At long last

Has it really been a month and a half since we last posted? It's high time we shared our photo album from our time in the Netherlands. Click on the collage of photos and it will take you to our web album, with albums for our time in Amsterdam, plus visits to Utrecht and Arnhem to see my brother Colin, and my friend Maame.


As you can see our trip was more about seeing people--and about those people seeing John--than about sightseeing. The prettiest pictures we took were in Utrecht, a beautiful medieval university town in the heart of the Netherlands which I hadn't really seen until this trip.

Here's the text from a post I started writing while we were there, but never had a chance to finish:

I'm home...

We've been in Amsterdam two days now. Our last time here was three months before our wedding, also for two weeks. At that time I hadn't been back in 3 years, and that was four years ago. Last time I was taking leave; starting a new life, visiting a city that was a part of my past and valuable to me as nostalgia. I was surprised at how much I felt a stranger and a visitor.

Now, four years later, ten years after I originally left to go to university in Canada, I come with my husband and son for the first time, expecting an even greater distance between the world of my current life and the world of my childhood home city, and find myself completely at home, familiar, at ease.

I'm still not exactly sure why this is, but it is a tremendous thing to be together as a family all together with my brother, my husband, my parents, my son, and all in the apartment, neighbourhood, country I grew up in. It's a first for me on many levels.

We were walking together today on our way to see the old Portuguese Synagogue (founded by Jewish refugees of the Spanish Inquisition) at my brother's recommendation. We went through the hippie market alongside the building where my brother works. That market is where I bought all my clothes in high school.

We also went to the Rijksmuseum (where the Rembrandts and Vermeers are, among others) and had the chance to see a series of paintings connected by the theme of "Mother," all showing scenes of pregnancy, motherhood, domestic life, etc. An appropriate special exhibition for me at this time in my life!

Beyond that we did very little sightseeing in Amsterdam. It was so lovely just to walk around my neighbourhood, go to the market, visit the park where I played as a child , and just sit around in the shade (we took a picture of John on the slide I loved as a little girl), go grocery shopping, buy flowers for my mom on the street corner, take an evening trip to the beach.

It was fabulous.

John traveled remarkably well, although he's changed quite a bit since we came back. More about that in our next post!


To be continued...