Blog: Milou de Kerf
"From now on, as you may have noticed, I am an ambassador for Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, and I recommend it to everyone"
I am a Zeeuw by import and (by now) I am proud of it.
How does someone from Breda end up in beautiful Zeeuws-Vlaanderen via Amsterdam and Antwerp? For love, of course. It’s not the most obvious choice and, at first, my friends even laughed about it. What are you going to do there? That reaction turned out to be pure ignorance. Because it’s absolutely beautiful here, there’s plenty to do, space and peace. In one word: wonderful, but I too had to be convinced of that. It didn’t happen overnight, but in phases.
I met my husband during my studies, friends from literally the very first day. Like so many people from Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, he first studied in Breda and then in Amsterdam.
It wasn’t until Amsterdam, more than 10 years later, that the spark really ignited. I was working at a large telecom provider as an e-commerce manager at the head office. He worked at a publishing company, and due to the sudden and sad passing of his father’s business partner, he was asked—some years earlier than expected—if he wanted to come work in the family business in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen.
After a few drinks in the local pub, he asked if I would come south with him... “Okay, but not to Hulst,” was my answer. I had just started with my new employer in The Hague and absolutely wanted to keep working there. What would I do in Hulst, I thought at the time...
It had to be easy to commute to my job, we wanted to live in a city, and it ended up being (somewhere in the poorly negotiated “middle” on my part) the lovely Antwerp. After wonderful years there, an in-between phase over the border between Antwerp and Roosendaal, and two kids later, we finally took the step to move to Hulst. My former employer moved to Amsterdam, and with a young family, that was just a bit too far to commute daily.
Exciting, moving to Zeeland after all, which felt far away from everything and everyone. But as it turned out, it was a breath of fresh air: the space, the peace, so close to the most beautiful beaches in the Netherlands, the friendly people, the Burgundian attitude, the highest Michelin star density in the Netherlands, and everything you need for daily life is nearby. If you want to visit a real city, you’re quickly in Antwerp, Ghent, Breda, or Rotterdam. And if you really put your foot down, you can even be in Paris in three hours.
That’s all great, but what about work? That turned out more than fine as well. Together with my truly Zeeuws-at-heart business partner, we started LeNoir and quickly built it into a successful advertising, marketing, and communications agency. There’s plenty of business activity here in beautiful Zeeuws-Vlaanderen.
In short, from now on, as you may have noticed, I am an ambassador for Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, and I recommend it to everyone.
