Hortus Haren, just south of Groningen, is the largest botanical garden in the Netherlands, but flowers were not the main attraction yesterday.
Just beyond its greenhouses is the insectarium, a small one that specializes in really big creepy things, e.g. tarantulas, a scorpion, stick insects, and cockroaches the size of dinner plates. OK, maybe I’m exaggerating on that last point. Cockroaches big enough to make Sarah Palin reach for the gun she uses when she’s hunting moose.
I learned a bit of Dutch when we lived here ten years ago, and one of the Dutch words I think is much better than its English equivalent is “kakkerlak,” which means “cockroach.” Another word where Dutch is better is “kikker,” for “frog.”
The “mystic” time tunnel, the Celtic tree horoscope, the rescued parrots, and the traditional Chinese teahouse that serves delicious traditional Dutch sandwiches are also fine features of the Hortus Haren. I recommend it! (But go with a Dutch friend or at least a Dutch dictionary–signs are all in Dutch.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Betsy Devine // Oct 5, 2008 at 7:56 am
If you are interested in Groningen’s Hortus Haren, I wrote up a longer description for TripAdvisor, one of my favorite web resources:
http://www.tripadvisor.com/Travel-g188572-d319110/Groningen:The-Netherlands:Hortus.Haren.html
2 TA // Oct 5, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Making the old world unsafe again? :)
To somebody who understands Swedish, Dutch is bewildering, especially spoken: like a strange mix of Swedish and English, with a familiar melody and interspersed with lots of recognizable words (e.g. “kakkerlak” is “kackerlacka” in Swedish), always on the verge of being comprehensible… but not quite.
In Swedish, a frog is “groda”. “Kikker” is the kind of word which constantly tries to lure the poor Swedish listener into English mode.
3 Betsy Devine // Oct 5, 2008 at 10:32 pm
To me, the Swedish word “groda” is like the sound a frog makes, while “kikker” is like its action.