Tilburg

Well, at this point in my travels I'm just about finished. And luckily for me I haven't even been doing much of that and have been fortunate to be staying with friends much of the time. I really like the time that I spend with people because I learn so much more about the country and the culture. In the hostels I meet drunk 21 year old girls from Britain. Ok, not quite that bad but I really want to move to Europe for a year, not just briefly travel through it.

Anyway, I really like looking at paintings of Jesus and climbing steeples of churches older than Canada all across Europe but been there, done that. Now I am visiting my mom's relatives in Tilburg, Netherlands. We are in the countryside which is a part of Europe I haven't really seen yet. The roads here are all paved and we went for a bicycle ride. If you ever want the perfect place to bicycle, Holland is it. Paved roads, flat, picturesque farm land (small farms, thatched barns etc). They have huge networks of bicycle routes with signage.

Anyway, I was taken on a bicycle tour of the countryside and here I am in front of my mother's childhood home in Brabant. It has a barn attached to the back of the house (for ~8 cows). Wow, farming was done differently and not that long ago.

After the bicycle tour we went for a walk in one of the nature preserve areas. In this area are 5 burial mounds from the bronze age. They were called the 5 mountains and it wasn't until 1935 that they were investigated. Now the contents are in a museum but they rebuilt the burial site.