Ladies and Gentlemen,

April is the month in which in 2012 “Polen voor Nederlanders” entered the global web world. It is true that the first text has been inserted in our website on January 31, 2012, but it was a temporary URL address so does not count. We decided that the best date of our birthday is April 16, the day of the first website comment, shortly after receiving the relevant URL.

To this day we can not believe it but we have done it! Because no one of us was familiar with a website design and everything we had to learn in practise. In particular, it was a quite new experience for Han, who had to switch from his favourite paper publishing world into the world of electronic words. And you must admit that this one is very unique. We also differed a bit in our ideas but somehow we were able to overcome these differences. To illustrate the scale of the difficulties it is necessary to say that “Polen voor Nederlanders” has been designed by Dutch guys, Wisja Pannekoek and Wouter van de Gronde, and the content was inserted by Renata from Poland, so there was nobody at her side to ask for advice. But we still managed to cope with the task and we are very proud of our work.

The idea originated in our Lower Silesia tour in 2010, during which we have found that Poland is a beautiful country, especially since – with financial help of European Union – this and that has been improved and some decent roads have been built. Looking at the green hills of the Karkonosze Mountains we found it worth to show it to citizens of the flat Netherlands. It was in a time when the climate around Poland and the Polish people was not the best out there, so we decided to improve it. So we started to drive across Poland in the summer to collect material and photos for our website. Our experiences have been described and shown in pictures in the “Tourism” section. Read also: PvN reflecting two cultures.

Our website attracts many young people, what makes us happy. Even more joy brings the fact that for the first anniversary of the Polen voor Nederlanders we had a special gift for you – a twin-website: Holandia bez tajemnic (Holland without secrets).  Maybe there is someone who wants to write something for it?

Feel invited!

Renata and Han