The Katies Meet!

So the big day was yesterday, when I got to meet Katie from A Listmaker's Life and my partner at ABC & 123: A Learning Cooperative! Here we are, Katie "Squared"! If you're wondering, she's in her traditional Dutch dancing outfit. She'd just performed around Centennial Park, you can see part of her performance here.

Speaking of her performance...here are some of the pictures I snapped of her after I finished taking a short clip of the first dance and yes they really are all wearing wooden shoes.

Doesn't she look like she's got some sassy attitude in this one?

They do not mess around at the Tulip Festival, each dancer has to be inspected before they can perform and two ladies in Katie's group had to go remove their earring prior to dancing. They weren't part of the traditional outfits. Each province in the Netherlands has to be represented in each dancing group; that's why there are different kinds of outfits worn by the group.

A very informative description was given about each type of outfit; you'd think as a former teacher I'd have attempted to pay more attention to it. Truthfully, it went on and on and I couldn't hear anyway. It sounded like the adults from a Charlie Brown Peanuts cartoon, and I guess that would make me a naughty student who was day dreaming through it.

The whole dancing group in an action shot. I have no idea if there is a formal name for this dance or this move but it looks cool, note the gal on the end I got in mid jump.

High kick it girl! This part is where I'd have fallen flat on my face. Okay who are we kidding, I wouldn't have made it this far in the first place. I have two left feet, with or without wooden shoes.

Oh yes, and since this was the tulip festival after all, here we are with the tulips! The tulips were everywhere, any place tulips could be, they were. They were even lining the streets along the curbside. We walked a ways through downtown together, and Katie got a lot of passerbys asking questions, I guess wearing the Dutch garb automatically makes you part tour guide. I was thinking after we took our pictures, I probably looked like just another visitor taking advantage of a photo-op and getting my photo with one of the costumed dancers☺

If you were wondering, how we ended up being partners without ever meeting face to face, I found Katie through a question she asked that was featured on a post by Tip Junkie, this post to be specific. I clicked on the link to her blog and started reading and commenting. We began emailing back and forth and then I had the idea for ABC & 123. We must really think alike because when I mentioned it to her, she told me she'd been playing with the same idea. We ended up jumping into it with both feet!

It's been great to have a partner, because as you all know blogging can take up a lot of your time, and it's takes up even more when you're trying to maintain two. This way we both have someone to share the load with and bounce ideas off of. We've gotten to know each other a lot better through phone calls and a ton of emails. We live two and a half hours away from each other, and she just happens to live in a town that puts on a yearly Tulip Festival that I've always wanted to go to. It seemed like the perfect time to go, and I'm so glad we did.

BTW: Tomorrow will be tulip overload as I will be sharing the pictures from the rest of the day trip.