Back from hols...

Holidays are great, I feel very refreshed. No doubt the daily grind will mug me again soon, but today was my first day back at work, I felt refreshed and focused on my work, and I got loads done. Sitting at a computer all day really is very bad for you, I felt much better after not doing so for a week.

We're just back from a week's holiday in the Netherlands. I spent the first weekend at a football tournament in Groningen, North East Netherlands. That was alot of fun, lots of playing and watching football, lots of beer and not much sleep.

On the Monday I travelled back to Amsterdam with the rest of the guys, then left them to catch their flights and met up with Hev in Amsterdam for a week of culcha.

We're reet culcha-ed.

We went to lots of museums and galleries, ate lots of great food and generally mooched around the city, it were grand.
We stayed at a great bed and breakfast on Java island (no, not that one, its just behind central station). I highly recommend that place, the guys were really friendly (hello, Hans and Jaap) the place is nice and it's very central. You can get a boat to central station, or walk into town via a bridge. We'll definitely stay there again.

Holiday highlights:

me: Rembrandt house and Van Gogh museum (especially the extra exhibition of Egon Schiele's work - one of my favourites - a really jammy bonus that one)

Hev: The canal trip and the Seahorses at the Zoo (the seahorses were very cool).

The Zoo was expensive but worth it. The guide book said it was the oldest Zoo in Europe. It's spaciiously laid out and you keep just finding nore things. The aquarium is amazing - over 2000 species of fish apparantly. The best thing though is that alot of the encloures are enclosed by think glass rather than bars, meaning you can very close to the animals. I had my face three inches from a spider monky, a silverback gorilla and a seahorse (not all at once, obviously, wet monkey fur - eeeew.)

All in all a great trip. We ate some great food, the best probably being an African restaurant in Amsterdam called Kilmanjaro, where we had a Antelope Ghoulash.

Yum...