The Wonders Of The World By Gjalt: June 2006

Thursday, June 29, 2006

i wish you a nice weekend

i dont have anything interesting things
to tell today

but i want to wish everybody a good weekend
and maybe you see something interesting on the
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Tuesday, June 20, 2006

The sun is going under in friesland

Friesland is a province in the north of the Netherlands and part of the bigger region known as Frisia. Its name in the Frisian language is Fryslân, which has also been its official name since 1997, and is therefore also used in official Dutch language publications. Friesland has 643,000 inhabitants (2005) and its capital is Leeuwarden (Ljouwert), with 91,000 inhabitants, in the centre of the province.

Friesland distinguishes itself from the other eleven Dutch provinces through having its own language, which is also spoken in a minor part of the province of Groningen, to the east. Closely related languages, East Frisian ("Seeltersk", which is different from "East Frisian (Ostfriesisch)", a collection of Low German dialects of East Frisia) and North Frisian, are spoken in the Saterland and in North Friesland areas in Germany, respectively.

The English language is also closely related to Frisian. There is a saying about it: "As milk is to cheese, are English and Frise."

Another version of this saying reads (in Frisian): "Bűter, brea, en griene tsiis; wa't dat net sizze kin, is gjin oprjochte Fries", which in English reads: "Butter, bread and green cheese, whoever can't say that is no real Frise". The saying plays on the sound differences between the Dutch and Frisian words for "butter, bread and green cheese", which in Frisian are pronounced almost identically to their English counterparts (showing the original closeness between the two languages), while in Dutch ("Boter, brood en groene kaas"), these words sound quite different.

Friesland is mainly an agricultural province. The famous black and white Friesian cattle and the well known black Friesian horse originated here. Tourism, mainly on the lakes in the south west of the province, and on the islands in the Wadden Sea in the north, is an important source of income, too.

The province is also famous for its speed skaters, and also for the Elfstedentocht (Eleven cities tour), a 200 kilometres ice skating tour.

Another interesting feature are the many windmills. There are 195 windmills in the province of Friesland, from a total of about 1200 in the entire country.

Friesland was the first to acknowledge the independence of the Thirteen Colonies from the United Kingdom.

Wadden Sea

The Wadden is a coastal region stretching from the north-west of the Netherlands through Germany to the west of Denmark. It consists of the Wadden Sea, large parts of which fall dry during low tide, and the Wadden islands, a string of islands that shields this sea from the North Sea.

The Wadden are very similar to what is called the Outer Banks of North Carolina, off the east coast of the U.S..