HET NEDERLANDSE ZAL OPNIEUW STIJGEN EN VEROVEREN: July 2008

Before I get into the past 20 days (shoulda made that short post (sorry Davis for lying to you)) I should get a few things figured out here. First of all, it seems people have gone off and gotten jobs on me. People ask if I am getting a job and the truth is, I am working at my grandpa's house this summer, fixing it up for when we sell it next year. It's not really a job since I'm not getting paid, but I will be working random hours and if I am gone, I am probably gone for the better part of the day. Also, I have tennis stuff coming up, but that is only for a few weeks. I am also gone on a couple of weekends, once around August 7th to Kennewick for dad's high school reunion and once in early September for a tour of the Hanford plant. What are everyone else's work schedules, because I really want to hang out/play SC. Oh and also, I get my wisdom teeth taken out on Thursday, so around that, I won't be too active outside of the house because supposedly I will "need to rest" so we'll see how that goes.

Secondly, what's going on with PAX? Who's going, whats the deal and has anyone bought tickets? The only person I know who has bought anything is Steven and his DS (congradulations on your purchase and I hope your brain is at an appropriate age). I hope PAX has not been scrapped, but I suppsoe I have only been back in Washington for 4 hours, so I have not had adequate time to talk to anyone. Nobody's on AIM, but then again, you are all probably at work. Wow, realizing that makes me feel kind of lonely. Oh well, I'll get over it. I'm sure people will be good to hang out in August and September, right?....

Well now that I've wasted two paragraphs of your time, how about I start right at the very start, when I got back home from Atlanta.

Wednesday, 7/2:
I went in to take my COMPASS test, which basically tells the registration where to put me. The lady next to me had to learn how to use a computer mouse. The test was not so bad, I was the second one to finish. I scored very high in all aspects of english, so all is well there. In math, they have you pick either pre algebra level, algebra level, or college level to start your test and it adapts based on how well you do. Since I had not taken a math class, I chose pre-algebra and apparently did very well on it, so the computer bumped me up to algebra level, where I got a bit stuck. That lack of a math class screwed me over, so I am slated to be in Math 099. I really hope I can get out of SCC in one year. I am not spending 2 in there.

Thursday, 7/3:
I went to meet with a counselor to sign up for my classes. I started the business track by doing the english and the math and putting in an accounting. My regular school day runs from 9:30am - 2:30 pm. I left the 11:30 slot open for jazz band if I make it in or lunch if I don't. If I make it in, I don't get lunches, but I'll manage (speaking of which, I wonder whatever happened with the lunches in my locker?:) ). I also have concert band, which meets only mondays for 2 hours at a time. I don't think that's a good way of doing it, but I don't want to quit doing music for a year, so I'm doing it. The counselor warned me about taking the extra classes. He said normal freshman only take 15 credits a quarter and I'm doing 19 right now. I thought, damn right, I'm trying to get out of here, but I was polite and told him I could handle it.

That night, my aunt and grandpa came over for a mini birthday party. After that, I had to pack up for the next day.

THE TRIP:
REFERENCE: Some words are in Dutch, so to learn how to say them, remember this:
ch or g - kind of like a k sound, but like you are hocking a lugie
oe - ooo
ui - ou as in out
ie - eee
ij - an "I" sound, like the I in "like"
oo - oh
That should get you by.

Friday, 7/4:
My aunt took us to the airport to drop us off. Our flight over was rather nice for a 12 hour flight. They had movies on demand. I watched Be Kind Rewind (terrible); Run, Fat boy, Run (good); Drillbit Taylor (bad); Solaris (wierd George Clooney movie); and bits of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Bullitt, both of which I had previously seen. Our plane ride took 12 hours, plus we gained 9 hours, so we landed early in the morning on...

Saturday, 7/5:
Tired and jetlagged, we were determined to stay up the whole day to adjust as quickly as possible. We actually managed to do so. We took a train from Schipol, the airport, to our hotel in Den Haag (The Hague (teh best city evar and my home port in AOE3)). We found our hotel right away and decided to go to Delft, which was nearby. We saw an old church and the burial tomb of the Orange family. William of Orange was buried there!!! All of them! We all went to bed rather early in the day (around 9:00) and just got extra sleep.

