A fun day out, part 1

 

I found this photo in a box full of old photos.

 

 

No, I didn’t. I took it today, when we went to the ‘Buiten Bezig Dag’, a fair that was held in the grounds of Havezathe Mensinge in Roden. (A ‘havezathe’ is a fortified building, originally a large farm. In the 17th century you had to be the owner of a havezathe in order to be able to get a knighthood.)

Buiten = Outside
Bezig = Busy
Dag = Day

We didn’t know what to expect, but hey… the weather was nice, we had a couple of hours to spare (a luxury), and I thought it might be a fun opportunity to take some photos. On our way there we followed this beautiful old car. Until it took a left turn where we had to take the right one.

 

As we were at the entrance of the fair, we encountered some friends of us who were just leaving. We hadn’t seen them for a while and it was nice to have a little chat with them at such an unexpected place and time.

Havezathe Mensinge

Pink seemed to be the colour of the day…

Interesting…

 

And this smartly dressed gentleman was doing something intriguing…

…something I’ve done myself a couple of times; although I’ve never dressed up for the occasion…
He was dowsing. In Dutch that is ‘wichelroedelopen’.
I’ve used a dowsing rod to find water. Long story. And, although I was quite sceptic, I’ve discovered that it actually works.

These rather attractive guys are architects.
I liked their inventive use of straw to keep the wind from blowing their designs all over the place.
They also had a market stall, but used this as their ‘office’.

 

More mad hats…

Creative metalwork….

I’m not quite sure what the red metal object is.
But I dó know that the little stall in the background is the smallest ‘poffertjeskraam’ I’ve ever seen.
More about that in the next ‘100 things I love about the Netherlands’-post. (Mr. Rhymeswithplague will be very pleased. As far as I know ‘poffertjes’ are a real Dutch speciality.)

 

There was lots more fun stuff going on at this ‘Busy Outside Day’-fair. More about that in the next post.

Don’t miss it…

100 things I love about the Netherlands: 6

The Dutch skies,

made famous by Dutch painters from the Haagse School (the Hague School), a group of painters who worked in The Hague somewhere between 1860 and 1900. They rebelled against the opinion of that time, to idealize the subjects that were painted, and tried to give a more realistic image of their subjects. Painters like Hendrick Willem Mesdag and Jacob Maris wanted to capture the atmosphere of the landscape in their paintings and stay as true to reality as possible, especially focussing on the light.

Of course they didn’t have a Canon EOS 40D camera. Life would have been so much easier for them.

Thursday’s Trifles

Thursday’s Trifles are based on what I’ve read in our local newspaper, the Dagblad van het Noorden.

Miraculous resurrection

A dead chicken came back to life after almost an hour. Reason for our fun loving newspaper editors to interview the owner of the miraculous chicken.
“Mouth-to-beak-resuscitation?”
“I’m not crazy!”
“What happened?”
“We came home from a barbecue party. My daughter found chicken Curry floating in our pool. Dead.”
“The chicken couldn’t swim?”
“The chicken couldn’t swim.”
“And then?”
“I wanted to dump the dead chicken in the garbage container. But the children thought that was sad, so we were going to bury it the next day in stead. Since I work on an ambulance I started to massage the chicken. You know, in one hand the chicken and in the other hand a pint.
But first I held the chicken upside down. Lots of water came out. And after about 45 minutes it regained consciousness.”
“A miracle?”
“I don’t know anything about chickens. We keep them for fun.”
“Was Curry shoved into the pool?”
“You’re thinking of attempted murder? I think it just flew in the pool.”
“Maybe the neighbours…?”
“Our garden is enclosed. And the chickens don’t even cluck.”
“You keep more than one chicken?”
“Sateh may have escaped too. But she was back in the coop again.”
“Curry? Sateh? Will they end up in the frying pan eventually?”
“No, if that was the case it would have been better if I’d chopped Curry up into a pan immediately. She was freshly dead!”