Acidente

Fran loved the idea that acidente means damn in Italian, so whenever we visited Amsterdam, she would go around saying 'acidente' because she liked the dam so well. That, I hope, explains the title of this post.

I visited Amsterdam at the beginning of July, where I got together with our old friend Donna. You may remember her from a year ago last January, when she and her daughter met us in Tulum. This is a picture of them holding her twin six month old grand daughters, Olivia and Pearl. Actually, the twins were not there, but we have the pictures of the rolled up towels, so maybe when they are older they will think that they accompanied their mommy and grammy to Tulum. This time, I got the twins small drinking glasses filled with Nutella, with faux Mayan astrology signs on them, to convince them further that they really were there.



Anyway, we did not spend time on the beach, as we had in Tulum. Instead, we spent time in coffee shops, DRINKING COFFEE! Here is a shot of Donna at the 420, a coffee shop that seems popular with Americans, and thus perhaps should be avoided. We spent a lot of time wandering around, looking at the parks, visiting art museums, and trying to figure out the Tram system. The weather did not really cooperate, so we did not take a train out to one of the beaches as we had planned.


We took the same canal boat that Carl and I had taken a few months back,
and that was very relaxing, and the glass roof meant that the light rain did
not bother our experience at all. While on the tour, they explained that
the buildings seemed to lean toward the canals so that when things were
hauled up on the outside of the building, neither the goods nor the building
were damaged. We got to see some folks trying to move a couch into a
building using the block and tackle. It really worked well. Sort of.
When they finally got the couch up to the top area where they wanted
to bring it in through the window, they discovered that not only was
the couch too big for the inside stairs, but it was also too big for the window.
We are not sure what they finally decided, but perhaps it was simply
to leave it outside, and use it as a terrace.

After wandering through the flower market on the Singel canal, we came across one of Amsterdam's newer architectural feats. The old style pissoirs had room for only one person at a time, and the person had to walk behind a green wall before using it. Now they have a whole new style. The city was getting ready for a 'white party', where 20,000 to 30.000 people, all dressed in all white, have a party at the soccer stadium, so perhaps they needed extra facilities for the folks visiting the city for the party. We did not go to the white party, and we left before the next week was out, so we also missed the black party, where the same number of people crowd the same stadium, only this time dressed in black. In fact, we kind of figured that after a week, some of the folks in white, if they did not change their clothing, would end up with all black clothes that had started out as white.

All in all a good and relaxing trip, and now Donna seems ready to again face the wonderful world of off campus educational programming, and I am ready for the influx of summer people. Accidente.