After living in Hong Kong and Singapore between 1994 and 2002 (see my Singapore page), Menno and I moved back to the Netherlands (our country of birth) in September 2002. Just over two years later, on 29 November 2004, we left the country again - this time to go and live in Australia. This page gives some insight into our life back in Holland between 2002 and 2004.

MY WORK

I found a job soon after we arrived back in the Netherlands and started working as editor-in-chief at a small communications consultancy on November 1, 2002. The publication that I was editorially in charge of was called Travel etc. | Business & Leisure. It was a quarterly glossy magazine for business travellers, focusing on news and information about the travel industry, features on countries and cities, lifestyle, culture, gadgets and everything else that's interesting to a frequent business traveller.

	The front of the monumental building housing our apartment. The two windows in the centre of the picture, unobstructed by trees, are our living room windows.

Unfortunately, the magazine did not survive the crisis caused by the economic recession, the war on Iraq and SARS, and I spent May to September 2003 doing some freelance work, mostly on websites, while looking around for another job.

In September 2003, I started working as a consultant, copywriter, editor and translator at Baxter Communications, which specialises in English business communications. I wrote English-language copy for brochures and leaflets, press releases, ads, newsletters, reports and websites, and also carried out translations. I loved working there - the work was fun and challenging, and my colleagues were absolutely great.

OUR HOUSE

We started house hunting in September 2002, and on January 6, 2003, we became the proud owners of our very first own home, in a town called Amersfoort. We moved right in after receiving the keys. We fell in love with the apartment immediately when we first went to view it, mainly because of the atmosphere the place breathed. We just felt at home.

It's a beautiful 100-m2 apartment on the 1st and 2nd (top) storey of an old but renovated monumental army barracks building. It's a large and quiet area near the city centre with several such buildings situated around a park with big old trees. The facades of the buildings were all kept intact and date back to 1890 when the barracks were built. The barracks were converted into modern houses and apartments around 1980.

The living room, seen from the open kitchen (still with the previous owner's furniture).

The apartment has a huge living room with two high windows, a new kitchen, and upstairs two bedrooms, a bathroom and a study room/work area. The living room has a clear view of the park, while the study upstairs looks out towards the city straight towards another monument, a monumental clock tower, the second highest in the country. Outside is a separate storage shack for tools and bicycles. We also immediately did the inevitable: buy a pair of bicycles so we could go for bike rides and move around quickly within the city centre.

Check out the pictures on this page, which I copied from the online sales brochure in December 2002. They still feature the furniture of the people who owned the apartment before us, because I never got around to taking a new set of photos of our home with our own furniture in it and scanning them in. But they give you a good idea of what the house looks like.

AMERSFOORT

Amersfoort is in the east of the central Dutch province of Utrecht. It is not only very central in the Netherlands but also right in the middle of where our immediate family lives. We have our parents and siblings all within 15 km distance from our home.

	The large and luxurious open kitchen.

We're just outside the medieval city centre, which is a 10-minute walk away and is great for just strolling around, shopping, meeting with friends at a cafe or having dinner at one of the many restaurants. In spring and summer it's festival-season here. Almost every weekend there'll be either live music on a stage, a theatre performance or special festival market for instance. They are usually held on the old squares in the old city centre.

Weather-wise, our first year back in Holland was great, but the second one was pretty terrible. While the summer of 2003 broke all records in the Netherlands for being the hottest ever, the summer of 2004 turned out to be the wettest ever! After a lot of cooler than normal months over the summer and autumn of 2004, we were glad to be moving to Australia where we could look forward to a real summer with lots of sun and warm temperatures.

CULTURE & LEISURE

Although the Netherlands are not that big, the country has very distinct regions with differing landscapes and cultures. In the two years we were back, Menno and I visited several parts of the country for long weekends. We visited places like the northern island of Texel, the hilly south of Limburg, the sea-side province of Zeeland, and the woodlands of Twente and Drenthe near the German border.

The view from the living room, over the garden of our downstairs neighbours, onto the big and quiet park.

In 2003, I also visited Budapest (Hungary), Brussels (Belgium), Frankfurt (Germany) and Prague (Czech Republic). The first three were work-related (for the travel magazine I worked for), and I went to Prague with a good friend for four days in August. Budapest and Prague are somewhat similar, seeing that they're both Eastern European country capitals with a large river running through it and comparable architecture, but each has its own character. I absolutely loved both these cities and would very much recommend a visit to either (if not both) of them.

In our spare time, we liked visiting our families to catch up and to play with our little nephews and nieces. We also loved watching movies, and we both joined a gym, which was just around the corner from where we lived (check out the FitForum website, which we created for them).

In the two years we were back, we also attended a few pop concerts, including Vanessa Carlton, Ilse de Lange, and an outdoor festival featuring Coldplay, Live and Supergrass. I also went to see a couple of great musicals (as Aida, Three Musketeers and Passion), and I had a fantastic time at the North Sea Jazz Festival which I visited with a friend this summer (where I saw Elvis Costello and Angie Stone, among others). I just love the atmosphere at concerts and festivals - music makes you feel alive!

Although we really liked being back in the Netherlands, close to our families, and I had a great job, we felt it was time to embark on our next adventure: living in Australia, which we knew we wanted to do since our first visit there in December 2000. Read about our life down under on my Australia page.

Last updated: April 3, 2005