The Laboratory

We hope you recovered from watching the Andre Rieu video yesterday. If you want to see it again just click on  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUKEOwM0F4s On our holidays we travelled from Maastricht in the Netherlands to Brussel in Belgium, which brings us to the Word Of The Day: non-contiguous Belgium is about to get smaller and the Netherlands bigger after the countries agreed to a swap of land. Each will cede small, uninhabited parcels of land to reflect a change in course of what is known in French as the river Meuse, and in Dutch as the Maas. The border will most likely change at the start of 2018 after both countries have ratified a treaty next week. The land swap, however, does not extend to the border village of Baarle-Hertog, aka Baarle-Nassau, which has non-contiguous part of the Netherlands in Belgium, and vice versa. Yes, there's a Belgian village in the middle of the Netherlands, but just to make it extra confusing there are small areas of Dutch land in t...

Where do you imagine the Capital of Christmas is? Lapland? Bethlehem? Perhaps if we called it "Capitale de Noël" that might be a clue... In fact, it is the beautiful city of Strasbourg , nestling in north-east France on the border with Germany. This year they are marketing themselves as the Capital of Christmas, and in addition to their usual beautiful architecture, storks, and European Institutions, they also have a range of Christmas markets. Our friend Manuel and his family are our favourite Strasbourgeois and we had the pleasure of visiting them in April this year. We first met "on the internet" sharing our love of IKEA soft toys. One thing that caught our eye on the Christmas website is that they are having a Belgian market. Waffles! Speculoos! Of course, but we hadn't come across cuberdons before. These are purple, cone-shaped, raspberry-flavoured candy with a liquid centre. We really will have to seek them out the next time we are Benelux-...