Holland (May 15-22)

So it was up at 2am in Tel Aviv in order to leave sufficient time to get through the famed extra heavy security of Ben Gurion airport for our 6am flight to Amsterdam. In fact other than a few extra stages of checking this and that the security wasn't really all that tough.

Landing in Holland was yet another step in our decompression from travelling Asian and Arab lands. Everything is so clean and well looked after, no one is hassling you about anything, it all seems so relaxing in comparison! Even something like not having to worry whether there will be TP available in the bathrooms or not is a big change for us!

Our destination from here was John's cousin in Gouda (yes back to cheese-land for us). This required a couple of short train rides connecting through Amsterdam and so we decided since we were there to spend the day hanging out in the city (after checking our luggage for the day at the train station there). Wow...what modern trains...brand new, quiet electric, feeling like they were floating on a cushion of air. And the people are so nice even when buying a sandwhich for lunch and you change your choice at the last minute, they are so cheerful and its like 'no problem'. And Amsterdam is so nice, the buildings look so beautiful, people seem to care what things look like and how good a shape they are in. These are all feelings we experienced as sharp contrasts to our world of the last 6 months.

We decided to go to the Van Gogh museum and have a look at their selection of his famous paintings. It was like sensual overload on top of everything else...beauty, art...just for the sake of it. After a couple of hours there we laid down in the grass of the park outside as we had only a couple of hours of sleep and John promptly fell asleep for an hour!

Well it was back to the train station to catch the connection to Gouda and to experience another new feeling...to talk to someone you know and have a connection with...for the first time in months! We enjoyed the feeling of being with family and the comfort of a home, home cooked food, using a machine to do laundry (rather than by hand in the bathroom sink!). So for the next few days we just basically hung around, hence there is not much to write about! except to say once more, at the risk of sounding repetitious, about how beautiful the old historic towns of Holland are. It really is a unique place because of the smaller, more compact, more intimate human scale of everything, of how well looked after is every little detail, of how the city centers especially are oriented to favouring cycling and walking and to discourage cars. Amsterdam is like this, Gouda is like this, Haarlem which we visited for an afternoon is like this, as well as countless other smaller towns in the country.

So after 4 days in Gouda (thanks a million Ellen and Willem for everything) we headed to the east of Holland to visit Aunt (Tante) Alie and Agnes for a few days (more wonderful hosts - thank you). Next on the plan is traveling to Paris where we will visit with friends and head off to visit our last country or so...Italy and perhaps some of the south of France.

Tickets have now been bought for our return to Canada...Toronto...on June 29th....but first there is much to experience of Italy. We'll keep you posted.