PARADE!

Thursday, the girls of Van Luyken (Anouk, Anne, Carolijn and me) headed to Rotterdam for Holland's annual PARADE.

De Parade is a travelling festival which moves from city to city in the Netherlands each summer. There are tents featuring yummy food and beer, performances of various plays, films and dance, rides, fortune tellers, etc. It's kind of like the South Carolina or Georgia State Fair, only MUCH higher up on the cultural spectrum.

We had a fantastic time... the pictures should speak for themselves!

Me, scoping out the different performances we could go see (didn't understand a word).

However it appears - it was delicious!

If you look closely you can see a sign behind Anne's head that says "Ja Ja De Bar is Hoog." That means, "yeah, yeah, we know the bar is high.":) I guess they don't want any complaints!

After dinner we moved on to my next favorite Dutch food: poffertjes (pronounced poffert-chures from what I can tell). But who cares about pronouncing them? All I wanted to do was eat them! At the Parade you get to make your own, so all four of us went after a batch!

I'm a master flipper!

Each of us got 12.

Anouk and Anne - ready to chow down!

Carolijn showed me the proper way to 'dress' my poffertjes - with lots of butter and powdered sugar! YUM.

After all that food, we thought it would be a great idea to go on a fair ride.

Anne bribed the Carnie-guy to swing me up as high in the air as I could go. Yep. I screamed... a lot...

Still, it was lots of fun.

Then we went to the Silent Disco. Everyone is given headphones to listen to, so as you jive around, no one knows what in the world you're doing or what beat you're hearing. It's a pretty fantastic sensation!

Anna jammin' to the slient tunes.

Anouk and me groovin'.

We missed our play because Anouk told us the play started at "quarter past 10" when it really started at "quarter of 10." We walked into the play with about two minutes to spare. However, other freaks present at the PARADE somehow made us feel okay about it all (see photo immediately above).

It was a great night in Rotterdam!