This blog post describes the content of the video, which you can see below:
In this video, Natalie leaves Marten to go to Breda with her sister for 48 hours.
Natalie’s Sister
Martine, Natalie’s sister, lives in Belgium, and they don’t get to see each other all that often. So it’s nice just to have some time to bond as sisters, and therefore they decided to do a sister weekend in Breda. The weather forecast is not that nice, rainy and cold, but after all our travels, we are quite used to that.
First impressions of Breda
Getting to Breda, from where we live, is quite a drive and after 2,5 hours Natalie finally arrives. It is very rainy and she has to find the hotel while it pours.
The hotel is in the middle of the city to make it easy to go anywhere we want to for the next few days. The hotel has a green policy, offering you to hang a clog on your door if you don’t want it to be unnecessarily serviced. And we both felt that was really important because there is a lot of waste in hotels, where bedding and towels get washed when that is actually not necessary.
So once we have arrived, we decide the first step is to get warm and get ‘Fika’, ‘Kaffee und kuchen’, coffee and cake. It’s nice to get a first look at the city while walking to the mall, where they recommended we get our cake. Everything is decorated for the holidays and gives the city a festive vibe, even with this dreary weather.
After a bit more strolling through town, dark sets in really quickly, and it becomes really cold. So we go to the Vismarkt (the Fish Market), where there are loads of cute cafés that have terraces with heaters. We have a drink and a snack there before going for dinner, back in the city centre.
City Walk
The next morning Martine and Natalie go for breakfast in the city before going on a city walk. It’s really cold this morning, the temperature dropped 10 degrees overnight and it’s going to be fun walking around the city the whole day in freezing temperatures.
There are a lot of amazing options early in the morning to get breakfast in the city. We end up in a small place called ‘In kannen en kruiken’, which literally means in cans and jars, but the saying means that everything is taken care of. The breakfast was really good and we really happy we went for this option over breakfast in the hotel.
And then we start our walk in the nearby park. The Valkenberg city park is filled with chickens and hens who have an opinion this morning about the weather. They walk around and are really vocal. Martine has found a city walk that starts from a specific monument in the park and after a bit of a search we find it on the far end, the Nassau-Baron monument. This monument tells the story of young Johanna van Polanen’s marriage to count Engelbrecht I of Nassau and how this started the Nassau dynasty.
The city walk then takes us along several places and monuments all through the city, a lot of them, connected to Johanna van Polanen somehow. Like the Queen Wilhelmina Pavilion, the grave of Nassaus in the Great Church and a courtyard where there is a statue of Johanna van Polanen. But there is so much more to see, and it is really interesting to read all the stories of Breda’s history and the history of the Nassaus while walking through the city.
We have to stop quite frequently for coffee and tea to warm up again because of the cold. Making the hour-and-a-half city walk take most of the day, but it was totally worth it.
In the evening we go to the Food Hall, where there are loads of different food stalls to order from and then we go out for drinks in a cafe which turns out to be a party cafe so at 11 at night, the whole place turns into a discotheque. After a fun little dance, we make our way to our beds.
The last day in Breda
The next morning we go out for breakfast again, though a little bit later than the day before. We needed a bit of extra sleep, and we needed to pack because we needed to leave the hotel room. We find a very cute place in the city centre and have brunch there. We do a walk around the canals in Breda to see even more of the city and to say goodbye before we leave.
The city replies by giving us pouring rain again as we walk to the train station and our car, while it was dry most of the weekend. I think Breda is going to miss us too…
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