As promised the next blog of my will be about being a Dutch Star Wars Fan. I will tackle this subject in a few categories:

Merchandise (both literature and actionfigs and the like)
Conventions
Fanclubs

Merchandise

When it comes to merchandise the Netherlands is a weird country to live in. I see you Americans always complain about the unavaiibility of certain actionfigures on forums and to be honest I get sick of it everytime I read it. Here in the Netherlands we never see them. Around a movie release we see some of them (with ROTS it was Anakin, Obi, Vader and Yoda only, I did came across a single lost Mace though, but that was luck). Then I believe some left-over pegwarmers of the Saga Collection has hit the shelves here recently and those are even collecting dust here too. After all: Seeing tens of Darth Vader (Hoth), Chewbacca's (ROTJ with the chain) and Fetts isnt really selling, even here. To be honest, Fett was quickly gone, same goes for the single Han in Carbonite I saw (bought that one myself) and 1 AT-AT driver (bought that one myself too). But I wouldn't mind if other pegwarmers like Poggle and the Neimodian were send here, I would bought those 2.
But when it comes to actionfigures we have to go to special comicstores (and pay outragous high prizes) or wait for a convention to come.

Comics and novels are easy to come by for normal prizes, thank the maker. The single minor bad thing is that we wait a little bit sometimes for some comics and that almost nothing gets translated. But then again I prefer reading English anyway.

Conventions

In this the Netherlands truelly shines for me. We have 1 or 2 conventions a year. Last year we had 'Screenheroes', this year we have 2 'Starcons', a 'Dutch Starcon' (which will be next weekend) and a 'New Starcon', which was last weekend).
They all include quite a load of guests and the merchandise. Then we have England (with Collectors Mania convention) and Belgium (with 'F.A.C.T.S.' convention) close by to go to. This is my 5th year of going to conventionns and collecting autographs that way (got 32 I believe now, with Darth Vader/Prowse, Watto/Secombe and Mon Mothma/Blakinston coming up next week), but more about that in future blogs.

Fanclubs

And of course I could not end thiis blog without giving credit to the fan community in the Netherlands. We basicly have 1 big SW costume club called European Kamino (find them on the web here: http://www.european-kamino.com/) that unites all the SW fans in the Netherlands, we are 1 big happy family and I really like it. Of course that big family has some culprits too and is spread out to 3 (I believe) Dutch SW forums, but really it is a nice group. Thats why I am working on a project for European Kamino that will be revealed to the members in a week or so. What I can tell is that I am writing soemthing and that every single member with his or her costume are going to be in it.

And thats it for today, a rather long blog, hopefull not to long for you people to fell in sleep above .