4 years Middle Eeast are over and a total of 10 years abroad. We have decided to return to the Netherlands and give our children chance to settle in their home country. To celebrate 10 years of expatriation, we have decided to travel back overland from the Middle East to the Netherlands. Take a look at our special webpage about this remarkable and unforgetable journey.
Here is a list of links of people and/or services that have made a significant impact on the succes of all our assignments abroad.
I built my first website in 2005 in HTML. Not long after that, I got hooked to CSS. I lack the skill to create a site from scratch, but I enjoy fiddling with an existing design. Templates are great and made for this purpose. This template is a DemusDesign template. This template is released under the Creative Commons 2.5 license, which means I can use it free, as long as I acknowledge the creator in this site (which I just did, by inserting this link). I edited the template and included a css drop down menu and a jguery slideshow in the header.
We have an interesting life. We are being transfered every couple of years (usually 3 ideally every 4 years) and our children grow up in different countries being part of different cultures.
We believe the exposure and insight we gain by living in different cultures is one of the best educational opportunities we could ever think of.
We are a family of 5. Thijs, Mary and their kids Niels (19), Onno (16) and Noëlle (14). We have left the Netherlands in 2001 following Thijs on his international career. We've lived in the Dominican Republic and Canada. In 2007 we moved to Bahrain in the Middle East. In July 2011 we repatriated back to our home country.
"Traveling is looking at yourself in a different back ground..."
During the summer of 2011 we drove overland from Bahrain to the Netherlands as part of our repatriation
During our last year in Bahrain, we witnessed Bahrain struggling through the Arab Spring. Mary wrote many blogs about the Feb 14 revolution
While located in Bahrain, we have seen some pretty amazing places. View our photo Gallery of our trip to Jordan in April 2010.
We bought a 100 year old house (old farm) which we renovated before we moved in. It's a work in progess and we're still not done.
The Middle East was an inspiring environment to pick up photography. Mary developed an interest and experimented with her camera.
Every year, during home leave, we tried to expose our children to some cultural or historical Dutch experience. In 2010, we made a Sailing trip on the Waddenzee
Being able to really ice skate on frozen lakes and canals made our struggle with repatriation blues a lot easy. Like many Dutch people, we caught the famous "Ice skating Fever"and although the house was still a huge mess, due to our continuing renovation projects, we took Niels and his Portuguese girlfriend with us for an Ice skating tour. Despite the blisters (Mary), it was a fantastic day and a true Dutch experience.
Read Mary's blog (Dutch) here
I created a blog in 2005, linked to our family website. In 2007 I realized blogger offers a great service. My blog started as a 'letter home' and has now covered many stories having lived in 3 different countries.
© 2012 Global Nomad| Template by DemusDesign edited by Mary Broekhuijsen
