Thursday, May 11

Holland, Netherlands, or whatever you call it

Well, Kate and I are in Holland now and no major crazy stories about Amsterdam just yet. In fact it's such a lovely, small, peaceful town on the water, it's hard to imagine that the crazy underside that it's more famous for is really the same place! Seriously it's beautiful! We are staying with my friend Jose from Monterey who I've hardly heard from in the last 10 years, so it's been really fun to catch up.

We visited The Van Gogh Museum today which was really well done and for the most part, not tacky or touristy. I came out with a much bigger appreciation for him than I had before, because I think his less famous works are so much more incredible. Also I saw a lot of Rembrandt at the nearby Reijks Museum, and of course Rembrandt is also soooooo remarkable.

Tomorrow we're just going to walk the city and take our time, although my one objective for the day is I've decided to just buy a new iPod at the Amsterdam Apple store. that normally would make no sense, but conveniently now it does because Jose happens to have a fully-loaded iTunes on his computer (about 20G of songs) which I can just upload to my new iPod. And he has good taste in music, so it's all good. finally. music.

the mysterious question is, will my new iPod have as good psychic powers as my old iPod? And does it still work if it's using someone else's music collection???

p.s.
Some later notes I'm adding to this blog...

While in Holland we also stayed with Kate's host family in a small town called Gemert, from the year she spent here in high school, and they have the most adorable children ever - Dan, Sara, and Joseph. The children completely kept us entertained for a couple days (I took tons of photos) but in this sense, our week in Holland filled a major "homesick" void in the middle of our trip. Besides Kate's family, we also met up with her two friends Willem and Jessica, and before that I had met up with a close friend of my mom and dad's, Jerry in Delft. It was such a nice change of pace to hang out with family and friends for a while.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Jose (my guy) has like 300 Bob Marley songs that he plays nonstop on his MP3, when I finally convinced him to put it on random, I swear it refused to play any Bob Marley. And it played Shakira a lot, which he only has about 20 of her songs. Anyways random, just thought I'd share.
Cami