From Osnabruck

we are away for a bit. we are now in osnabruck, germany, where we staying at the house of a friend and former colleague (while they are enjoying some time off in the netherlands). jaaajjjj!! the house is gigantic. there is a piano, and i already cannot count the number of hours tim has played... good its a free standing house...

photowise.... this is all i can show you from osnabruck. yep, thats quite bad.... but... we have had quite some rain and im not good at balancing my umbrella in one hand and the camera in the other. this i took from the car. this traffic sign tells you that you can only enter the environmental zone of osnabruck when you have the green sticker on your car. to get the sticker, the car needs to meet the german/EU pollution standards. even if your car meets the standard, no sticker means you can get fined, regardless whether you have a german or foreign car. so.... luckily it was quite easy to obtain the sticker at a local inspection zone (providing the license plate was sufficient, together with a payment of 5 euros).

today its raining again, but lets see, perhaps i will take some more interesting pics!

Our station

to the right you see "our" subway station from where we took the train into boston. we would cross the street at the yellow "lane". the yellow would diminish over time, but periodically it would be repainted. more often than not cars would not stop. then i would yell a bit or otherwise make clear that i was not happy about that. i even once wrote the municipality asking whether something could be done about this crossing. there were some signs that cars are supposed to stop, but they werent very well visible (the yellow marking however should have been enough). but... the guy responded that this part of the road did not belong to the city, but to the MBTA (the massachusetts bay transportation authority; ie the boston subway), so i should write to them. i never did.... buses were coming at it like maniacs too, even though they were supposed to be driving only 6 miles an hour right after the yellow line...

every weekday we walked to this subway station and got off at north station. for 3 years! but when tim recently said "hey, can we still name all the stops?" we both could not. not with certainty.... funny, how quickly you forget some things...

Another balcony

there are so many 4story apartment buildings in amsterdam... many have balconies and its interesting to see what people store on those....  i must say, i havent often seen bikes hanging like this on a balcony. thats more something for a storage room, but perhaps they dont have one. luckily we do have storage downstairs where we keep our bikes, i wouldnt like to have to store my bike outside. not only for the risk of being stolen, but also because i would really feel bad for it. rain is not good for a bike!!

most balconies are about the size as you see here, ours is no different. its not big, so i do try to keep it more tidy than this one. if not, we wouldnt be able to hang laundry, or to sit and enjoy the sun! we have some flowers too, but we dont have the fancy over-the-railing thingies to put them in. i must say i really enjoy having a balcony. i never had one before. of course, a garden would be even better, but a balcony will do at the moment. now that we have amazing weather, its nice to have breakfast and/or dinner outside. (secretly) observing the neighbors is of course fun too!!

Sitting lady

this statue is along the main street close to our apartment. it is a war monument, called the sitting lady, but i do not exactly know why it is associated with WWII (it was placed may 4th 1957. not at exactly this location, but somewhere close). in the back a woman just finished hanging laundry from the balcony. i was afraid she would think i was taking pictures of her, but i think she didnt notice. i actually was sort of taking pictures of her, i thought it was interesting together with this sitting lady.

many people around here hang their laundry from the balcony like this. until recently i only hung it on the balcony, but this week i tried the above method. as it hangs more freely, it dries faster. buuuttt... i am always afraid that i drop some of the laundry in the nieghbors garden (not freely accessible), or that the wind will blow it off the rack... if you look downstairs, you do see several pieces of laundry in various gardens..... some people hang out entire blankets and mattress covers, so they partially hang in front of their downstairs neighbors balcony, isnt that weird?!

Another canal

 i saw this statue in a city in the north of the netherlands (sneek). as you can see, just like amsterdam it has canals, and cars park next to them.... but i was more interested in the statue. isnt it cute? it was placed in 1981 (the year i was born), and is called "child with lamb". it is made by maria van everdingen and symbolizes the care of and for children.

in 2012, a group of idiots (i.e. some drunk kids) pulled so hard on the girl's arm that it was ripped off the pedestal. they just left it there, so at least the municipality could pick it up the next day to repair it....

Street view

like i showed you last time with the bikes parked right at the edge, here you can see how close to the water the cars are parked. just one wrong movement..... i guess having to park like this does make you a pro at some point, but hmmm..... not for me!

and like most canals, also this one is lined with boats. we have amazing weather at the moment (like really warm!! no jacket needed), so many people are out on their boats. at the end of our street is a canal, lined with boats as well. of course we have the one boat thats the get-together-point for all the alcoholics in the neighborhood (they never take the boat out, they only come to the boat and harass everyone passing by).

tomorrow its supposed to be even warmer (some 25C/77F). lets see if that really happens!

Deserted roads

there are many things i miss from the usa now that i dont live there anymore. there are also things i do not miss at all, of course... :) but when i think back about those 3 years, i most often think about driving on empty roads in the middle of the desert. and if someone asked me what i wanted to do RIGHT now, it would be exactly that; driving on a deserted road somewhere in the USA. i would like some crazy heat with that, a summer dress and a hotel with pool at the end of the road..... i wouldnt even mind the cheap american hotel breakfast with tasteless pancakes that you make yourself in the wafflemaker. in fact, that is just part of the road trip experience....

at the moment, it is unseasonably warm (but no crazy heat like i know from boston) here in the netherlands. but i do miss the american apartment with the pool downstairs; right now all that comes up from downstairs is a constant stream of cigarette smoke/smell from our lovely neighbors (YUCK!). and..... every now and then you can drive on deserted roads here too! like you see above... if you take the small roads... (just before i took this picture quite some cars passed us, but well...)

