Traipsing About on the Continent

Hey all, we are still plugging away here in Ireland, working every moment that we are not travelling... Looking forward to some visitors in the summer, and enjoying being hosts for the hospitality club, as we had been guests so many times earlier this year.

We did manage to fit another week of travelling in to our working weeks, at the beginning of May, one of the most memorable trips to date! We flew to Amsterdam for a couple of days, and enjoyed the cosmopolitan-ess of the city, basking in the sun, visiting all the major sites, admiring the canals, flowers, and of course all of the great bike paths! We can't wait to come back to bike around this cyclist's paradise, all flat, big bike lanes, even traffic lights for bikes! Then we met Mike's Grandma and Grandpa Germain in a little town, and joined them on their tour for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Holland, a big portion of which was performed by the Canadian forces, which they were both a part of, as was Carli-Ann's Grandpa Gord, we learned while we were there. We attended a ceremony with hundreds of veterans at the Holton Canadian military cemetary, heard Adrienne Clarkson speak, saw more mounties than we had ever seen in our lives in Canada, and were sprayed by thousands of poppies scattered by a military helicopter over the cemetary and those gathered to honour the occasion. It was a really interesting experience for us to be a part of this, especially as this could be the last big celebration of this kind, and it was wonderful to see grandparents...sort of felt like we were back in Canada for a couple of days!

The next day, we hitchhiked across Holland, and then on to another family event in East Germany. Carli-Ann's Grandpa Engelman's family was having a reunion, and even though we only knew two great aunts from Canada (and that was nearly all who spoke English!), we were very brave and showed up in the little town. We were surrounded and embraced by 200 elderly family and village members who were orginally from Egerland, a region that is now in the Czech Republic, but has (or had, perhaps) its own dialect, which we were treated to in song and speeches and history lessons. After a night of sauerkraut and cake and elixirs and hospitality, it was cool to realize that there is a whole side of the family that we had never met, even if not many of their younger members joined in the party. But we got a few email addresses of people to visit when we return, and chugging past the windmills and golden canola fields and blossoming fruit trees on the slow train back to the nearest town, we definitely felt like we got the real East German experience!

To top off our trip, we spent 18 hours on a lay over in London, where another newly acquainted family member, Jim, who used to be a bobby, then a cabby, took us on a taster-tour of the city, and we met even more family! We are looking forward to possibly setting up in London perhaps next winter to work for a while, and it will be much easier with someone to look out for us in the metropolis!

We'll update again when something exciting happens, and with our pace so far this year, I am sure it will be soon! See yous!