The grown-ups flee

Most of our friends and acquaintances know that Tyler travels a good deal for his job. Some assume that we wallow in frequent flyer miles and must always be planning an exotic vacation. Oh that it were true. Stingy airline policies and business-class upgrades have eroded much of my mileage cache. (We joke that the suitcases may belong to Tyler, but the miles belong to me.) But for the first time in eight years, we left the kids in the able care of my soon-to-be-canonized sister-in-law Mandy, and Tyler and I spent a week in the Netherlands.

We were prompted by a batch of expiring miles, but more important, the fact that my brother David and his wife Julia are currently living in Leiden, south of Amsterdam. For one semester he is a student at Leiden University. They're living in a lovely Dutch row house on Rembrandt Street, since Rembrandt was born here so with free tickets and free accommodations, we couldn't pass up the chance.

Here's a bit from my recollections (and you don't have to slog through it all--this serves as my pitiful effort at a journal).

Day 1 - Leiden

Slightly disoriented, despite those lovely business-class seats, we collected our luggage and found David and Julia at the airport. They took us downstairs to the train station (leave it to those ever-efficient Dutch to stack the airport over the train station) and we soon arrived in Leiden to our first rainstorm--of course with jackets and umbrellas stowed in the suitcases. We arrived about 10am, and after unpacking a bit we went out to see some of Leiden.

The city is small and feels like Old Europe--brick streets, stone buildings--but not crowded. We walked around the courtyard of Pieterskerk, and the old prison and had it all to ourselves. Everyone walks or rides bicycles here--there are bikes or all descriptions everywhere you look, and all loaded down with baskets, mailbags, wheelbarrow-style attachments to carry children and dogs. Take a look at the red-brick house behind David--it's not much wider than the doorway. Hope it goes really far back...

Once the rain stopped we walked through the Hortus Botanicus, the University botanical garden. We didn't find the 400-year-old tree, but did see several that predated the American Revolution. I liked their use of tree branches or logs to build raised beds, and several of the greenhouses were filled with interesting pitcher plants, cycads, and other tropicals. Vid took us to a restaurant for Doner Kebabs (Israeli-style schwarma and falafel) for lunch, and we went out for Indonesian food for dinner. The rijstafel came with two kinds of rice and 12 things to put on top of it. Spicy but good.

At home we had snacks of pancakes with orange quark (sort of like a cross between yogurt and cream cheese), which I'd had in the States, and I wish I could find in Utah. This will become a theme. Pancakes are not breakfast food to the Dutch. There are entire restaurants devoted to the pancakes, and they're full at all hours of the day.

David and Julia's apartment is so fun, albeit a bit quirky. It's a typical Dutch row house, with three floors, each about 12 feet by 20 feet, with the front door right on the sidewalk. The Dutch used to base property tax on the width of your house, hence the typical Dutch architecture is narrow but tall. Their main floor is kitchen and a small bathroom/laundry room squeezed under the staircase. The bathroom contains a toilet, but no sink or mirror. The second floor is a sitting area, and the third floor is the bedroom and the other half of the bathroom (sink, shower, and tub, but no toilet). The bedroom has four sloping ceilings rising to a point, like an attic loft. Clearly not a house designed for large families, especially with the staircases squeezed into an almost ladder-like steepness. When you wake up in the middle of the night, needing to go to the bathroom, you really think about how badly you need to, since it would require climbing two flights of narrow twisty stairs in the dark.