Trip to Utrecht

I had the opportunity to go visit a city by the name of Utrecht this past weekend. Utrecht is situated about 20 minutes south of Amsterdam. I met up with a friend that I had met when I was visiting Holland last fall. She is originally from Italy and has a private Dutch instructor that had planned a tour of the city for her students. So she invited me to join them so we all could practice our Dutch all day long and take a nice tour of the city. It was a lot of fun and great practice for my Dutch.

I experienced my first "snelbus". On the weekends in the south of Holland they are doing a lot of work on the rail systems, so they seem to have some delays and detours along the way. I had the opportunity of riding in a snelbus, which literally means fast bus, for about 35 kilometers through the beautiful country side of the middle of Holland. The "snelbus" was really just a luxury coach bus. I was impressed as to how organized they had these detours planned and how efficient it was to make all my connections. The journey ended up being a lot of fun as I did get to see a lot of the country this way.

Our actual city tour began in the city center as we walked around the various canals, side streets, quaint cafe areas, libraries with live music, art showings, the new city hall, the cathedral, a new architecture exhibit and then finally to have a really great cup of Hazlenut hot chocolate.(always a sure way to my heart through chocolate :) It was a really nice time. The weather was really windy and a bit cold as we are having a front move through right now, but none of this stopped us from making the best of the weekend.

I am sad to say that I did not prepare myself with extra batteries for my camera, and to be honest I was really just in the moment of the experience so I did not take too many pictures with the last "little juice" that my camera had in it. So all you get today is one picture of a theatrical building.

I had a wonderful weekend filled with meeting new people, speaking my new learned language and just taking in all the great history. I promise next time to take more pictures :) If you are interested in looking at a website of Utrecht you can visit
www.utrecht.nl in the top right hand corner there is choice of viewing the site in English.

I hope everyone has had a great weekend. I can feel I am starting to get spring fever so I am sure you will be hearing about even more travels along the way.

Till next time

In love and gratitude,

Asha