DUBBELJE

I mentioned in an earlier blog how proud the Dutch are of their 'tall' reputation. However, there are a couple of cases where they are very proud of things from their country that are very SMALL. The first is the miniature city of Madurodam . A tourist attraction just outside of the Hague, Madurodam is a miniature village that contains everything quintessentially Netherlands. There's lots of little perfectly modeled buildings, tiny people, windmills and more. Almost every Dutch landmark building has been reproduced on a miniature scale... they even have Schiphol airport.

The other is the 'dubbelje' (double-cha), the Dutch equivalent of a dime. Unfortunately, since the euro, the dubbelje is no longer in circulation, but until that time, it held the honor of being the most diminuative coin in the world.

The Dutch can also lay claim to Phillips, one of the most successful electronics companies in the world, and the composer Ludwig van Beethoven. You heard me (pun intended), Beethoven was actually of Belgian/Dutch ancestry. The 'van' is Dutch, whereas German would be 'von'. Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany, but the Dutch choose to honor him as one of their own.

The Phillips company created the CD and the DVD and they were 'creative' in more ways than one in doing so. When designing the CD, there was a debate over the size, so one of the engineers reached into his poacket and took out a 'dubbelje'. Inspiration struck, and now a dubbelje coin fits to the millimeter into the center of any CD or DVD. Also, a standard CD is 72 minutes long, precisely the length of Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

Thus proving, there is a small out of circulation Dutch coin out there somewhere in the world that you can stick into the middle of a CD, and after that you can listen to Beethoven's 9th Symphony in it's entirety.