Merry Christmas from the Stewarts in Rome!

Merry Christmas to our friends and family. We hope this holiday finds you happy and well!

We have had a phenomenal 2013. In lieu of a Christmas letter this year, A has made this video of our travels to share with you. We hope you enjoy.

Love,
The Stewarts in Rome

Epic Summer Part III: Mega Trip--Bruges

I believe we are making the same mistake that many travelers make. We are stopping in Belgium only because we need a place to sleep between Amsterdam and London. But unfortunately, even mega trips have limits, and we can’t see all that we want to or even give as much time as we’d like to each place on our itinerary.

We had originally planned to head out of Amsterdam fairly early, so that we’d have time to stop in Brussels for lunch and see its beautiful Grand Place, or big central square. However as a few factors had us leaving a little later, and traffic on a Friday wasn’t in our favor, we ended up having to scratch the plans to see Brussels and head straight through to Bruges.

The little we saw of Bruges had me falling in love right away. Clean cobblestone streets, lined with tidy brick buildings, and a huge open city square—what is there not to love? The whole feeling of the city is calm and relaxed. No one seems to be in a hurry, and everyone we met was friendly and willing to chat. We arrived in the early evening, when most sites were closing, so we spent our time wandering around.

Just coincidence that he parked in this spot? I think not!

I know I said in a previous post that we aren’t foodies, but you kind of have to be if you visit Belgium. As the land waffles, beer, fries, and chocolate, it’s hard to work up a big enough appetite to sit down to a meal when there are delicious snacks to be had everywhere you look. We started by filling the kids’ (and A’s) request to munch on a waffle. Waffles here are not for breakfast, they’re a snack food, and so we arrived at the perfect time. S had hers with bananas, and the rest of us enjoyed ours with strawberries and cream. The waffles were pretty delicious. They must put some kind of coarse sugar in the batter, because they had a sweet crunch. Mmmm.

 

Our waffle vendor offered to take our picture. Friendly town!

Bananas

Strawberries and Cream

We found a bench in Markt (Market Square) to finish our waffles, and we were all still a bit hungry, so the kids ran over to a friet stand to get some french fries. Although the Dutch will claim they invented fries, to our understanding they originated in Belgium. Legend says they were given the name "french fries" when WWI American soldiers were introduced to them in Belgium. Since the Belgian army at that time spoke French, the Americans nicknamed them french fries. They’re fried twice, once to cook and once to brown, and they are extremely good. Everyone in the lowlands eats them with mayonnaise, which we all enjoyed. Bruges actually has a friet museum, which the kids really wanted to check out, but it was closed, so we’ll have to save that for next time.

 

The kids have no qualms about purchasing treats on their
own--regardless of the language of the country we're in!

Markt is this huge open space that is lined with great old buildings and a tall octagonal bell tower. We enjoyed sitting in the square and just taking it all in.

Markt, the center of Bruges. 

The town's medieval bell tower.

The colorful buildings lining Markt.

This one is my favorite. Looks like it was built from Lego bricks.

In the bell tower courtyard. I think maybe there was too much sugar in the waffles?

From Markt we wound around town, to Burg Square (which was the old center of the city), through the streets and over the canals to the Church of Our Lady.

 

Bruges town hall on Burg Square. They were setting up for an outdoor concert.
(Aaron checked it out later--unfortunately it wasn't too good.) 

One of the canals. I love how the building touch the water. Like Venice, without the decay.

Swans in the canal.

I choose this one for my house.

Love the old fashioned doorbell!

The next morning we had a couple of hours before we had to be on our way, so we acquiesced to E’s wish to climb the bell tower. The tower is unique looking, with a lot of different architecturally styled elements. We climbed the 366 steps, stopping just below the top to get a peak at the giant music box style drum in the carillon room. Then, at the top we were able to look out upon some wonderful views of Bruges. We luckily managed to time our climb just right so that we could watch and hear the bells at the top of the hour. It was interesting to watch how the entire thing is engineered, with cables running from the hammer of each bell to a row of cylinders, where the carillon engages them to play the song. Then we really had our eardrums tested as the giant bell right next to us struck ten o’clock.