Sunday, 7/6:
We went out to the beach town, Scheveningen and saw the beach and ate by it. There was a casino, so dad and I went gambling. I actually won some money, but then dad insisted I try to win our tram fare back, so of course, I wound up losing. Luckily I only lost about 10 euro. Also, we found out that there was a tennis tourney in town with many people that had played in Wimbledon. We caught an exhibition match since it all didn't start until the next day, which was the day we left. The match we saw was really cool though.

Monday, 7/7:
Before leaving Den Haag, I made sure we did what I wanted to do there, to visit the international war crimes court! It was actually a really cool tour and I learned quite a bit. Since I know Orion is about to ask me one thing specifically that I learned, it would be that the biggest gift in the place came from Russia and it was a huge-ass vase that had to be put into the room by a crane. There you go. We then went in our car north up to a small town called Heiloo (hi-loo) to see a relative of ours. She was not at home, so we popped over to Alkmaar, which was the nearby big town while we waited for her to get back. When she was supposed to be back, we stopped in to talk for about an hour about how she has been doing since a relative visited her last in 1992. Her husband, who was actually related to us by blood had passed away 6 years ago, but she was nice enough to let us in. It was cool to meet a relative.

After that, we went up to Noord Holland and crossed a 30 mile long dijk that connects to Friesland, where my family is from. We soon learned that Frysians actually have our own language and that Frysian children are brought up like normal Dutch children, learning Dutch and English together, but they also learn Frysian, so they are trilingual. I also learned that Frysians are a very proud people, so I gathered some Frysian pride and realized that I fit in really well with them. Frysians seem to primarily be farmers as the region is flat and pretty much perfect for that. We had a nice hotel on a lake right outside Drachten.

Tuesday, 7/8:
This was a cool day because we went out to go to the two towns where my family comes from, Boornbergum and Kortehemmen (conveniently on the same street (I am not kidding, it's the only street in town and at one point, the town becomes Kortehemmen or Boornbergum, depending on which way you are going). On our way, we stopped for directions at the tourist center in Drachten and she said that her sister and her sister's husband and her own partner (a scotsman) were rennovating a farmhouse just down the street from where the church we were going to was and they had bought that house from a couple with the name Altena. She said to pop by and say hi. We went to see the church first and to see my great x6 grandparent's graves, then dad and I went to the house. We immediately were able to pick out the scotsman because he looked different from all the other guys there and he also was about a foot shorter than all of us. The contractor working on the house looked at the papers we had about our family and said he was related to my relative buried at that church, so by total coincidence, we met a very very distant relative. The lady's sister came out and accompanied our family over to the other Altena's house to see if we were related. We weren't, but it was cool to finally meet someone with the same last name as me. It was actually a really wierd feeling. After that, we went back to the house and talked a bit and got some contact info because they are converting the old house to a Bed and Breakfast, so if we go back, we will stay there.

We then went down the street to see the house my great grandparents had build in about 1910. They were the first occupants of it and since then, it has been a house, then a restaurant/bar, then a bank, then a house again. We actually knocked on the door and showed the lady there a picture of the house we had and she said to come on in and see where our family was from. The funny thing was that she had the same picture of the house in the early 1900's that we had framed on her mantle. Another funny thing was that she had been a nurse working in Kenya when our missionary friends had been there. Regardless, it was cool to be in the house my great grandparents had lived in before they came to America. I've decided that if I go to live in the Netherlands, I will live in Boornbergum or Kortehemmen. They were really nice towns.

Also, I had to note the fact that the Netherlands were like a giant RPG. Everyone just let you in their house if you were a complete strangers. I was tempted to look for items at times. Also, I must point out something that I have been forgetting. Dutch girls are very pretty. It was very odd to notice one after the other that was generally attractive. Then once I got into Friesland, there were even more attractive girls. It was almost amazing how it happened. Friesland has the most attractive girls in the world I must say.

Wednesday, 7/9:
We went out to this coast town called Makkum to look for a pottery place that was called Altena. We arrived only to find out that it had not existed for 15 years, about the time since my last relative had been there. That was kind of a bust, but the city was pretty nice. Later in the day, we headed south to Arnhem, but then went to our hotel in Otterlo. We got there fairly early in the day. After that, we went to this place that's like a big nature preserve and you can ride bikes around it and see some different museums. It was ok, but we spent too long there imo.

