so that women who are alone have the best lit places and dont have to walk too far at night when its scary out. many parking garages have some right near the exit, or placed such that they are in sight of the security guys....

here in the netherlands we get more and more parking spots that are only for electrical cars (they are charging points at the same time). in our street 2 spots have been sacrificed for that. it made parking even harder for those non-electrical drivers. but i must say, they are often used.

Cemetery angel

when we visited trier in germany, we passed by a cemetery and walked around. there were quite some pretty statues on the graves, like this one above.

now its time for bed. tonight we move the clock 1 hour forwards again.... so from tomorrow onwards the days are really getting longer again...! too bad it costs one hour of sleep...

Fancy place?

we saw this castle while driving, yesterday. overlooking the vineyards and the little town at the banks of the mosel river.

this morning i didnt even try to upload a picture, the slow crappy internet. and... we had to pack and tidy up the bungalow, getting ready to go back home. yesterday evening many more people had arrived to the park, probably staying for a long weekend (again, most of them dutch!). we drove back and visited luik (liege) in belgium, where we wandered the flea market. too bad they were just packing up. then it was another 2+ hours to get back to amsterdam....

Hiking etc..

yesterday it was really sunny, so we decided to hike around in the neighborhood. we had a very brief description of several hikes around mont royal. choose one that would lead us down into the valley and back up again. in 3 hours. there were hardly signs so we choose the wrong turn a few times and had to go back. finally down we were not where we were supposed to be, according to the description... the names of most villages are somewhere on their vineyards, like above, but ofcourse we couldnt see any during our hike. and surely it started to rain while we left all rain clothes, umbrellas etc in the car. the clouds looked more threatening than it eventually was, but we didnt find the path back up and had to walk along the road. beeeehhh. that was not what we had planned. after 11.5 km we were back up.

then we drove around the neighborhood a bit, while we drove on this narrow bridge i took this pic.

Current view

well, the fog has gone done a bit further already... its going quite fast! we are on top of mont royal, and we had admired the view when we arrived monday evening. i was really excited yesterday to see the valley in the morning sun. but... when opening the curtains there was just thick fog. and it remained like that until we left (and i think quite a while after that). this morning it was really sunny, so i was sure that there was no fog... but... completely fogged up again when i opened the curtains. that was a few hours ago, but now, during breakfast, its slowly getting less....

yesterday we visited trier, the oldest german city. then in the evening we had a swim (theres a pool! so nice!) overlooking the other side of the valley. after that we watched some tv, and came to the conclusion its really more peaceful to live without a tv, like we do at home. i discovered there is some sort of reality program on the dutch tv (there are a lot of dutch tourists here, so they really cater to the dutch) where singles meet each other on a deserted island. while naked. and while being filmed naked. very, very weird. we also watched "opsporing verzocht". a program in which they ask the help of people in trying to find thiefs and criminals by showig their pictures and showing/telling what they did. it makes you afraid just to buy something at the store! (there are a lot of losers that are tricking especially old people they encounter in supermarkets to help them and while they get the "help" they ask for, they steal that person's bank card and take all their money).

ah, the internet connection is really crappy here. we have to pay for it, but often its not working, and half of the sites are not accessible or take ages to load. grrrrrr! time for some hiking in the neighborhood!