Archive for September 8th, 2010

Wet & windy

Holland greeted me with weather that should not have surprised me: cold, raw and rainy. Nevertheless, Sietske, a friend of hers who is a professional sailor (and used to much water), and three dogs took me out for a walk along the Bosbaan, Holland’s official racing track for boats. It is where Sietske and I spent many weekends during our high school years, when we were in the race for the national rowing championships (we didn’t) in the category 14-16 years first and then 17-18 years after we outgrew the first category.

We dried ourselves off in a lovely goat farm & restaurant (Ridammerhoeve) which may well be a vision of what Tessa and Steve are saving for.

Sietske dropped me off at the train station for the one and a half hour train ride to my B&B in Enkhuizen through wet city- and landscapes pressed down by a very low hanging sky.

I was picked up at the train station by one of the innkeepers, the wife, who put my heavy suitcase on the back of her bike. We walked alongside it crossing one picturesque canal after another. I kept thinking how much Axel would have liked it.

I am now established in the blue room which we had reserved and look out over the rooftops of old houses and the magnificent spire of the Zuiderkerk.

While waiting for the clouds to drift away I busied myself arranging for a haircut and a hot stone massage, all the rest is secondary.

Odds and ends

Labor Day came and went, in a blur. In fact I can’t remember what we did except sleeping in (everyone but me), seeing Sita and Jim off to their newly married life with a car full of stuff that took a full day of loading and off-loading.

Axel got started on his all clear liquid diet which lasted more than 24 hours until this afternoon. It is hard to imagine Axel without real food for such a long time but he managed. It shows once again how endlessly adaptable we humans are.

Tessa plunged back into school and I got to do a ‘back-to-school’ shopping for old time’s sake. Dinner was a stand-up at the counter affair, effective but not much fun. I had everything Axel couldn’t have: sausages, garden salad and tiramisu. Axel had Gatorade laced with laxative.

We made the rounds to friends who had put up family and friends, gracious acts rewarded with Afghan handicrafts. After that it was time to load up my re-set iPod-Touch with all sorts of apps that come in handy when you are stuck at airports or inside places with electricity.

I unwittingly downloaded several gigs of Tessa’s very high resolution (3 to 5 megs) pictures. I got to relive the various wedding parties over and over again as my computer froze repeatedly from the overload. I had to resize all hundreds of them by hand. I think I will finally succumb to buy a digital photo frame to simplify the showing of pictures to my friends and colleagues back in Kabul.

Tessa took me to the airport in spite of the 10 hours of homework she has between now and tomorrow’s first class (something she mumbled louder and louder as we watched the return traffic built up). The things we do for our loved ones!

On the way to the airport Tessa received a call from Jim’s mom who is a nurse in the endoscopy suite that Axel had successfully completed the ‘procedure’ and was in the recovery bay. I hope we can talk before the doors of the plane close. We all hope he will get a clean bill of health and can join me on Friday for the flight to Dubai.


September 2010
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