Beautiful morning to climb a tower! 

Climbing the tower

At the top for the top of the hour. It was LOUD, but fun to see how all the bells worked.

View of Bruges from the top.

You’re probably not surprised that I have neglected to mention beer. Someone else will have to visit Bruges and let us know what they think of the beer. But I absolutely was not going to pass up the chance to sample their chocolate. The heat and the evening hour had meant that the chocolate shops (at least the ones I believed to be the good ones) had been closed during our stroll the day before. But as things were just opening up after we descended the tower, we made our way to a few places to do some shopping. Our first stop was Dumon, where we picked up an assortment of pretty hand-made chocolate pralines and truffles. Ms. Dumon was very helpful and offered to swap a piece from the box with the white chocolate raspberry praline she saw S eyeing. Then it was on to Godiva, because you can’t go to Belgium without trying some chocolates from this world famous chocolatier. The kids and I each picked a chocolate (milk hazelnut for S, dark caramel for E, and white macadamia nut for me) and we added a cone of chocolate covered strawberries. Finally we sought out The Chocolate Line, which is known for their unique flavor combinations. I just asked the clerk to recommend a 100-gram assortment and we walked away with crazy flavors like lemongrass, wasabi, apple, lime/vodka/passion fruit, bacon, and what she claimed was her favorite, sun-dried tomato/olive/basil. Chocolate shopping is a lot of fun. I highly recommend it. Also, S has now decided that chocolatier may be a future career choice for her. Oh, and I didn’t forget about A. It’s just that he was born with a defect and doesn’t really care for chocolates?

 

At Dumon's. There are no English labels because Ms. Dumon likes to
chat with her customers. 

Too pretty to eat? Not at all! 

If you're looking for something different The Chocolate Line has it!

At that point it was time to say goodbye to Bruges. We had a wonderful, albeit short, visit and highly recommend this quaint, friendly, and delicious town to all our traveling friends.

Epic Summer Part III: Mega Trip--Amsterdam

I had really been looking forward to our visit to Amsterdam on this trip. Partly because it is a city in a country I’ve never been to before (I never count airports), but mostly because we were staying with my childhood friend and her family. K and I didn’t keep in touch after high school, but then we were reconnected through the miracle of Facebook. We started getting together for an annual dinner with a couple of other high school friends about four years ago. Then she found out she was moving to Europe just a couple of months before we did. Crazy! We’ve written back and forth quite a lot this year. It has been so nice to have a friend going through a similar experience with which to compare notes. We really wanted to find a way to get together while we were both in Europe, and, since she lives in such an amazing city, we asked if we could come stay for a few days. Her family was graciously willing to host us. So in Amsterdam we had a place to stay, our own English-speaking guide, and a chance for our kids to make some new friends. How great is that?

K, her husband, and two kids live in a great house just outside of Amsterdam on what is fairly new reclaimed land from the sea. This whole idea of solving the land area by basically “making” more is so cool to me. And then the Dutch go one step further and turn it into fantastic farmland. Such a different way to look at solving problems—as opposed to just going and taking what you want/need from others. Anyway, I think we had been there all of fifteen minutes before the boys had immersed themselves in a video game and the girls had headed off to the park. Our kids totally hit it off!

We spent our first morning together at the FloraHolland Aalsmeer Flower Auction. This is a HUGE warehouse where nearly half of all Holland’s flowers for export are auctioned off each day. You walk along an elevated catwalk above dozens of people on little motorized scooters pulling trains carrying thousands of buckets of flowers. Then you come to the auction rooms where you can peer in at the action. It’s interesting to watch. The auctions run in reverse. To keep things moving quickly, the price starts at the highest point and ticks down. The first buyer to click his button (I couldn’t spot a single female buyer) has “won” the auction. There is no “going once, twice…” I imagine being a buyer at this auction must be a pretty intense job. (Although we did see one guy playing Bejeweled on his iPhone, so maybe not?) The auction room looks like an auditorium. Two separate auctions run in the room simultaneously. The flower for sale is projected on each screen along with the circular price countdown. The actual flowers are moving on trains beneath the screens. The auctions happen so quickly that the flower trains never stop moving. The obvious idea is to get the fresh flowers to their final destinations as quickly as possible. They have several of these auction rooms. We arrived a little after 8:30 and things appeared to be winding down for the day. Obviously you have to be a morning person to work here; therefore, I’m out!

