When Hayden’s parrain JT flew over from NYC, we took him to the quirky towns of Dutch Baarle-Nassau and Belgian Baarle-Haartog, all tangled up within each other like a jigsaw puzzle. Located across the Dutch border, twenty Belgian exclaves can be found here, with seven Dutch exclaves within the Belgian exclaves. This meant that Hayden could stand with one foot in the Netherlands and one foot in Belgium:

There is a “front door rule” that means that the position of the front door determines whether a house is classified as being in Belgium or the Netherlands. The nationality of the home is also indicated by a flag next to the house number. We visited the house in which the border goes straight through the middle of the door, and thus has two addresses (and two doorbells):

Loveren 2
2387 Baarle-Hertog
Belgium

and

Loveren 19
5111 Baarle-Nassau
The Netherlands

There was even a divisive border across my lunch, separating the savoury cheese and potato pancake from the sweet cherry crepe. I ate each in isolation and they were delicious.

Plus, JT hand-delivered to us a delicious Black & White cookie, all the way from New York City. Hayden is still too little, so I ate it for him.

This week Hayden visited his fourth country when we accompanied Adrian to a conference in The Netherlands. Less than two hours on the train took us from Brussels to Amsterdam. The hotel gave us a free upgrade to a bigger room to fit the cot, and we had a lovely view over the main square.

While Adrian and his students presented their work to an international crowd, Hayden and I took long walks along the canals. The air was brisk but most days we had beautiful blue skies that were perfect for sightseeing. Once the talks had finished for the day we met up with Adrian and his colleagues to talk science over a few beers.

We had breakfast each morning in the elegant Winter Garden of the hotel – a huge glass-roofed room built in 1881 and filled with tropical ferns and a long buffet table filled with tempting treats. I started each day with poffertjes (tiny pancakes) with sour cherry sauce, and ended the day with poffertjes with maple syrup.

In between pancakes we managed to do some shoe shopping, as well as visiting the Wetheimpark and the Resistance Museum. A lovely way to mark the end of my maternity leave and squeeze in one more mini break before I go back to work next week.

We celebrated another beautiful Spring weekend with a trip to Holland to see their tulips at Keukenhof, the world’s largest tulip garden – the Netherland’s answer to the Floriade of Australia.

Adrian and I started our train trip at Brussel-Zuid. Various friends boarded our trains in Brussel-Centraal, Mechelan, and Den Haag, in what Cedric termed a “logistical triumph”. He also warned us that statistically the Brussels-Amsterdam local train was prone to the most delays in Benelux, however we were in luck and we made our connection with minutes to spare. A bus then took us from Leiden to Keukenhof, and we stepped through the front gates of the chateau to a magnificent garden and greeted with the sounds of an old-fashioned automated pipe organ.

In the 15th century, Keukenhof (“Kitchen-gardens“) was originally the site for the herbs and vegetables for Teylingen, held by the Countess Jacqueline of Bavaria, converted into a flower landscape by Jan David Zocher and his son Louis Paul Zocher in 1850, and then first opened as a tulip exhibition in 1949 to promote the Dutch flower export industry.

There are 15 kilometers of walking paths over 52 hectares, and over 7 million flower bulbs hand-planted. They even hire 12 swans for the duration of the opening period, fill their ponds with dutchings, and have a “t Hofje” children’s farm filled with chicks, lambs, calves, and piglets. It was a beautiful day, and even though it was filled with people there was plenty of space for everyone.

I found out afterwards that bridal parties and their photographers get free entry, although it’s unlikely that I would be able to fit into my wedding dress at the moment.

By the afternoon some of our party were feeling a little tuliped out, so we made our way back to Leiden for an afternoon of bar hopping along the canals. We finished up at Annie’s for dinner, sitting on a floating platform and watching the procession of boats filled with party-goers celebrating another fine afternoon of light and warmth.

For a country that is so close, we have not given the Netherlands the attention that it deserves. We were nudged to explore more of it when Adrian’s dad and his dad’s wife came to visit us a while back. We stayed the big bright city of Amsterdam and took a day trip to Haarlem. While in Amsterdam, we had lunch at the delicious Pancake Bakery for me, and dinner on a pizza and icecream cruise for Adrian. We visited the wax figures at Madame Tussauds, and I was amused to discover that Adrian had previously thought it was a serious museum of important historical figures.

The next day, we took the train to Haarlem, a delightful and fascinating town just outside Amsterdam. We saw signs to “Molen De Adriaan” and decided to take a detour. We discovered the most delightful windmill, and ventured inside. The woman asked us if we wanted to take a look in the museum upstairs. It was a few euros each, but we decided to splash out. We were astonished and delighted to discover that we had bought a private tour of the entire windmill. Our tour guide was an old man with an extensive knowledge of mills and wind. He told us about the secret signals that the windmills used that were dependent on the orientation of the vanes, how to convert circular motion into up-and-down motion, and even took us all the way to the top.