Utrecht

Yesterday I woke up to gray skies and a forecast of thunderstorms. I decided to go to Utrecht anyway.

I love Utrecht. It's the oldest city in the Netherlands, and some of the canals are over a millennia old. The cobbled streets are crammed with bicycles and little shops and houses hang out over the canals. You can eat lunch on the walkways running at the edge of the water, buy a pastry from a bakery hidden down a twisty alley, and check out the soaring cathedrals. Which is pretty much how I spent my afternoon.





There must be a lot of demand for pet snot in the Netherlands.



For lunch I stopped at a Turkish restaurant. Mainly to see how "Turkish" was interpreted here. The menu was only in Dutch, but the waitress was really nice and went through all the options with me. I wound up ordering a "hummus plate," which involved (I was told) lots of different kinds of hummus and pita. What I got was a plate of babaganoush, tuna salad, cucumber salad, lots of tasty things--but no hummus. There was no hummus on the hummus plate. Oh well.



There's this awesome little park in Utrecht that used to be a 10th century monastery's cloisters. I love it there. It is always full of beautiful flowers--and it always smells like pot. I took my laptop and worked on my novel there for about two hours.



Then, as I was heading home, I came upon--are you ready for this?--KAYAKING. There was a boating company that let you rent a kayak for about four euros an hour--and go boating on the canals! How cool is that!! So I totally flipped out and rented a kayak. I wound up getting pretty lost and wandering around for about an hour before I heard the thunder. There was no rain--it was actually sunny, with some clouds--but it sounded like it was right above me. So I set about trying to find my way back. Overall, a day well spent!



Houseboats!



This is a prison. No idea there was a prison here!

A Rare Sunny Day

Most of Holland is supposed to be under the ocean. I think of this whenever I ride a train through the countryside, which is utterly flat and criscrossed with endless canals. I think of mud flats at the bottom of the ocean, channels carved by random currents.

This summer, the world has evidently decided to put the country back underwater. The rain has been unrelenting for two weeks, heavy curtains of it driven horizontal by the wind off the North Sea. So far we've NOT gone to Luxembourg or Amsterdam, and I've also managed NOT to go to Utrecht or Delft to work in a sunny outdoor cafe by the medieval canals, because there have been no sunny days.

Except today. Today when I have client calls scheduled for the afternoon and can't go anywhere. Whee.

My goal for living and working in the Netherlands is to take one work day a week as a field trip--go to some new town, do some work in a pretty place, spend a leisurely afternoon wandering and exploring. So far the weather hasn't cooperated, so I'm playing it by ear and trying to leave my schedule open for unexpected sunny days (so far the weather sites have been really undependable). I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that today isn't the only nice day this week.

It's also been cold, even in sunlight--not much higher than 65 Fahrenheit. I have to say I'm obsessively jealous of New Yorkers and their heat wave.

Back to work...

Blogging My Life...Take Three.

I've tried creating travel blogs to take everyone with me as I run around Europe and various other places...and each time I try it, it doesn't work out so well. I quit after a handful of posts. I think I've been setting expectations too high.

So this time I'll be doing it differently. No longer will I be writing elaborate, poetic multi-page posts about everything that happened in the past week. Instead, I give you this:



This is Dutch butter. The Dutch have this hilarious habit of naming foods things that sound, in English, profoundly unappetizing. Heh heh..."smeerbare." Here's another example:



Mmm...lintpasta.

So yeah, that will be about the level of discourse here. I'll also tell you all about my travels...and when I'm back in New York, I'll update on my life there too. Just...not every day.