Flower trains 

I can only imagine the traffic this place sees at the beginning of the day!

The auction boards. You can see the moving train of flowers below.
There is another train under the other clock. They never stop moving.

Next, K took us to an open-air museum called Zaanse Schans. Here we got an up close look at a couple of windmills and saw how they make wooden clogs today. It was a windy day, so we were lucky to see the windmills. Firstly, if you’re unsure of the term “open-air museum,” it refers to an area that is usually set up to model historic life. In Zaanse Schans the millers and shopkeepers actually live here, so you also get to see their lived-in version of a 1600’s Dutch village.

We started by walking along the canal down to the first windmill. This windmill operates a series of cogs that turn stones in order to grind material into dyes. The stones were moving at an incredible speed. We could get fairly close to see how it worked, and then we went upstairs to see how the cogs connect up with the rotating shaft of the windmill. We were also able to go outside at the top to get a close up view of the spinning arms of the windmill. The entire top of the windmill is made to rotate so that the miller can turn it to make best use of the wind. Again I was struck by the awesome engineering involved. I wish I could bring my class here when we study simple machines.  We went in a second windmill that is set up as a working sawmill. We couldn’t go up to the top of this one, but instead were able to get an up close look at the working saws. The windmill powers three sets of blades. The millers were using the big middle set to rip a large log into boards. We watched as they set another of the blades sets to cut one of the ripped edges of a log. It was really fascinating and the miller was happy to tell us all about his mill and how it works.

The residential part of the village. 

The nearest windmill is the one that makes dyes. The next one down is the sawmill.

The gears, up above, spinning really fast!

The stones, down below, grinding the dyes.

The second windmill functioning as a sawmill. It was interesting to see
the blades speed up and slow down with the wind.

New friends!

We were lucky and had the most perfect weather for seeing everything in action.

We left the mills and walked past the residential part of town to the klompenmakerij, where they make Dutch wooden clogs. They had a neat little display of clogs from all over Holland. We arrived just as they were starting a demonstration and were able to see how they make the shoes today. They use two machines, one for the outside and one to hollow out the inside. The first machine operated like a lathe and turned the shoe. It uses a blank as a jig (like when you have a key copied) to cut the outside shape of the shoe. Then the shoe is put into the second machine to hollow out the inside. This one also works by using the same blank as a jig, but the cutting part works more like a router. Sand it smooth and in about five minutes you have a finished shoe. Then you have to wait weeks for the wood to dry out before you can decorate/wear your shoes. They had lots of painted clogs on sale for the tourists. I really wanted to get myself a red pair. But they would have to be so huge to fit my feet that I guess they wouldn’t be very cute. The Dutch still wear them for their intended purpose. K says they sell them in the garden stores right next to the rubber boots!

Neighborhood street in Zaanse Schans

Different clogs from all over the Netherlands.

These clogs are made for ice fishing.

She was barely humoring me by putting these on. I guess she's not a fan.

But I am. I think these are so stinkin' cute!

We were fortunate that our kids were getting along so well because K had set up a sitter for the evening so that the grown-ups could go on a double date! We had a very nice dinner out in an older converted building that reminded me of a McMenamins type of place. Then we walked around Amsterdam a bit in search of a place for dessert and champagne. It was so nice just chatting and getting to know K’s hubby (great guy!). Before heading back to the car they took us on a quick walk through the Red Light District—because you just can’t visit Amsterdam without checking that off your list. It was definitely different. The streets were clogged with tourists checking out the ladies in their black light lit windows. We saw lots of little red lights and I definitely have pot in my catalogue of smells now. Intellectually, I can appreciate the pragmatic view of the Dutch toward prostitution and marijuana, but personally I’m not really sure. A believes strongly that a society should set higher standards for itself. Ideally I agree, although the realist in me doesn’t think that’s a battle that will ever be won, especially when the former is a profession that’s been around as long as society itself. What did make me a little sad, however, is to see what a big part of the tourist industry the Red Light District is. Amsterdam has so much to offer that I certainly hope people come to see more than just that piece of it.

