Remodeling pages are back

07/01/10 21:15 Filed in: News | Remodeling
nieuwjaar
First of all I would like to wish every visitor a very happy new year.

These are the first pages in English. For several years now, I've only been maintaining my Dutch site due to all kind of very important honey-do lists projects. It's far, very far, from complete. Basically it's work in progress. I'm guessing it will take several months to finish, but I'm not making any promises. I'll at least be posting all new pages, which might seem a little awkward since you're missing a lot of (history) details (read: pages).

Next, I have news: the remodeling pages are back after being off-line for several weeks. I had to adjust them to make them fit the new website layout. So, unfortunately no new stories yet, but I promise it won't take long. Soon there'll be a 3rd episode for the kitchen. Please be patient for a little bit longer, please, please, please ... After that we will publish a story about a new project. I'm not going to disclose what it is yet, just check back with us once in a while and you'll find out.

I have also added a new page: Extra. For now it's only a story about my small but oh so fun to drive car: the Fiat 500.

Enjoy reading.

Tags:

How to tell the sex of a fly ...

10/12/07 17:37 Filed in: Humor
image001
A woman walked into the kitchen to find her husband stalking around with a fly swatter.Read more ...

Tags:

My 1st impression of CHINA

09/04/05 12:00 Filed in: News
china01
If you're unfamiliar with the Far East, like we were, you have no clue of what to expect. When we arrived in China it was cold, wet, grey, cloudy, in other words miserable. Luckily a company car picked us up and took us to the hotel. All other days we had to travel using taxi's. Once stepping into a taxi you will know what it feels like to be a smoked salmon due to the nicotine odor. Taxi's here are in a state of decay and don't need air conditioning because the door panels, roofs, floors are so rotten they have what we call natural venting. Not enough though to take away that smell of nicotine, but surely enough to make you feel cold and very unsafe. It definitely does help (feeling unsafe) that safety belts are completely missing. Also traffic is like ..... ehh, like ........ ehhh, it's like nothing I have ever seen during all my life.

There's hardly any rules. Nobody, and I really mean nobody yields other traffic. It's like they don't care. Surprisingly they somehow seem to be able to avoid too many accidents. I don't want to see the yearly numbers on traffic victims, but you'd expect more with this traffic. I have no clue why the even bothered making dividers for traffic lanes, nobody cares about them. Not even traffic coming from opposite direction seems to bother them. If they want to pass a car they will do just that, no matter what. On the highways they will swerve from the left to the right side even using the emergency lane as a passing lane.Read more ...

Tags: , ,

Our Suzhou adventures in A NUTSHELL

03/04/05 12:05 Filed in: News
tongli03
So now it's my turn to write something about our Suzhou adventure. Menno was off for one week during the Chinese New Year break so that gave us the opportunity to do some sightseeing in the surrounding area. On Saturday we went to Shanghai to visit the, with Foreigners highly popular, Fashion market. Here you will find all kind of shops selling imitiation brand clothes, jewelry, dvd's, games etc. That's where we got our North Fake jackets and fleeces from. We all needed other jackets so off we went to one of the North Fake shops. I saw a nice windstopper for me and Timo. So let the bargaining beginnnnnnnnnnnnn! That's the part where (luckily for me) Menno stepped in.

Well............I have to admit that I had to turn around and walk away sometimes, because I really can't do that. I was laughing my pants off. For us it's already very cheap and than hearing Menno bargaining over 1 or 2 euro less made me feel like a cheapskate. But I problably have to learn to get used to that, else you pay too much most of the time and those Chinese people are really good at acting like you're really giving them a hard time with negotiating, but they still make money when they sell you their stuff. So toughen up Helen. After all we had a great day and came home with less money and more jackets (2 leather ones included).
Read more ...

Tags: , ,

Our visit to PANMEN GATE, Suzhou City

26/03/05 12:11 Filed in: News
panmengate02
It was February 11, 2005, a cold but sunny day in Suzhou. We decided not to stay in the hotel. Well actually it wasn’t a hotel but more something like an apartment. A lot better than a hotel, especially if you’re staying for a month and have 3 kids. In this case the apartment had 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a kitchen and a living room. Anyway, this day we decided to do a little bit of sight seeing in Suzhou. First we went to Tong Li, an old town just outside of Suzhou, advertised as Venice of China. Very touristic, but still nice. In a future article I will write a little bit more about this town. After Tong Li we went to some old remainings of the original Suzhou city wall protecting the city in the old age, called Panmen Gate.

Panmen gate is Suzhou's oldest and most complete preserved part of the ruins of the ancient city of Suzhou. It was originally built in 514 B.C. The current version was rebuilt in 1351. Inside the gate are the Ruiguang Pagoda (44.42m high) and Wumen Bridge, which, with the gate, make up the three Sights of Panmen. The Panmen Gate actually includes two magnificent gates, one on land and the other on water; it is the sole land-and-water gate in China.Read more ...

Tags: , ,

We moved into our new HOME

01/03/05 12:15 Filed in: News
home01
Finally, the time has come. The container with our funiture arrived. We have been waiting for this moment for a little bit over 6 weeks. Actually not too bad, considering 6 weeks is about the average time to move a family from one location to the other. But that's for "normal" countries. I wouldn't call China a normal country. Well maybe it's normal to people who never knew anything else before, but not to us.

I'll try to explain: when we were in the process of clearing the container from customs I received a message where the customs wanted to know what was in the container. Well that's simple, it's on the packing list. I guess they went over the packing list because they started to ask "weird" questions. Questions like: "what type of washing machine did you bring: top loader or front loader?" or "how many loudspeakers did you bring?" or even worse "what does [fire] mean: did you bring explosives?".Read more ...

Tags: , ,