Rackhams Visit

Since my family left me a few weeks early so they could make it home in time for a big family reunion, I've been all alone in our house in Brussels. It has been the perfect time for friends and extended family to come visit.

One group that came was my sister-in-law, Laura, and two of her kids, Hannah and Katie, and their grandma. We had such a fun time going all over the place. These people are serious tourists and I had a difficult time keeping up with them. We ate lots of delicious Belgian food together--french fries, waffles, and chocolate. At one time I think we had over $1,000 worth of chocolate sitting on our dining room table. We were trading it around with each other like baseball cards, very yummy baseball cards.

My favorite place that we went was Amsterdam. I was amazed by the Rijksmuseum and the Anne Frank House. One funny thing that happened, as we were following the instructions of our GPS to get to the Anne Frank House, we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of this massive party. The streets were filled with people. As we crossed over a bridge we could see that the canals were also packed with people. My first thought was that we were in the middle of Spring Break for old people. Then I noticed that a lot of the people were wearing pink and there was a much higher-than-normal number of same sex couples. We had inadvertantly driven our massive American SUV right through the middle of Gay Pride Day in Amsterdam! The most interesting part to me, though, was the contrast between people who were completely free, almost to the point of anarchy, and the people depicted in the Anne Frank House who were robbed of all their freedoms and even there very lives, in many cases. There truly is opposition in all things. And just because one extreme is clearly incorrect, it doesn't automatically make the opposite of that extreme good. Anyway, it was quite thought provoking, ironic, and more than a little shocking.