After enjoying the enormous breakfast K made for us (and leaving her husband with the dishes), we spent our second day in the city. We had tickets in the morning to the Van Gogh Museum, so K left us there and we spent a couple of hours admiring his work. Van Gogh is probably my very favorite painter. I’m not sure why, I really don’t know much about art, but I just like the way his landscapes feel personal. It kind of makes you feel giddy to see art that you recognize, but have only seen in books. Seeing the actual brushstrokes is somewhat surreal. The museum is laid out mostly chronologically, so we were able to stroll through while reading about Van Gogh’s life in our guidebook. His art is amazing on its own, but I think learning about the tormented nature of his life offers a deeper insight and appreciation for his work. Of course we are all drawn to tragic stories, and I’m not sure there is one more tragic than Van Gogh’s. We were allowed to take pics of some of the paintings. Here are some of our favorites.

Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers--1889

Landscape with the Chateau of Auvers at Sunset--1890

Self-Portrait in Front of the Easel--1888

Wheat Field with Crows--1890

After the museum we met up with K and her kids again and walked around Amsterdam. We usually love the self-guided walks in our guidebooks, but I must say we were pretty disappointed in the one for Amsterdam. So we gave up on it fairly quickly and just let K lead us around. We saw some great squares and old buildings, but my favorite part was really just walking along the canals and seeing the neat old houses. K says one of the cool things about Amsterdam is how little it has changed. That if you look at a picture of it from a hundred years ago, most of the buildings are the same. The houses are all tall and skinny. K told us that taxes used to be assessed based on the width of your house, so the Dutch built their houses narrow, tall, and deep. The houses have a hook at the top for hoisting things like furniture up from the street and in through the windows of the upper floors (Dutch houses have incredibly steep and narrow stairwells). If you look closely you can see that the houses were actually built to lean slightly toward the street to make it easier to raise the items. So clever!

E would have loved to play, but at least he was able to
help out the players as they set up for a new game.

Walking along the canals was my big "must do" in Amsterdam. I wasn't disappointed!

The "Skinny" Bridge. There's a neat story that says this bridge was built by two sisters
who lived across the canal from each other so they could get together and chat everyday. 

I would like to buy this house. I love all of the large windows.
I also love the guy next door hanging out his window.

The train station. 

The other thing we had to get used to while walking around was the bikes. Apparently there are more bikes than people in Amsterdam. They are everywhere and you’d better stay out of their way. We had to keep pulling the kids off the bike paths. And it was tricky to remember to look when crossing a bike path just as you would crossing the road! It made me feel a bit better about our decision to ride in Berlin, because Amsterdam is at a whole other level. A said watching for the bikes was the most difficult part about driving there!

I wish I had taken a picture of a bike parking lot. The number of bikes is crazy!

