28 May 2011

Long Days

Literally. Being a good bit further north (See red line on map showing my latitude) than most of my readers (all 3 of you or so), the days here are quite a bit longer than where you are. Not as long as the 20-some hours of daylight in Alaska but it's after 10pm and it isn't completely dark yet. Morning twilight was at 0450 this morning (sunrise at 0533) and evening twilight ends at 2220 tonight (sunset was at 2137). And the days will continue to get longer until the Summer equinox (when twilight will be at 0437 and 2241). It messes with my sleep. I need dark curtains!

This also means that in winter, my days are much shorter. At the end of December/beginning of January the sun will rise around 0840 and set around 1640. That gets pretty rough in a different way.

09 May 2011

An American and a Greek Walk the Dogs

My neighbors are Greek. The husband is in the Greek military and he's stationed at the NATO base here. They have two kids (girl 5 and boy 2). The girl is in kindergarten at a local Dutch school. Seems you can't go to the international school if you don't speak English but you can go to the Dutch school if you don't speak Dutch. Well, she speaks Dutch now. And I'm sure she would have learned English just as quickly.

She loves dogs and wanted to come with me yesterday to walk them. She talks to the dogs in Dutch; I guess because she talks to me in Dutch (who could have guessed that knowing Dutch would come in handy when talking to a little girl from Greece?!?!). I found that interesting, though. I pretty much talk to all dogs in English. The dogs didn't seem to have any trouble with the translation. Seems petting and brushing are pretty much the same in any language.

05 May 2011

Happy Liberation Day

Today is Liberation Day in the Netherlands. May 5, 1945, Canadian forces (with some help from the Brits and Americans and French) liberated the Netherlands from Nazi German occupation.