Adventures in Holland: Playing Catch Up

Sheesh, what happened to September and October?! We've been busy around here with just regular life (and a little bit of traveling.) We've definitely moved out of the "IKEA phase." You know, the phase where you find yourself at IKEA three times a week, and spending all your evenings with an allen wrench and a picture book. It's been a solid month since I've been to IKEA. Progress. I still don't have all my pictures hung, which is why I haven't posted pics of the house. But I promise there's a good reason. The reason is, I'm lazy. And also, you can't put nails in the walls here. It's plaster over brick walls, and it requires a drill and masonry screws, and I'm just not overly motivated to tackle that right now. So here's a few for now. I'll add more later.

Living Room

Dining Room

I took these last month. I love my new big dining table. It fits 8 like this, but it also has a leaf, so you can fit a ton of people around it. I also love love love the herringbone wood floors. This house was built in 1908, and was originally lived in by the ambassador to the UK. Later, it was a doctor's office. Rotterdam was bombed heavily in WWII because it's the major port for Europe. But this area wasn't bombed, so the buildings are older and have a ton of character.

Ok, enough about the house. In October we celebrated Holly's 10th birthday. Double digits! I can't believe how the time goes. She really wanted to go to an amusement park for her birthday. So we went to one about an hour away called Eftelling. I went with super low expectations, because, it's hard to top Disney when it comes to parks. We were pleasantly surprised! It was clean, and a really nice park. It's got a fairy tale theme, not all of which I recognized. The weather was perfect, so it made for a really nice day.

This is what the park rents as strollers. Aren't they cute?!

opening her new toy

We've had visitors! Have I mentioned that we love visitors? My sister and her husband were in this neck of the woods on a business trip. I took the train to Paris for a day to spend with them. Here's a few pics of what we did:

The Louvre

Notre Dame

Gargoyle on Notre Dame--isn't he cute??

view from the top of Notre Dame

Eiffel Tower

And then a few days later, they came to our house! Our first visitors. We had so much fun showing them around. We put 'em on bikes and everything. We took them on the pancake boat, of course, and also to the Euromast, which is kind of like the Space Needle in Seattle. Awesome views of the port and city.

View of Rotterdam from the Euromast

The Pancake Boat!

We also took them to the new Market Hall. It's pictured below. It's a food lovers' dream. Rotterdam is kind of known for their modern architecture. It's residential all around the edges of the building, but it's a huge gourmet food hall in the middle.

The Market Hall

On their last day in town, we all took the train to Amsterdam. It was our first trip to the city. It started out super rainy and cold, but the sun came out in the afternoon and it was perfect. We went to the Amsterdam Museum while it was raining, and took a canal cruise when the sun came out. And of course, everyone had to get their picture taken in the giant wooden shoes.