K and her kids left us again once we arrived at the Anne Frank House. What a powerful place! I’m not really sure how to describe it. It’s definitely a humbling experience, but not as depressing as I would have thought. I actually left somewhat uplifted by this young girl’s beautiful spirit. The museum starts by giving you some background on the family—how they came to Amsterdam to escape the growing anti-Semitism of their native Germany. Anne’s father Otto, the only one of the family to survive the holocaust, worked hard to keep the building from being torn down. He wanted people to experience it and learn from it. The building is where his pectin business was housed. When the family decided to go into hiding they converted the back half of the top two floors into the “secret annex.” They lived there with four other people (eight in all) for two years before they were found and arrested by the Gestapo. As you walk through the lower two floors you get a little background on their story, along with video interviews of the friends who helped them. Some of Anne’s quotes are on the walls. You also see a furnished diorama of the two floors where they lived, so you can try to imagine what living with seven other people in fewer than 1000 square feet must have felt like. I can kind of imagine that, but it’s the never going outside part that I can’t really wrap my brain around. Then we climbed through the hidden opening behind the bookcase and made our way up into the secret annex itself. Other than the lack of furniture, the rooms are much the way they were when the families were in hiding. The windows are blacked-out. You can see pencil lines on the wall marking the heights of Anne and her older sister. The pictures Anne pasted on her bedroom wall to cheer up the place are still there. Everyone was very quiet as they walked around and took it all in. When we made our way back down we saw artifacts like their registration cards from Gestapo headquarters and Anne’s name on the transport list to Auschwitz. Finally we came to the room containing her actual diaries. There are also short stories she wrote and a book of her favorite quotes. There are pages showing Anne’s revision of her diaries as well. She wanted to have her diaries published after the war and had revised most of them with that in mind. Her father was able to publish her diaries because his secretary had gathered and saved them after the family was arrested. The last room in house is an interactive board that describes current, real, moral conflicts and asks you to vote on the correct course of action. Then it shares the poll results. It was Otto Frank’s wish that you leave the house understanding that morality will never be an area of clear consensus among us. I voted and was in the 23% minority. It is a little unnerving to see how different our moral compasses are. I think that is what Otto Frank wanted us to understand.

I’ve actually never read The Diary of Anne Frank, but I bought a copy and I’m starting it today. Reading her quotes on the walls I had to keep reminding myself that she was only 13 and 14 when she wrote them. I also had to try to fathom the fact that a young girl could gain such a deep understanding of life while locked away from much of it. It’s sad, but uplifting at the same time, to see the strength of the human spirit. 

Anne Frank's statue outside the Secret Annex.

Our Dutch neighbor in Rome had advised us to be sure to have pancakes while in Holland, so K and her family obliged and took us to a great place out in the country for dinner. Dutch pancakes look a lot like crepes, except they are topped with just about any combination of savory or sweet ingredients you can imagine. The kids had theirs with bananas and powdered sugar. I think their favorite thing about Holland may be that you can get away with eating dessert for dinner. A and I opted for savory. A had ham, and cheese. I chose sundried tomatoes, mozzarella, and pesto (it must be the Italian in me) and I couldn’t even finish it!

For our last day in the Netherlands we decided to treat all the kids to a day at an amusement park. K’s husband scored us a great deal on some tickets to Efteling, a traditional Dutch theme park, they both took the day off, and all eight of us headed out to play. This place is fantastic. It is a theme park based on traditional Dutch fairytales. It’s large, spread out, and beautiful. There are a lot of gardens and huge trees. You can tell they’ve worked hard to keep it from feeling big and commercial. Because things are spread out, you don’t just see a series of rides. There are huge trees surrounding many of the big rides so you don’t even know they are there until you’re right in front of one! The boys wanted to head straight for the roller coasters, of course, but S needed to warm up to the idea, so she headed off with K’s daughter and husband to some of the tamer rides. It was really nice to do an amusement park with another family because we could better accommodate what the kids wanted to do.

A and E both liked the Python best. It’s a roller coaster with a couple loops and a big corkscrew. S liked the giant swinging Viking ship. I usually have a great stomach for amusement parks, but even I had to call it quits after 5 goes on that one. My favorite was the old-fashioned wooded roller coaster. It was actually a racing coaster, with two tracks. Unfortunately our side lost both times we rode it. Another interesting ride was a bobsled type coaster. We were actually in a bobsled-type car with wheels, and no track, so that was a little different! And I believe Efteling may have the world’s fastest carousel. You have to hold on tight on this one!

One thing the park does much better than the parks in America is food. The cafeteria-style restaurants were pretty decent and reasonably priced. And the place we went for dinner had a fantastic play area for the kids. It was nice at the end of the day to sit and relax while the kids could run and expend more of their endless supply of energy.

Unfortunately, we didn’t take a single picture, so you’ll have to check out their website here. I think it may have had something to do with our too recent experience mixing cameras and rollercoasters.

We had a great time in Amsterdam, made even better by our wonderful hosts. It was so nice to spend time with an old friend and watch our kids enjoy each other’s company. A huge thank you to the Hill family. We hope we can try to repay the favor and you'll come visit la bella Roma!