Alkmaar and surrounds

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  Alkmaar, Noord-Holland, Netherlands
Sunday, August 29, 2010

This morning Lisa's great-uncle Age and his wife Metje took us for a walk through the old city of Alkmaar, which was completely deserted.  We then drove to Broeker Veiling, and had a look at the museum.  That was very interesting - it is a land of many many islands, where vegetables used to be grown.  They would then be transported to the vegetable market by boat and sold by way of Dutch Auction.  Now the islands have been built on instead.

After lunch we went to see some traditional windmills and a pumping station.  Again we learnt a lot about the moving of water to make more land available - a lot of the country is below sea level.  We learnt that this was started back in the 1500's!  Clever people.  We saw a windmill in use for moving water, and because it was such a windy day the parts were really moving quickly.

It rained again off and on all day and there was a cold wind.  I'm told it has been a good summer but we have just struck it badly (it has rained every day of our time in the Netherlands!)

Back in Alkmaar we backed up all our photos onto two external harddrives, so we could clear off the memory cards.  About 800 photos so far :-)  Some of those will form panoramics later on though.  We also did some washing and Lisa failed to think about the fact Matt's new red sleeping bag liner had not been washed before so put it (since it was silk) in with the woollens, ... which are now all splotchy pink.  So annoying as one merino top had been oatmeal in colour so really soaked up the red dye!  And my favourite merino tank which was blue-green is now a hideous blue-purple-ick!  The clothes that are ruined were fairly new also :-(

In the evening we went out to a Greek Restaurant for dinner.  We had never eaten Greek before but it was very nice.  We walked back to the apartment through the carnival/fair.

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Hall in a home for older single women	The town hall	image	An old boat for transporting vegetables
Dutch auction at Broeker Veiling	Windmills!	Matt and the milk pails	Lisa and the working windmill we looked in
At a Greek restaurant for dinner	Age and Metje out for dinner

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