A Mum for Mother’s Day (09/03)

Why are the previous blog posts only coming now and not after they happened? Well that is because I have been without a laptop for 5 weeks. A laptop brought by my parents and delivered by my Mum just last week (5-10th) has meant that I can blog once more and also regain a couple of shreds of my sanity! We spent 3 evenings together in IKEA Delft sipping on free tea and coffee and munching on their lovely food selection and the other available 2 and Sunday with our Dutch family. Saturday, however, was a day for my Ma to meet my friends! Dropping by Wassenaar we picked the best of the bunch for a day sightseeing!

Kinderdijk

Kinderdijk is a village just outside of Rotterdam and is home to a stunning 19 windmills set against a beautifully water-ridden landscape, now a National World Heritage Site. The wind blew ridiculously hard and the rain fell ridiculously hard the whole day long but it didn’t stop us having a walk around what has become an epitome of the Netherland’s battle but also affinity with water. The well- known saying here that ‘God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands’ sprang to mind as we learnt of its long history. Of course all the windmills were once homes so it was interesting to go inside the Museum Windmill and discover how the mill itself worked and how the miller and their family lived in such a tight space. An electric pumping station on site was also interesting. It has an astounding capacity of 1500 m3 of water per minute, surprisingly quiet for such a tremendous workload!      

Noah’s Ark

Kinderdijk rests between Rotterdam and Dordrecht, the later plays host to perhaps one of the stranger things that I can now say I have visited in this wonderful land. Noah’s Ark. Not the real one but a replica. Made using original materials and measurements by Johan Huibers. It is approximately 30m wide, 23m high and 135m long and with a size of 20,000m2 it truly is mind blowing. The life sized polyester animals that stood alongside many real ones demonstrated this effortlessly. Ma and I happily re-read the story of Noah, that of creation, the little facts about all the different animals mentioned in the Bible and particularly the details of how the Ark was perfectly possible to build in the time of Noah and how it could easily facilitate all the different ‘kinds’ of animal of the world as outlined by God. In fact 36.5% of the Ark was more than necessary to accommodate the animals, the rest was used for food storage, Noah and his family.

It was amazing to discover that the building of the Ark was inspired by a dream in 1992. Johan Huibers dreamt that waves from the ocean washed over the Netherlands during a storm. The dream was followed by even more signs, meaning he had to rebuild the Ark. This Ark is not meant to save people from a global flood as Noah did 4,000 years ago, but to tell people that there is a God who loves us, and that He has a plan for our lives. A fact that I’d somewhat forgotten over the past testing weeks.