Monday May 18, 2009

Hallo,
We are very busy but this is how you travel in Europe-gone all day and your hotel/home is only for sleeping. Shane and I (we're staying in the same home in Kerkrade, everyone else is staying alone with families and are all in different staaden (cities)) were picked up last this morning at 8:45 after a wonderful breakfast of yoghurt from a milk carton, fresh toast with brood (butter) and salami and fresh cheese, fruit and koffee-yes, I have now had coffee twice. You can not do anything without having coffee. When we get to a place they say hello, well, let's have coffee. I decided not to fight it and it is good! With lots of milk and sugar.

The theme of this area is figuring out how to keep people living here, bring tourism, and bring jobs. It is similar to people that used to live in hasings or something and are now moving to Jacksonville and there would be no jobs in hastings anymore. (only instead of people leaving hastings, we are just selling the farmland and developing it-actually having more people live there) We visited the Kerkrade Museum Monday where they are remodeling. They will now showcase products made in this region and how people use the products like the heart pacer, chemicals, and such. Then people will appreciate the area more if they know about it. The area supported 200,000 people with coal mining from 1830 to 1964 when one day the government closed all mines because it was cheaper to extract from Australia. People were out of jobs and very poor and left the region similar to Pittsburg. Today the cities are still shrinking as people want to live in Amsterdam and people here are getting old. They are all trying to figure out how to get people to stay here. Now they have a zoo, an indoor ski slope built from the old mines, mining museum, turning black (coal mining) to green by being carbon neutral and having more green space, more tourism, having a steam railway, and a theme park about the region. They want people to be proud locally. We visited an abbey from 1500? It was nice. Then we went to a castle and had open faced sandwiches (hugh and susie know) with fresh bread, fresh cheese, and smoked meats, asparagus soup, and salad with orange juice. The City of Kerkrade spoke with us again about how to get people to stay here, how to bring tourism (amsterdam citizens will drive here for a day, but not stay the night). They want to have green spaces, advertise the castles as resorts, utilize belgium and germany which are very close, etc. We had fleckt or local pies with rice or fruit in the middle like apple pie. Then we went to Gaia Park (zoo) where they have won awards for their more natural habitat. For example the monkeys are only separated from the public by water because they don't swim. The giraffes are separated by not being able to climb out of such a high wall and we were face to face with them in the open, etc. It was nice because they have similar animals, but I''ve never had a guided tour of a zoo. THEN, yes there's more, we went to a cooking club where we thought we would be the cooks. Instead, 12 men cooked for us (yes, men only you know I don't like this). It was a four course meal with lobster over spinach salad, then vegetable lasagne, then ostrich with a pastry cover with vegetables and potatoes, then ice cream with caramel sauce with puff pastries with homemade slagroom (whipped cream) and different wine with each course including sweet wine for dessert. We were there until 11:00pm and everyone was nice and we got to practice much dutch and they thought it was weird how much we pay for insurance and of course we had coffee! They kept assuring me that the wives come once a year and they cook for the wives-I don't think that counts. We were ready to sleep and our house mom gave me another blanket and we sleep with the windows open. Tot ziens (see you later), Terri Keeping record:How many times we have had koffee:Sunday May 17-3Monday-May 18-5Tuesday-May 19-4Total-11 How many times I have walked into the herlen bathroom (men's)2 Dutch mistake of the day:Ik bedonkt neit.Should have said "ik begriept neit"-I don't understand. Instead I said something similar to bedonka donk (or in the country song big country butt"".) Not only did the dutch man laugh at me, but so did Sarah, Jason and I!