After that, we went to something I wanted to do, the airborne museum in Arnhem. It had a lot of cool stuff about the paratroopers that fought to reclaim the Netherlands in WW2. After the museum, we decided that we were only 20 minutes from Germany, so why not have dinner over there for fun? We did and we found this pizza place with this super hot waitress who spoke a bit of english in the way that it was quite sexy. I accidentally ordered "spicy" pepperoni pizza and I got those peppers that are the insanity pepper that is dropped into chinese food and stuff. I felt brave and took a small bite of one of the peppers and I spent the next 10 minutes writhing in agony as my mouth was on fire. I wish I had brought some home, because I think Sai might have even found them to be slightly hot, but surely nothing his iron digestive system couldn't handle. It was quite an adventure.

Thursday, 7/10:
We got going pretty early because it was a small town and there was nothing to do. We went out towards Rotterdam to see this place called Kinderdijk, which happens to be the location of my picture hanging above my computer in my room and also is my Blogger Profile Picture currently. I am pretty sure it was my first one as well, but it mysteriously disappeared so long ago, I only remember it had at least 1 windmill in it. Anyway, it is my favorite place in the world, so it was cool to be there. Also, we got to tour a windmill and since it had been raining, some mill owners started up their mills and we got to go inside one while it was going.

After that, we drove down to brussels in, ugh, belgium (nothing deserves capitalization). It was a dirty city. We didn't do that much in it at all.

Friday, 7/11:
I was all too happy to leave belgium by train to Paris, France, where I was told the food would be excellent. It was ok food there, though I am afraid I have become addicted to baguettes. We got into Paris later in the day and just hit the hay early to get a start for the next day at...

Saturday, 7/12:
DISNEYLAND, PARIS!!! It was cool to ride rides we know and love in French. The Space Mountain (Mission 2) is a lot more intense than the California one. It does loops and corkscrews. The haunted mansion (there called the Phantom manor) has a plot circulating around some dead bride or something. The Indiana Jones ride is an outdoor coaster. Thunder Mountain is cooler. Also, they have this "Aerosmith's Rockin' Roller Coaster" that my sister recognized as a racetrack in this game she used to play at my grandparent's house, so we rode it. It was so good and was only a 5 minute wait, so we decided to ride it 4 times in a row. It was a really good roller coaster for the wait. It has loops, corkscrews, and all to either "Dude Looks Like a Lady" or a funky live recording of "Sweet Emotion." Dad and I used our fastpass micro to get past the lines at a very busy day in the park. We tested our rules from America. The differences are that the time slot is only half an hour in Paris. We tried showing up late on one, but when I gave the girl the tickets, she gave me this creepy look like she wanted me in her pants. When we got in, my family said "Either we can use them late like at home, or David is hot." We tried later, and it turns out that I am just hot. All in all, it was a good use of the day.

Sunday, 7/13:
We went to see Notre Dame early in the morning and we lit a candle for my grandpa while we were there. It's a pretty impressive building. We got lunch at this mexican place with a really cute waitress that I got a little flirty with. She was a British exchange student to Paris. My mom liked her because she said my mom had a good French accent. We then took a boat downriver to the Eiffel Tower, but the waits were long, so we decided to go early in a later morning. After that, we just hung around and got dinner.

Monday, 7/14:
We got up early to go to the Bastille Day Parade. It's basically the French marching their army around in a parade. We witnessed the cops breaking up a protest even though it was peaceful. It was funny because in America, they would have been allowed to continue protesting. They were hoping for a freed Tibet. We bailed on the Parade because the views were horrible and we watched it on TV at a restaurant. After that, we went to the bad part of town, where scammers prey on the weak minded. One scam was they ask for your hand and they put a string around your finger and they pay you to take it off because you need scissors or something. The guy didn't understand no and he was grabbing at my fingers, so I made a fist which I figured was the universal symbol for fuck off or you'll have to pay someone else to put your teeth back in. He backed off a bit after that because he was not quite my size. Amongst all that, I also saw people playing that game where there are three shells and one has the right dot on it. I had never seen that done in real life before and it was funny to see outside of the tv.

