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Welcome to Byron & Anita online

What has happened since the last update?
We went to Berlin and indulged in BIG glasses of Berliner Pils and BIG hearty meals.
Byron left me and went back home to live with Mum and Dad and the rest of his family.
I moved to Den Haag (or The Hague) into a typical Dutch row house from the turn of the century.
The sun came out and the temperature rose above 25C and everyone got nude on the beach.

I don't have all the photos to demonstrate all of this yet, but there's some new ones that may be worth a glance.
Good things about the Netherlands
I was told one day that I was in danger of being mistaken for an American or a German given my criticism of certain things Dutch. So I had to compile a list of good things in the Netherlands. Here are some of them:

1. Summer activity. Once the sun comes out, the temperature rises above 20C the people here go nuts. The restaurants and bars spill out onto the footpaths and set up on barges on the canals. The parks are full of people getting their gear off...as are the beaches. Eveyone makes the most of every possible moment of sunshine.

2. Work ethic. Their was a study which came out recently which listed the Dutch in the top ten of hard working nations. Personally I have no idea where this comes from. With 25 days of leave and 13 RDOs per year it seems that some people are never in the office. But, one could never make the accusation that the people working in my office are workaholics. There is certainly an emphasis on the homelife (got to have plenty of spare hours to indulge those children and to tidy the one square metre of garden). Most impressively, there is an increasing move towards people working 4 days a week in order to lessen the amount of time that there children spend in childcare. Perhaps the number of hours in the working week will slowly be revised to recognise that many families now have both parents working "fulltime" jobs.

3. Tolerance. Can't make a list of good things about the Netherlands without complimenting them on their policies of tolerance. However, I still have no idea how a group of such conservative people (as judged from my liaisons) can have such liberal policies on drugs, homosexuality, euthanasia, etc. I think it has something to do with the the 8(approx) parties which make up their government. But, as conservative as they may be individually, they are certainly very proud of their liberal policies and rightly so.