This Sunday Dutch Prime Minister Balkenende will visit the Brooklyn Museum, joined by Minister of Foreign Affairs Verhagen and Minister for Development Cooperation Koenders.

As we wrote before, the Brooklyn museum is hosting various special events this year around the Schenck Houses, two early Dutch colonial houses. The wooden houses suggest the way a Dutch American family might have lived in Brooklyn over a period of 150 years. They were moved to the Brooklyn museum in 1929 and 1964, and after a renovation in 2007 they are standing next to each other on the fourth floor of the museum.

Breuckelen, as its first name was, was named for Breukelen in the province of Utrecht in the Netherlands when it was authorized by the Dutch West India Company in 1646. Brooklyn's official motto is still in old-Dutch: Eendraght Maeckt Maght. Obviously a source of pride for the 'original Brooklyn' in Utrecht, there is a special website to celebrate the Brooklyn Connection, part of BrooklynBridgeBreukelen.