As Chinese New Year is coming up, it's not a bad idea to talk about how I spent New Year's Eve (31st December) in the Netherlands, and some Dutch traditional ways of celebrating the New Year. 農曆新年將至，就讓我寫寫應節的話題——我在荷蘭過除夕的趣聞，及荷蘭人迎新年的習俗。 My Dutch friends and I stayed for the two days from New Year's Eve in a farmhouse in Biddinghuizen, a village in the middle of the expansive farmlands of Flevoland (where the girl in our group originally comes from). I've never expected to see endless farmland anywhere in the Netherlands since the Netherlands is a really compact country, and it actually felt a little like Australia to me! Flevoland is a province that was created more than 40 years from land reclamation. The sea that was originally in the middle of the Netherlands, Zuidersee, was dammed off the North Sea and became the present-day lake called IJseelmeer. Different portions of the IJseelmeer were then dammed off in turn and drained to create new agricultural and resident