It’s finally time to sharpen up my blades—I’ve been waiting for over eleven months now. The oldest known ice-skates, 4000 year-old strap-on horse bone blades, were dug up near a Finnish lake by archeologists in 2007. But while ice-skates have been used as transportation for millennia, the Dutch, who call skates ‘schaats,’ turned skating fun [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=1106
The waterways here in Maine are full of pretty wooden boats these days. And for that we can thank England’s King Charles II and the Dutch. The King, who was in exile in Holland during the mid-1600s, brought back a yacht, or jacht, as the Dutch say—a sixty-six foot pleasure cruiser given to the King as [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=649
