Pork and Apple: The Netherlands

The Netherlands is a very interesting and beautiful place full of cheese. We spent a total of 8 nights there, 4 in Amsterdam and 4 in Rotterdam.

Some fun facts I learnt while I was there:

The Dutch traded New Amsterdam (the British renamed it New York) for Suriname (a little country in South America that no one has really heard of). I'm not totally sure why they swapped, we were told it was because of a truce between the two countries. With hind sight it seems a pretty lame swap.
So Suriname became a Dutch Colony. When they "released" them (I am not confident that this is the right term) locals were given the option to get a Dutch passport and move to the Netherlands. A lot of them did and there's Surinamese shops everywhere.
Indonesia was also a Dutch Colony so you can get a lot of Indonesian food in The Netherlands
The name of the country is The Netherlands, not Holland. Holland is made up of two provinces - North and South Holland. These provinces were very successful which lead Holland to be the well known name world wide.
There's a really nice, somewhat hidden court yard in Amsterdam surrounded by flats. During the war it was dangerous for woman to be living on their own while their men were away so the government put them in this housing for free. The only catch was that they had to do the washing for the whole Jordaan area. Above the entrance to the court yard it has an inscription "HUYS ZITTEN WEDUWEN HOFE" which translates to "HOUSE SITTING WIDOWS COURT". They are a literal people. The flats are now used as government subsidised housing and it was the nicest government subsidised housing I've seen.
Rotterdam was bombed during the war, most of it was destroyed. They now have the most spread out and newest city centre in The Netherlands. One guy we briefly met said they were even a little bit thankful to Hitler because it meant they got the chance to build a modern city. They really did go a bit crazy with the modern buildings, Rotterdam is full of weird, "modern" buildings. The place has a totally different feel to the rest of the country.
Surprisingly the Dutch haven't always been so liberal, before Napoleon brought freedom of religion to The Netherlands there were a lot of secret churches throughout Amsterdam (we got to visit one on a tour)
If The Netherlands stopped their water management after about 3 months 40% of the country would be under water

But it wasn't all history. We had heaps of fun exploring and cycling around in the rain.

After 3 days in the city we finally found the sign that we'd seen so many pictures of

The Smallest Flat in Amsterdam

Amazing new market place that's just opened up in Rotterdam. There's delicious food stalls through the middle of it and flats all around the outside. I would be huge if I lived there.