Amsterdam

M has the opportunity to present his research at conferences a couple of times a year. Earlier this month he presented in Leuven, Belgium. Now he may present anywhere in the US he’d like to and I’ll calmly hold down the fort here at home, but if he gets to leave the country, I insist on going with him! Our parents agreed to watch the kids for us and we’d been saving up for it, so WHAHOO! And we were off!  (I am posting these in reverse order of how we lived them, so that when you read down through the blog it's in chronological order...I'm sure it makes absolutely no difference to anyone but me, but then it's MY blog, now isn't it!)

We arrived a week before the conference and checked out the Netherlands. We used Amsterdam as a base and stayed in a quiet little corner of the Jordan neighborhood on a street with a canal down the middle.

We couldn’t believe all the bikes in the Netherlands! We saw families of 5 traveling on just 2 bikes, old ladies riding sidesaddle on the fender behind their husbands with their ankles demurely crossed as though they were quietly sitting on their front porch, moms with up to 4 kids and/or an infant car seat carrier in wooden boxes built into the front of their bikes (like the one in the photo below), everyone on the phone or texting while riding bikes, women pedaling in stilettos, guys toting construction materials harnessed to their bikes, people singing at the top of their lungs with their ipods and acres and acres of bike parking, 3 stories high, at the train station.

The canals were fun to have everywhere. We rented a paddle boat one morning to go exploring.

The architecture was so cool everywhere you looked. M took lots of photos of houses whose facades were impossibly leaning into the street.

I loved this art deco theater.

The flower market was fabulous and heartbreaking at the same time; fabulous because of all the varieties of bulbs and the all the colors, colors, colors - heartbreaking because there were only a handful of rather plain, red tulip bulbs that were properly packaged and papered to bring over to North America. When it came down to it in customs, they didn’t even really take notice of them, so I probably could have gone ahead and been swept away in the tulipmania and smuggled in some contraband bulbs after all.

Of course since we were in Holland, we went to see inside a working windmill. M was geeking over all the gears and mechanics that were still made of wood.

And since we were in Holland, we did some cheese tasting. M’s favorite was a little smoked and herbed cow cheese on a tasty little item called a stroopwafle. My favorite local fare were poffertjes, puffy mini pancakes, and it didn’t hurt that they served them with ice cream and cherry sauce!  Some how M talked me into posing for all the tacky tourist photos, claiming that he'd posed for the last one...only I can't find any of him now?  (the knight in shining armour is my brother who we met up with later in the trip.)