Saturday, April 29, 2000

Worked some today. I didn't mean to; it is a holiday weekend after all, but I wanted to try something out. I had moderate success, and later found out why I had encountered trouble, so that worked fine.

In the afternoon, I recovered sanity and we went in to the Queen's Day celebration in Utrecht. The bus took about 25 minutes to go a normal 10-12 minute route because it had to go far around the city center, which was blocked off for miles because the entire thing was turned into one huge market/fair/carnival. It appears to this foreigner that the Dutch, instead of having garage/lawn/whatever sales thoughout the year, all bring their detritus in and spread it out on tables or tarpaulins (orange, if possible) and try to get rid of it there. Since their royal family is the house of Orange, everything, from food to clothes to hair, seems to be orange. Imagine a St. Patrick's day parade viewed through a filter that turned green to orange and you'll have a pretty fair idea of what it looked like.

After we had eaten too much food from street vendors to be really hungry, we found a restaurant that serves cheese fondue. We know where we'll try to go for dinner tomorrow!