Part II: Dottie in Enschede and further travels West

For all the brilliant weather we had in Amsterdam it has turned a little crazy here the past few days in Enschede. We've had occassional sun with sudden bouts of freezing hail and snow. We managed to get outside a bit and hit the open air market today. The bad weather did not deter us from having a great time playing cards and dominoes after James went to bed, though the Maier 'spirit of competition' soemtimes left Katharine feeling a little outnumbered (even while she smoked us in rummy). Another highlight was the International Womens group meeting we hosted here on Sunday- Dottie fit right in and chatted it up with women from 4 continents. She was great with James, singing him songs and playing games, always talking and repeating the important things (numbers, colors, etc.) I realise this is how we all learn to speak; its just easier when you have the gift of gab.
She even couldn't resist washing up the dishes ocassionally-



For the record, Katharine didn't mean to leave us on the sidewalk. We were trying to get around the first day in Amsterdam and she was trying to wrangle me, Dottie, and James in his stroller onto a double bus (the kind with the articulated hinge in the middle) that had three doors. She was at the front door trying to explain to the driver that we just wanted to go one stop to avoid walking to the station. There were three doors and she was at the front one while we were between the other two further back. The middle door opened as she was talking and we turned to it as it closed (not the quickest reaction time admittedly) and the last door never opened as we stood on the sidewalk and watched as the bus departed with Katharine onboard looking puzzlingly out at our expressions of shock. It turns out the bus won't pick up passengers there because it is too close to the station. Never mind the Americans that are too lazy to navigate the crazy cobbled streets...
We had a great time with Dottie anyway, though it took a while before she could grasp that though you could buy coffee at a coffeeshop, it is not their main product.

We are again back from travelling to the west- after Dottie left we spent the night in Den Haag (the Hague) so I could renew my passport and we could meet our friends Brian and Eugenia Cayce and their 6 month old son Henry as they had a 12 hour layover on their way to Cairo. Though the US embassy is in the Hague, it turns out that you have to renew your passport at the Consulate in Amsterdam. We had already made a reservation at a place in the Hague so we stayed there anyway since we had never been and wanted to see a different part of the NL. A very interesting city, great Art Deco apartment blocks (we stayed in a B&B in one of these neighborhoods). It was another sunny, though cold day as I took the train and tram to the Consulate on the Museumplein and then met Kat and James in the Hague. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Den Haag, and Utrecht make up a huge urban area called the Randstad; you can get from one city to the next pretty quickly with public transport.
This is the Rijksmuseum in the background and the Van Gogh museum on the left- the American consulate is a less picturesque, fortified building off to the right...



We had a great time wandering around the Hague and hanging out for a couple of hours in Amsterdam with the Cayces. Though they all needed some sleep, they are always game for adventure of any sort; even Brian's normal hummingbird-esque level of energy was only down to normal after the long sleepless flight with a young baby.

We ended up in a picturesque neighborhood near Chinatown in the Hague- it seems the boats and canals there are a kept a bit better than in AMS for the most part.



Though we have tried to give him rice a couple times to no avail, it seems the trick is to use chopsticks with James...



My friend Anne wrote recently about looking back ten years (or so) and considering the drastic changes that can take place in that period. You think fifteen to 25 is a big jump (and it is); for me and a lot of folks in my generation 25 to 35 is what seems like lifetimes of change.



When I picked this passport up in 1997, I was on my way to Thailand with a girl I had met 6 months before. I had been married, divorced and was still slowly healing a broken collarbone (I still have a tilted shoulder) from end-oing slowly over the front forks of a mountain bike at a fourth of July party on a mosquito ridden gravel airstrip in Alaska.
I look back at 10 years of travelling on this (now defunct) passport really fondly- I remember that scrawny, bruised version of me from then and so look forward to my new passport coming in the mail and making even more journeys (with a few more grey hairs and carrying a bit more weight around...).

One journey I will be making is to the western Massachusetts this summer to apprentice at the Heartwood school. I visited them in February, really loved it, and just got an email confirming the position 2 days ago. It will be a challenging to be away for so long but we all look at it as a worthwhile investment in finding a place where we can both get meaningful jobs when we return to the States around the holidays this year. In a lot of ways I can't believe it will be four years since we left this September.