A card from the Suprise Me RR. The heart is actually a hole cut in the middle of the card, which I had never seen anything like before. I have to wonder why the designer chose the ugly picture to take up 2/3 of the card... but perhaps it's a blessing in disguise since the scuff marks left by the mail sorting machine are only defacing the ugly picture. :P (I think the card would be a lot nicer if the other five pictures, which are nice, made up the entire card.) Anyway, I still like it.
Texel is one of the Frisian Islands located in the Wadden Sea, although it is actually in the province of North Holland, not Friesland. Tourism is Texel's main economy, and it does look like a nice place for a vacation if you want to take it easy or go bicycle touring. About one third of the island is a nature preserve, complete with a visitor's center and wildlife museum, where you can watch the seals being fed twice a day. (I am not sure why they are feeding the wild animals at a nature preserve, though.)
More nice stamps. The one on the left reads "zomerpostzegels 1992, floriade nederland" Floriade is a flower festival held every 10 years in the Netherlands. In the middle is a stamp from 1995 showing the equation discovered by J. D. van der Waals, a Dutch Nobel Prize physicist. The stamp on the right is undated so I am guessing it is a definitive.
Hi Maggie! Looking for Sogenji-photo's and recognizing the takuhatsu-picture I ended up on your blog site! I looked some things up for you.
ReplyDeleteThe stamp ont het right is from 1982 (! - collectors item) and shows the groundplan of a dutch fortress town called 'Coevorden'. The star-shape is very common in Dutch fortresses for the 16th to the 19th century. The stamp is from a 'Europe'-series, which means that in a certain year all european countries made their own national stamp on a certain common theme; that year supposedly something like 'history'. (I do not collect stamps - to my big surprise it took me less than 30 seconds to find this info on the internet!)
The seals fed at Ecomare on Texel are actually captured wild seals; mostly sick or injured or babies that lost their mothers (called 'screamers' - in dutch 'huilers' because they make a lot of noise calling for their mums). The are released back in the wild as soon as they have recoverd or have matured. The reason for this was that back in the 70-ies/80-ies there were very few seals left because of a viral disease. Nowadays the population has recovered.
Most Dutch people come to Texel to enjoy the beaches, so that probably explains why 'the ugly picture' is biggest. (And it probably was a rare occasion, because it was not raining ;-)
Hope to meet you again soon, in Sogenji, Hokuozan or... maybe Texel?
Bertjan
Thanks Bertjan!! My guess is I'll be back at Sogenji a lot sooner than I'll make it to Texel, but you never know. ;)
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