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| Welcome to Holland! On behalf of our volunteers, we wish you a very warm welcome to the Holland Pavilion. |
| Our volunteers have worked long and hard to provide you with the sights, sounds and tastes of what has to be, in relation to the level of the sea, one of the lowest countries in the world (Nederland or the Netherlands means "low land"). In fact, nearly half of our flat and very densely populated country is below sea level. It is also one of the world’s smallest countries, with approximately 16 million inhabitants occupying an area of 14,864 square kilometers. The Netherlands has always been a trading nation and even today, while the country has only 0.008% of the world's area, it is the world's third largest agricultural exporter after the USA and France. In addition, for a bit of trivia, the Dutch are the tallest people in Europe. |
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The Netherlands and Holland are often used interchangeably to describe a country known for its windmills (nearly 1,000 have survived and over 200 are still working), and wooden shoes.
The Netherlands is, in a technical sense, the more correct descriptive term of reference, because Holland actually refers to only the country's two western coastal provinces of Noord (North) and Zuid (South) Holland and Zeeland.
Today, of course, the Netherlands is much more than windmills and wooden shoes.
It is a very progressive industrialized country where the world's oldest scheduled airline KLM or Royal Dutch Airlines began passenger air service in 1920 with the their first flight from London to Amsterdam, and where the Dutch multinational Phillips Electronics N.V., founded in 1891, in partnership with Sony Corporation, first launched the CD in 1983.
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