Tonight we headed into Limburg for a celebration of Ivo’s paternal grandparents’ 60th anniversary. Limburg is very pretty, with actual hills and cute villages – it’s where Ivo’s parents come from – neighbouring villages in the former coal mining region – his grandparents on both sides worked in the mines.
Dinner was nice, at a restaurant understandably named Bellevue. It was a little hard to understand his family since they speak Limburgs, a dialect of Dutch, and even when they speak regular Dutch they have strong accents – they didn’t speak much English. When I got in the car to go home with Ivo’s sister I just said, “I’m sorry, I can’t speak any more Dutch – that was hard!” and she got to practice her English on the way home.
But here is the family – Ivo’s dad’s two siblings on the left (brother first and sister third), with their partners (his brother’s wife is 4th in), and Ivo’s grandparents at the end. Ivo’s sister Evian is next to me and his dad is beside him.
