All of my siblings have moved in the last few years. They sold their old house and bought a house in another town. They fixed them up/modernized them – at considerable expense, time and plenty of headaches and stress. But all are now all completed and they are all happy with the result. We got to spent time in their dream houses and admired each one of them.
Our first stop was Amersfoort, a town not well known by Americans – lovelier in the summer than winter but interesting any time. It lies at the center of Holland where the major north-south and east-west traffic axes meet (train and road).
We visited the ‘Caravaggio in Europe’ exhibit at the Utrecht Central museum where I learned about Dutch, Belgian, French and Spanish ‘caravaggionists’ I had never heard of and whose masterpieces were at par with those of Caravaggio himself. Some of the enormous altarpieces were done by those painters when they were still in their twenties! Impressive.
We had beer and ‘bitterballen’ before taking our evening meal in a specialized ‘Pannekoeken’ (Pancake) restaurant called the ‘Shrieking Maid’ (this is also the name of a type of firework that is very popular with 13-year old boys, even a week after New Year’s Eve). The giant menu (24”x18”) consists of countless combinations of bacon, apple, cheese, mushrooms, onions, molasses, confectioner sugar (a la carte) or American, Malaysian/Indonesian, Mexican, Italian ready-made combinations that can be guessed.
Day 3 and 4 we drove further east in our wheelbarrow-wheeled Daihatsu to my Irish-twin brother, and visit him in his very new house. The rather boring two storied back of the house had been replaced by an enormous floor to ceiling glass wall that brought the outside in: a meadow with tiny little ponies grazing in the rain. The yard in between the house and the ponies is still awaiting planting season and looked rather sad but there is a plan to make the view even more spectacular.
We visited another museum I had never heard of, the exquisite Modern Realism museum ‘More’ in Gorssel. Here too we discovered artists we had never heard of but from another period, the modern realists who produced their work during the 20th century. We had dinner afterwards in what appears to be a chain (Loetje) that is famous for its gravy – the tenderloin Axel order was served in a bath of (rather salty) gravy, with slices of wonderbread to sop up the liquid – a rather unhealthy combination it seemed to me, but apparently a selling combination for the chain.
Sylvia's Journal 
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