Fun Dutch Facts

I have a bunch of things I want to post about, but I'm about to head to London for Easter to visit my family. SO for today, I will leave you with a handful of fun Dutch facts my Dutch teacher shared with us in class the other day. Some I knew, some I didn't...and here are my favorites!

1) The Rijksmuseum was designed to represent a church and "The Night Watch" by Rembrandt formed the 'altar piece.'

2) Manhattan, among others governed by Peter Stuyvesant around 1650, was purchased by the Dutch West Indita Company for the equivalent of 25 euros.

3) When you arrive at Schiphol Airport, you are four and a half meters below sea level.

4) The Dutch swapped New York, formerly called New Amsterdam, for Suriname in 1667 in a trade with the Brittish.

5) For more than 200 years, from 1639 to 1868, the Dutch were the only westerners in the world allowed to trade with the Japanese.

6) Sri Lanka was a Dutch colony from 1656 until 1802. Therefore, Dutch has contributed substantially to its official language Singhalese.

7) The last German emperor Wilhelm II found asylum in a castle near Utrecht in 1920. The castle used to be the home of the grandmother of Audrey Hepburn.

8) When queen Beatrix turned 65 she received a state pension just like everyone else, despite the fact that she is worth $300 million.

9)If requested, a sex worker will be provided for a physically and mentally disabled person, paid by the state.

10) The Dutch company Philips invented the CD player in 1979.

11) Out of the 16 Dutch Nobel Prize Winners, 10 received the prize for their research in physics and chemistry.

12) The first dikes were built around the year 1100 by monks.

13) The original color of a carrot is not orange. The Dutch artificially manipulated the carrot around 1600 into orange to match it to the national color.

14) In 1679, the Dutch scientist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek found for the first time bacteria and spermatozoa with his own made microscope.

15) According to Dutch scientist Simon Stevin, Adam and Eve spoke Dutch in Paradise, and Dutch would be the most logical language in the world. Therefore he wrote most of his work - late 1500s- in Dutch. This is the main reason why in Dutch most scientific words are Dutch not Latin.

16) In the beginning of the 1630s, tulips were more expensive than gold and cause a tulip mania. It collapsed as they didn't know yet the different colors and stripes were caused by a viral disease.