A city like Leeuwarden is very interesting on the historical point of view. However, when you go somewhere, you want to see more of the country than a few old buildings in a single city.
Kite surfer
So we went out of the city, different places, different things to see… You don’t want to miss the sea if you’re going to Holland, right?
Going from Ukraine to Holland is a matter of hours. Not much to see, even less when the weather is not cooperating. Arriving after some bright sunshine above the clouds left me with a 16C and heavy clouds in Amsterdam Schiphol.
Canals and bikes
No problems, I wasn’t going to stay in Amsterdam anyway. After the flight, a small trip of a few hours to Leeuwarden, a small city in the north of Holland.
Whenever you go on travel or holiday with a camera you come back with pictures. Some will be the obligatory pictures like the jet engine of the plane you’re about to board…
Huge and powerful
And you will have a lot of other pictures, with which you do not have a complete story or a complete set of pictures for a story. Here are some random pictures of our travel to Ukraine and Holland in the past five weeks.
In Holland we have some old villages that still function in the way they did around the turn of the century. The previous century, that is.
Toll house, no one gets in without paying
Now I’ve been talking about many places where life is like it was a hundred years ago, here it is preserved as a working and living museum. In other words daily life continues as it did a hundred years ago.
Oh, the beach! What a pleasure to go to the beach on a nice afternoon! Wherever that beach may be, we always think about sunshine and hot sand. We decided to go to the beach near Bergen aan Zee in Holland. Noord-Holland, one of the two provinces that give the name Holland to The Netherlands.
On the road to the beach
You wouldn’t expect a blazing sun in mid-September in Holland…
And we didn’t get one. But the beach was full of activity, despite the not so clement sky.
Whenever someone talks about a leaning tower, the image of the leaning tower of Pisa in Italy comes to mind. The famous tower where Galileo Galilei dropped weights to demonstrate the principle of mass.
Majestic
In Leeuwarden, Holland stands another leaning tower called the Oldehove. This one, apart from leaning towards one side is also crooked as a banana. It also leans more than the tower of Pisa. Galileo would have been able to do even more experiments here.
This is a “slogan” that is written on many schools in Ukraine and probably in Russia as well. This is one of the mottos from an illustrious father of the Soviet Union: V. I. Lenin.
Famous saying by a famous man
Now I am not a fan of everything he had to say and everything he put in motion to create the Soviet Union, but this little gem dates from far before the Russian Revolution, probably around 1909 and for me it holds the truth. Learning is an important part of life and should never be considered finished.
We are in Konotop, a small city in the north of Ukraine. The city was first mentioned in 1635 in various documents as Novoselitsa, something like New Little Village. Nice name for an emerging city.
One of the older houses
Many battles have been fought in this region, from ancient times (yes, 1635 is pretty ancient) until the last World War, or as they call it here: the Great Patriotic War.