Real patriots!

today the weather was not too bad, finally! quite sunny and even warm enough to sit on the balcony in the early evening. the above picture however was taken on queens day (oh no, i mean kings day). its one of the few days dutch people wear orange. as i wrote before, orange is the national color since its the color of the dutch royal family (they are named "van oranje", meaning "from orange"). the other days you might people see wearing orange is when the dutch soccer team is playing in the world cup, and i guess thats about it. orange is not worn in everyday life. so in general, people do not possess orange clothing, aside from the one orange jersey you wear that one time a year. it really is considered weird to wear orange, and you wont see much (any?) orange clothing in the shops.

i never even wore orange on queens day, but that changed after 3 years in boston. there we dressed up in the american colors on the 4th of july to feel like real americans. so... it was just natural to finally do as almost all the other dutch do. it also helped that i bought a beautiful silk orange dress in boston, just a few weeks before we left (it was crazy cheap in a shop for vintage clothing. i still miss the cheap american shopping, and hardly shop nowadays.) when else to wear it but on kings day?!

Only rain

this weekend it rained. and it rained. and then it rained a bit more. ah, there was quite some wind too. beeehhh. we didnt do much. partly because of that... 

today there was a marathon in our neighborhood, and i really wanted to watch. but even for watching the weather was just too shitty (imagine those running!!). we did do the dishes, as they hadnt been done in quite a while (it felt a bit like a marathon, we had used up all the plates, and most of the cutlery, and we have quite a lot...).

as you can see, when we drove here it rained as well. driving in the netherlands is more frustrating than driving in the usa (except that the roads are much better here than in massachusetts); people are less patient and more aggressive. the speed limit varies constantly, and sometimes its not clear how fast you are allowed to go... and at exactly those spots (or so it seems), they check your speed, resulting in several tickets by now.... :(  whereas we drove a real big american truck in the usa, we now have a normal car, and i still feel small next to all these big trucks. i especially hate it when they are trying to pass each other. trucks are on a strict speed limit, 80 km/hr, but somehow they always need to pass each other, slowing down all the other traffic thats going 130 km/hr. like above, where i suddenly felt trapped between all those big vehicles....

Sample field

while most of the tulip fields were without tulips, at least the sample field still had quite some tulips (although i think also here about half was gone already). here we walked along many, many differently colored tulips. different shapes, leaves and sizes too. some hardly looked like a tulip anymore. some with simple names, fitting their looks, others with crazy names i cannot even remember. but all of them were labeled, a really nice display! it was a bit wet from the rain and i was wearing fancy shoes, but well....  above you see a coupld with their grand children. the girls kept asking question after question "but why....?" "and why do you think that...?" until their grandfather said: "well, not its enough with all these questions!"

today we had crazy rain too. nearly the entire day it rained without a break. some schoolkids were catching snails in the little greenery downstairs to our apartment and didnt seem to mind the rain. they all had little jars and when one showed us how many snails they got in there, they suddenly all got the urge to show how many they had. for some reason they were moving them to the next green spot across the street.... i hope the snails were as happy about that as they were... (i also wonder whether this project would have made me happy as a kid.... :D a few weeks ago some kids were cleaning the streets, they all got a tool to pick up trash and a bag to put it in. they were running like crazy when they saw a piece of garbage on the street, and very happy when they were the first to get it....)

Parking & Canals

i took this picture last monday. ah, only now i realize that was yesterday. indeed, i took this picture yesterday, but somehow it seems ages ago... :) as you see, it was very sunny....

i guess most people know amsterdam has a lot of canals. 165 in total, some 60 miles of water, combined. there are also a lot of bikes, cars, houses, and not a lot of space. so... parking is often done right at the waterfront. unfortunately, its very important to always lock your bike to something (as i have written several times before). not only because someone might otherwise steal your bike.. every year between 12,000 and 15,000 bikes are fished out of the water!! im pretty sure most people dont have the habit of throwing their bikes into the water on purpose (i certainly dont have that desire), but someone else might just do it for you. here you can see a video of the piles of bikes coming out of the canals...

it also happens that cars get into the water. it is estimated that around 35 cars end up on the bottom of an amsterdam canal. they are parked at the edge as well, and having the car in reverse gear when expecting to go forward is sometimes all it takes to end up in the canal..... (this happened to one of tims colleagues. she got out fine but the car didnt... we dont need to park next to the water but just to be sure we did get an emergency hammer recently....)

Flower field

last week we drove amidst some flower fields again. unfortunately, most fields were empty already. i guess the weather has been too good. when we were there, it was actually quite gray, as you can see. i somehow expected warmer weather, and was not dressed for the chilly wind. of course i anyways had to get out and take some pictures of this field of white tulips...

Adult magnet

in the comments yesterday i read a far better title; adult & child magnet! and yes indeed, as much as it is a childrens magnet, these water sprayers are an adult magnet too. this man (and i assume) his son spent a good 5 minutes biking through it. we were not sure who enjoyed it most. they would bike through the water, then around the square, and suddenly they would be back again. both of them were completely soaked at one point.... me and tim made up the story that he had had a fight with his wife, took out the kid for a ride, and would come back soaked, just to make her even more angry. the other possibility was that they were already divorced, and that she was coming to pick up their son. for fun he was arriving completely wet.... most likely; they were just having fun!! (i do hope they didnt have to bike back home too far, as it was not that warm, especially not when wet).

Water play

the past week we had very mixed weather. sometimes sunny, then windy, then cold again.... here it was so-so. but that didnt bother the boys playing here! i guess every city has such a waterplay, where water comes out of the ground at random times, and kids are always attracted by it.... at first they run careful, trying not to get wet, but in the end they are usually soaked. the days are getting longer and longer. the sun goes down after 9 by now! thats something i did miss when living in boston.

i wrote about the entrance gate in the background once before. you can see that here.

Dog transport

dogs have their own place on a bike!! comfortable, in the fresh air and with a view....