At the very North of The Netherlands: Groningen

Hi all! 
Today I'll take a tiny break from the Australia posts to show you what we've been up to recently here in the Netherlands.

We decided to use the few days off we had last week to go and explore Groningen, right at the top end of the country (pretty much at the opposite end of where we live, since we are at the very bottom of the Netherlands). 

Here is a little peak at what we did and saw.

Well... to start with, we saw... a lot of grey skies! A bit of snow and very cold winds too. The weather didn't exactly score points in favour of the city but then again, it's nothing we're not used to down here in Maastricht. :-)

 
And thankfully there were plenty of other things that made us have a tremendous time!

Let's start with the food:
We had a lovely breakfast at Puur! Natural Food one morning where we looooved the pancakes with a hint of cinamon and the delicious jam that came along. The place was really cool (I especially liked the mural shown below).




Also (and I don't have any photographic evidence), one evening we had the most amazing dinner at Hanasato, an exquisite Japanese restaurant where we had shabu shabu for the very first time. It was delicious and the whole meal was a wonderful experience! We decided to go there after reading this post by Livlig and we were so glad we did!
 
We also followed Livlig's advice and headed to Sostrene Grene; what a cool shop! I'll show you all the little things I bought there soon.

And we spent a significant portion of our time in Groningen in the magnificent Groninger Museum. We particularly loved the Nordic Art exhibition they have at the moment, and I loved walking through all the rooms painted in different colours...




Other highlights of the trip included climbing the Martini tower and admiring the foggy view below us, relaxing at the complimentary sauna and turkish bath at our hotel, and even scoring a bottle of prosecco to go along because it was Valentine's Day! :-)