Tramps and Tulips

Hello,

We finished off Belgium with a visit to the art museums in Brussels and the Museum of Central Africa in Terverun, which is just outside Brussels. It was a pretty interesting museum in that in dealt with the colonization/exploitation of the Congo by Belgium in the late 19th-early 20th century. Anyway, we also went to Ghent to see this crazy painting by Hubert and Jan Van Eyck called the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. It was painted in the early 15th century and is undoubtedly one of our favorite paintings of the trip (well, it is actually like 20 paintings turned into one super Voltron-esque painting). Overall Belgium was cool in a quirky kind of way....I mean, one of their main national pastimes is comic strips and their most famous statue is of a two foot toddler taking a wiz.

We stayed only a night in Amsterdam and then moved to a smaller town about 45 minutes away (Rotterdam) in order to see some other sights and to avoid the expensive cost of staying within Amsterdam. Apparently, the city has a serious housing shortage....to the point that half of our hostel in Amsterdam was basically a halfway house for street musicians and general weirdos (seriously). Amsterdam had some cool museums and is a nifty looking city. The only downside was the butt-freezing wind that we suffered through. As for the city's infamous "red-light district"....it is actually pretty contained and not all that raucous. We were expecting a non-stop, Mardi Gras-type atmosphere but what it looked like was an antique shop neighborhood that instead of having signs for antique shops has them for....um, other services.

Today we took in the most classic of Holland related items: windmills, wooden shoes, tulips, and Delftware. At the place where we saw all the tulips, they had this old-school music-box thing (except that it was the size of a small car) that played this crazy-weird acid-carnival-psychedelic gnome music that was awesomely hilarious. We debated buying the CD of this but decided not too because we figured that prolonged exposure to the sounds would lead to either seizures or the riotous burning of wooden shoes. (If anyone has purchased this CD - V would like a copy to test our theory).

Tomorrow is our last day in the Netherlands and then we will be in Berlin.

Bye,

V & P

P.S. Ritter Bars are a German candy bar - they are for all to enjoy not just "work girls" - they can be purchased at Trader Joe's - try the biscuit one.