Back Home

Well, we've been back home from our European vacation for 10 days now and it's been more of a whirlwind than when we were travelling. I guess that means it must have been a relaxing vacation. Already we've said Bon Voyage to my sister, sending her off on her great Asian adventure, we've been camping at Timothy Lake, and we've been to my family's annual swim party down near Eugene. As usual, it was a blast.

The kids only managed to stop swimming when Steph brought out the snowcones. There's Paul in the water feeling much more like himself...and look at that wavy new hair! Linda calls it his chemo perm.

Michiel is back to work today. The kids have one more week of freedom. The house is a mess of half-unpacked, half-organized things. And I keep finding spiders in the bathroom. Big ones. I'm beginning to think Jo, Jim, and Tash (who stayed in our house while we were gone) left something more for us than tp and extra towels. There's not a spider's nest you forgot to tell us about, is there, guys?

A Few Pictures From This Last Week

Tomorrow we head to France for a week of camping, castles, and oh...Paris. Here are a few pictures from this last week:

We climbed the Peperbustoren in Zwolle, a church tower with a spiral staircase composed of 236 steps. Even Mieke made it to the top by herself!


Happy kids modeling their new slippers:



Getting around the Dutch way...in a bakfiets. Boy, I wish we had one of these!





Annabel surfing the canals of Leeuwarden:

The Little Things

When we get back home, and the routine of a new school year starts, the kids will look back on our trip and one of the first things they'll remember is this:



Trampolining in the rain. They all got soaking wet (kletsnat, we would say in Dutch) and loved every minute of it.



They may not remember the churches and cathedrals, the castles and towers, the old city walls. But they will remember that the neighbor let us borrow the trampoline because his teenage boys don't use it much. They'll remember helping to set it up in the yard. They'll remember racing to jump on it every night after being excused from the dinner table. And they'll remember that one time when a warm rain fell, and they didn't think we'd let them, but Papa joined them, and they jumped and jumped while the water sprayed up all around them and fell down on top of them and they got wetter and wetter and they wanted to go on jumping all through the night.

Back home in Oregon, they will sometimes watch the rain fall and remember that joy of lightness, that bliss of flushed cheeks and shining eyes, and they'll wish they had a trampoline so they could recapture that time when they were truly happy.



Other things they will remember from the trip, those everyday things that might not make it into a scrapbook:

• getting to eat hagelslag (chocolate sprinkles) and nutella and other yummy sweet stuff on bread every morning for breakfast
• getting to eat vla (a sort of pudding, only better) every night for dessert and Oma taking them in turns to pick out new flavors--dubbel, strawberry, blanca, stroopwafel, speculaas
• watching cartoons every morning when they wake up
• riding on the back of a bike with feet in the saddlebags, or dangling free in Alexander's case
• trying to squeeze into the baby bathtub because Oma and Opa have only a shower. Really, even Alexander tries to do this.

Echte Nederlands

Real Dutch. That's what this post is about. Sure, there's cheese and windmills and klompen and stroopwafels, but what happens when you get beyond tulips and coffee shops?

Well, one thing that happens is spekken. This is a sort of marshmallowy candy that is soft, pink & white, and pure sugar. Spek is the Dutch word for bacon. What this candy has to do with bacon, I'm not exactly sure. Perhaps it is the pink and white that is reminiscent of marbled fat? Mmmm. Isn't your mouth just watering?

We all felt a bit sick afterwards.
Another thing that happens is Sjoelen, an old Dutch game were you slide wooden discs across a wooden board and try to get them into four different slots, each earning you different points. It's a fun game but I haven't yet got past the sliding-as-hard-as-I-can-in-hopes-that-something-will-go-in strategy.

Another thing is Ijs van Co, which is this hugely popular little soft-serve ice cream place that Jeanni's parents used to take her to when she was little. The lines were long but moved quickly because there were about seven teenagers packed into this little hole in the wall and serving up ice cream. Annabel and Mieke got two ice creams because their first servings were small, and well, Oma and Opa need to spoil them!

Maastricht

Two days ago Michiel and I had a little day-trip getaway to Maastricht, in the south of the Netherlands.

Here is het Vrijthof, the big central square. Check out that red bell tower!


I also dragged Michiel to an art museum, the famous Bonnefantenmuseum full of drawings from the Renaissance. And also some modern art--some cool and creepy and some of it, well, let's just say it was a little too modern for us. This one was cool...the only piece of art work in the museum's central dome:



And the whole reason we were there was to meet dear friends from Innisfree! Stephanie and Olivier from Belgium on the right, Jamie and Christian from Virginia but visiting his parents in Germany in the middle, and then us. Such a fun group!

People Pictures

There are many more, but that's it for now!

More from Germany

We also went to the Ittertal Historischer Freizeitpark. Think Enchanted Forest only older, smellier, and a bit creepier. It was fantastic! Alexander annoyed his sister. Mieke got to jump to her heart's content. And Annabel made friends with a girl from a refugee family from Libya who spoke more English than German.

Jaunt to Germany

Sailing with Markus and Tina:
 

Open Air Museum:


Ice cream (of course). This was our second stop at the ice cream shop.


Everyone who came to the family gathering at Franz's house:

Getting over Jetlag...

...in three easy steps.

Step 1: Tickle your cousin
Invite family and friends over all at the same time. Eat, drink, and tickle your cousin. Try not to fall asleep.


Step 2: Koffie en Koek (Coffee and a sort of cross between a cake and a cookie)
Celebrate everything, especially birthdays, whether they happened yesterday or in March. Teatime? Let's celebrate! Try not to fall asleep.


Step 3: Glitter tattoos...of course. What else? Borrow bikes from neighbors so that all 10 of us (Michiel, Lisa, Alexander, Annabel, Mieke, Jeanni, Carel, Tatjana, Maarten, and Kiril) can ride to Zwolle for a festival. Six bikes, ten people. You do the math.