highlights of the trip

Jz wana finish blogging about my Holland trip then I can do my other work

Let me first start by giving a brief introduction about Holland.

Netherlands aka Holland is aptly named as it means low (Neder) lands in Dutch. It's called that because about one-third of the country is below sea level. Dikes and dunes were built extensively to prevent the flooding in the country. I was suddenly reminded by my mum of a story which I heard long time ago about a little boy who sticked his thumb into a hole in a wall and that saved the whole village from flooding.

I only planned to visit a few places in Holland which included the famous spring garden Keukenhof Garden which opens for only 2 months every year and charge expensive entrance fee, the sex museum which I only heard about it before I left for Holland, the Red Light District in Amsterdam and the Chinese restaurant Hoi Tin which Steph (and the book) said serves very good dishes.

But it turned out that I visited a few other unexpected places which put a made my Holland trip a nice and enjoyable one.

When I was young, I used to help my sister cut up paper figures in magazines (she used to have a rather weird hobby of using the paper figures to replace the barbie dolls). The magazines ( the good old days 'Wings of Gold' and now 'Going Places') which my parents brought back from the airlines unfortunately became our victims.

I remembered coming across many picturesque pictures of a garden with long arrays of all kinds of flowers and I used to marvel at how beautiful the place was and hoped to visit there someday.

I also remembered when I was young, I had to wait for hours for my parents to pick me up so I used to read 星星周刊 (some sort of Sin Chew's weekly publication for primary school students). I read about the miniature village and was amazed at how small the buildings were. But when I saw that the miniature village was in Holland my heart dropped as I thought I would never have the chance to visit it.

Fast forward a few years later when I was in secondary school, I read a newspaper article of a body exhibition which was held in Singapore. The exhibition was about bodies which were very well dissected using modern technology thus revealing even to the very finest detail of every blood vessels. As I have always been interested in the human body I had always wanted to visit the exhibition but I knew that I would never have the chance as the likelihood of the body exhibition to come to Miri (which is a small town) is very small.

Those were my childhood dreams and somehow as I grew up and became busy with course work I have forgotten about them.

But when I was in Holland, I had the chance to visit them! Keukenhof garden was planned but the miniature village and the body exhibition was rather unexpectedly.

As there are many pictures which I took for each trip, for the following few days, I shall post an entry each day on each trip which I went to in Holland.