Ice stadium

It looks impressive, but it wasn't a dedicated curling rink and that makes it more difficult to play a good game of curling.  There was an ice hockey game on the evening before our competition on the Saturday and when we were finished our games by about 7pm, there was speed skating, so the ice is getting churned up a lot.  The ice makers do their best to prepare the ice for curling, but it's not the same as in a dedicated curling rink where the ice is always smooth and the ice men cut the ice to make the stones curl.  That didn't happen here. The locals knew to just throw the stones down on either side of the centre line with a bit of force.  Our skip couldn't adapt his tactics to suit the conditions so we had an embarrassingly poor performance.  However the social side of the competition was really good and with three games on each day, we got to meet a lot of different people, who, since it was in Netherlands, were able to speak English.   We also met up again with players from a competition we played last year in Belgium.  From a social aspect it was very enjoyable.