[RedDevil]

Ah, Nieuwegein. The birthplace of Wifi. And my mother.

Although technically, my mother was born in Jutphaas, which was at the time a small village with a large municipality consisting of mainly farmland, but running up quite close to the heart of the city of Utrecht, which had sold its land rights in the Middle ages to likely focus on its core business of being a city and leaving al the peasantries to others.

Enter prewar growth and scarcity of housing, and big housing projects were started to house the people working in Utrecht that were unable to find suitable accommodation, like my primary school teacher and principal granddad. Jutphaas ain't Utrecht, no matter how close the housing block was; but that was 'corrected' by annexation in the '50s to the dismay of Jutphaas...

50 years ago (almost to the day!) Jutphaas and Vreeswijk, a fishing and shipping town with a profitable lock service on the channel connecting the Lek river with Utrecht, merged to form Nieuwegein. This new town expanded rapidly with office buildings that housed (among others) a bustling IT company which grew annoyed of having wires everywhere to have devices communicate.

50 years Nieuwegein is reason for a celebration. As part of that we now have a trail of black tiles with engravings suggested by the locals that ends at the Kerkveld, the 1000 year old center of Jutphaas. Some of the tiles have engravings of Anna van Rijn, a noble lady who provided free housing and schooling for the poor as early as the 17h century, and other notable people of local history. There's a drawing of a bird by a man with a hemorrhage. There's a collection of personas in Minecraft, which my kids like very much. All in all, yeah. It connects people to a concept that never connected them before.

Nieuwegein was voted 'the ugliest town in the Netherlands' in 2007. Which is mostly undeserved, there are f.i. over 100 km of lanes and roads lined with trees and waterways and other pleasant things to look at. I do walk a lot but I seldom leave town, no need for it. But part of the credit has to go to the council which has indeed worked to improve how Nieuwegein looks. Nonetheless, housing is cheapest in the region for a reason, and when my wife wanted to reduce travel time to her job in nearby Houten it was the logical choice (as my job was and is in Gouda to the west) and Nieuwegein was both reasonably accessible and reasonably priced.
We had no connections there whatsoever. We both grew up in the west (me Den Haag and Rijswijk, my wife in Alphen aan den Rijn; she was born on the doormat of the house she lived in until well after our marriage).

Six years on my wife's work went north (literally and otherwise) and the pandemic has me working at home. So here we are, my kids know Nieuwegein as home, and we grow used to it. It would be ideal if I had no tinnitus and the area would not be locked in in a narrow triangle of the busiest highways in the country... but then if you need to go anywhere you just drive about straight at it.