After visiting the church in that area, we ate at a restaurant on a hill. My glass kept sliding away from me, so I had to hold it down. After that, we wandered through the sex shop district to see Moulin Rouge. It was very anticlimactic. After that, we went to see the Arc Du Triomphe, which was funny because it looks like such a huge building that it is hard to imagine that it is so dwarfed by the Eiffel Tower.

Tuesday, 7/15:
We got up early to visit the Eiffel Tower. We met a couple from New York while in line. It was funny because we got to talking about how their son is going into college also and the father said "Yeah he wants to study music and business, which I think is..." in a tone that sounded like he was going to go on a rant about how big a waste of time it was, when mom chimed in that that was exactly what I was doing, so he stopped talking really quick to avoid putting his foot in his mouth. They were really nice people. The Eiffel Tower was really cool. I went all the way to the top and saw some good sights. I took the stairs on the way back down though for fun.

After that, we went to see the opera house, which was really cool because of the immensity of it. Mom and Kathryn went shopping, then back to the hotel. Dad and I went to the Science and Industry Museum, which was pretty cool.

Wednesday, 7/16:
We spent the whole afternoon on a train to Amsterdam. It was a nice ride, except for the annoying stupid people and the annoying stoner kids bragging about their fake IDs. As you may have guessed, they were PS3 users. I hope they overdosed on pot or got aids from the red light district. I just kept my head down and listened to my music and played Pokemon. That night, we went to see the Anne Frank house, which was pretty cool.

Thursday, 7/17:
We took a train out to Haarlem to see the Coree Ten Boom house. She was a girl who hid Jews in WW2. It was a pretty cool story. We met some kids from south Florida, which was cool. After that, we hung around the town a bit before going back into Amsterdam. We had dinner at this really good steak place. Across from our table were four really really hot girls at what seemed to be a birthday dinner for one of the girls. They paid me no mind except for one that occasionally looked over, but knowing my luck it may just have been to see if the waiter was nearby. Also, they were smokers.

Friday, 7/18:
We had a day of museums that effectively melted my brain from the boredom. We started with a canal tour, that was so boring, I was reduced to finding entertainment in the expertise in moving the huge boat through the small canals, which was actually very amazing to watch. After that, we went to a Jewish memorial thing from WW2. After that, we went to a church that was being redecorated for a fashion show. At one point, I distracted a gay guy as I walked by and he lost concentration and pricked his finger then looked around embarassedly. He had every right to stare at me though because my hair that day was FAAAB-U-LOUSSS. After that, we visited the Dutch resistance museum, which was pretty cool and was about the Dutch resistance to German occupation. After that, we hit up the Rijksmuseum for some cool paintings and artifacts. After that, we went to the Van Gogh museum. By the end of the day, I was museumed out. I still had enough energy to check out the red light distric though. Sorry, no pictures. It was not allowed. I will say though that I thought it would be the distance of shopping department mannequins in a window, but they are right up there against a door. I got a couple doors knocked at me, but that may have been just agressive advertising.

Saturday, 7/19:
We didn't do much other than go to the old chuch and that was about it. It had some pretty good views. We had dinner at a nice place where a guy recognized my gameboy color. It was impressive because he had a good knowledge of old videogames, so he was not a casual gamer.

Sunday, 7/20:
Our flight left at 1:30, but since it took an hour more than the time we gained, we got in at 2:30. I got back and unpacked and helped my grandpa get some technology stuff figured out, then I got back home and started this post after reading others' blogs.

Thank your for the comments by the way on the pictures. I will be posting more pictures after I filter out what ones are bad and what ones don't need to be posted. Currently there are 900, but since everyone else seems to have jobs keeping them busy now, I guess I have time to do some organizing unless I am over working at my grandpa's house.

I hope people are online tomorrow, because I had a good chat with Keir, but I am feeling a bit lonely, so where are ma homies at? I get my wisdom teeth out on Thursday and I will be more or less incapacitated for a day after that maybe until the tissue in my mouth heals. I need to acquire SC before then. I hope people are online tomorrow. Oh well, pictures are coming soon, just wait for them. Peace out.