Amsterdam area Day 2

Sunday morning arrived way way too early. Luckily people in the area realize that Amsterdam will exhaust you and check out is at 12 noon!! We somehow managed to drag ourselves out of bed and checked out a right around noon. We decided that we had done all the damage in Amsterdam we could do and headed out to hit Haarlem, Netherlands.

Haarlem is a completely different world than Amsterdam. Amsterdam is wild crazy with adult shops on every corner. Haarlem is a quiet picturesque city with a lovely city center, lots of quiet outdoor cafes and beautiful canals. We took a ferry to get to Haarlem and had a nice relaxing lunch in the city center. There was an outdoor book fair going on and we walked around for a couple of hours just enjoying the beautiful city and taking in the scenery.

Europeans really do know how to relax. From the plant last week Kyle learned that there is NO overtime whatsoever in Europe. People are simply not allowed to work overtime. If you work more than 40 hours they have to give you time off equal to that. They receive at least 30 days of vacation a year plus 10 holidays.

At Monsanto here they work 37.5 hours per week and take an extra 3 days off per month!! The pay scale is also quite different here than at home. We are used to getting raises every year based on performance. They receive raises that are dependent on inflation. If inflation goes up 2% every one's income goes up 2%. They don't really get yearly performance raises. Of course, with all that time off who needs raises?!?!

There is an old fortress/church in the center of Haarlem that was just gorgeous. There was a great little Dutch pancake stand in the middle of the city center. The pancakes are a mixture between regular pancakes and a funnel cake. They were really good. They serve them with a huge pat of butter and lots of powdered sugar.

After we walked around for a while (all the shops are closed on Sunday and Monday) we decided to head back to Antwerp. Our Garmin decided we needed a scenic route and took us all through the countryside to get back to Belgium. It was some of the most beautiful scenery I've ever seen in my life.

They have cows everywhere. I thought that the canals in The Netherlands were just in Amsterdam. It turns out that the canals run all through the country. They use their canals for everything. There were cows, horses and sheep everywhere and after several miles of this I finally figured out what was missing from the scene. There were no fences at all on any field.

They use their canals as fences. The fields are about 100 meters (approx 100 yards) wide and about 1000 meters long with canals (about 2-3 meters wide) running along all the sides of the field. They would have corn on one field, sheep on the next field, a couple fields of cows then a few empty fields, ready to be grazed next. Some fields had a bridge between the fields with a gate in the middle of the bridge but most of them we couldn't see a bridge at all. We think they probably have a portable bridge system they bring in via tractor to move the cattle to another field.

There are small roads next to the larger roads where there were people out for bike rides (of course). I could totally see spending a couple of weeks just in the Netherlands biking around the countryside. It's a beautiful beautiful land.