Many thanks to Karin’s friends, Jenneke and Niek for providing us with accommodation last night and great Dutch hospitality.

From their house we ran to our first school visit of the day in Eindhoven at Busisschool De Hanevoet, where the children diligently listened and were amazingly enthusiastic. They were all so quiet as they tried to feel harmony inside themselves.

Running in the small playground with them was such great fun, and they really wanted to run with us the 2 km to the next school.

But the teachers said it was just a bit too far for them, but they said they would love to do something special for next year.

With no time to spare we said our farewells to the children, and ran to the Regional International School, where the principal warmly greeted us. We were shown to the playground where two classes joined us. The school is truly international with 40 different nationalities, and when we asked them who have friends in other countries, not surprising, every single child had many friends in different countries.

They fully understood harmony by commenting it was about love, friendship and union. All the children were so well behaved and later the teachers commented that the children were never that well behaved and silent for them.

The children were a great example of harmony in action - many different nationalities working together.

In the staff room we had refreshments and were presented with the school’s Yearbook and key rings. It certainly felt a most harmonious staff room and all the teachers wished us success and good luck and for us to return next year.

The weather again was warm and sunny with clear blue skies. Holland has numerous cycle paths to accommodate the many cyclists. It seems that nearly everyone cycles here, and a brilliant traffic policy is that cyclists have priority over cars.

After running a further 23 km we arrived at Zwijssen College in Veghel. Abhinabha gave wonderful presentations to two separate groups of young adults in the college’s cafeteria. We passed the torch to groups of young people sat down and one young lady originally from Morocco was the most enthusiastic as she was the first to hold the torch and hold it up aloft.

In Holland everyone has a bike, and this college was no exception. In most countries the car parking lot is far bigger than the space to park your bike. In Holland the bike rules. The college bicycle parking lot holds 1,500 bikes!

The college kindly provided us with lunch and refreshments.

In the afternoon we met some young goats along the side of the road. Mark decided to talk to them about harmony. Many of the team suggested quite a few funny captions for the photo below, one of which was, “Can you spot which was in the runner?” and “We started our run in the capital of Portugal, do you know the capital of Portugal?”

We later came across a classic Dutch landmark of a windmill and Ondrej couldn’t resist taking a photo, with runners jumping, but it looks as though they’ve fallen form the sky!

In the afternoon sunshine we ran the 50 km to Nijmegen, the oldest town in Holland. At the city hall we met Mrs Lenie Scholten, city representative of youth and social affairs.

We were given a tour of the city hall, complete with old dungeons and torture chambers down in the basement. The city hall generously provided us with our evening meal at the restaurant ‘De Plak’, which we thoroughly enjoyed.

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Distance: 85km

Team Members:
Abhinabha Tangerman (Holland), Annemarie Beumer (Holland), Karin Wijnkoop (Holland), Klaus Schulz (Germany), Mark Collinson (England), Marton Fekete (Hungary), Nataliya Lehonkova (Ukraine), Ondrej Vesely (Czech Republic), Vladimir Ilaysov (Russia).

Harmonemail:
You can send a message to the runners or read the messages.

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