TRAVEL AND LIFESTYLE DIARIES

If you are going to imitate something, then you better do it well. Or perhaps, better? That’s the story in a nutshell with Royal Delft in the Netherlands, the porcelain company (Koninklijke Porceleyne Fles) with roots going back to the second half of the 16th century. The Royal Delft Museum and Factory for the 'Royal Delft Experience' tour. The Dutch weren’t the inventors of blue pottery. They learned this skill from Italian potters and copied Chinese-style porcelain brought back by Dutch seamen from the Far East through the Dutch East India Company (VOC – Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), which by the way is the first publicly traded company in the world. If there is another thing than trade that the Dutch did was good, that would have to be being master imitators of porcelain ware. Demand for blue porcelain skyrocketed and before long enough business was doing very well that the company made investments of more than 32 factories in Delft and a number in Amster...

My long-time friend, Bubbles wanted to visit a city in the Netherlands that she hasn't been to. Well, that's going to be an easy task for me as there's a n abundance of pretty little Dutch cities. Most of them in fact I have already visited in my 15 years of living in the Netherlands. Lunch on the Markt at the Het Konings Huys. Bubbles had a few cities in mind but because we do not have the luxury of time, she has to choose only 1 Dutch city to visit. We have planned a whole month of trips for April. A road trip in the Balkans, a city trip to Dresden (Germany) and Antwerp (Belgium), as well as side trips to Amsterdam, the flower fields and around Utrecht. Bubbles picked Delft. For some reason, she has read good things about the city and saw nice pictures. The first thing we did in Delft after parking the car was to go to the Markt (Market square). The Markt is the living room of Delft. Here, one can find the city's Old Town Hall (Stadhuis Delft) and the N...

The main update for this daily life series is the good news that we bought a new house! Yup, last October was the big day when we signed the papers =) This is the showroom of our (house/project) contractor. Moi standing in front of the future house. The ground has now been prepared and the official building starts on the 1st of December with a little party onsite of course.  The building of the new house will start next month, that's less than 2 weeks from now and we are kind of excited. Construction will approximately take a year and the Dutchman and I have been very busy, spending long nights and pouring over on floor plans and schedules, researching building materials and visiting many showrooms. We have been driving all over the place. In fact, I took 3 days off just to do all this, what I call, building a house orientation. There's a lot to be done! You'll hear more of the house as construction progresses =) The other main thing that happened in Octob...