Living in tokyo.

April 21st -27th
As I said yesterday, we are in Amsterdam. Across the canal is a gorgeous church and right next to it are some of the prostitute rooms. Two groups of tourists have passed them taking pictures since sitting down here. I heard from a man working at our hotel that the mayor is trying to get rid of all these rooms.
After Taize we headed up to Holland. A friend of mine in Tokyo is from a small town called Noordweijkerhout. Her parents own a cute, little B&B there. The reason they have a B&B is because it is located right in the middle of millions and millions of tulips. It has always been my dream to see these fields in full bloom.
I was excited about being in Holland. What if my grandfather had never moved to the US? What would I be doing if I were Dutch? The Dutch language almost seems familiar to me which is strange as even my father doesn’t speak any Dutch. But for some reason I could understand quite a bit. There are similarities to Swedish I guess. Maybe Dutch will be my next language after Italian. The problem is the Dutch speak better English than Americans do so it’s hard to get motivated to learn it.
The first morning in Noordweijkerhout (I think it’s spelled that way.) we took a three hour walk around the tulip fields. On the left side was a canal that went on forever. Yellow flowers lined the canal the entire way. The variety of birds we saw was amazing. Ducks, swans, water chickens, and many more I can’t name. On the right side were the fields of tulips. We spent three days looking at TULIPS. Jonathan definitely got tuliped out! I could have still done some more however. Thanks to Ricy and Nic, Brejcht’s parents our stay there was beyond my expectations. THANK YOU!!!
Enjoy the tulips pictures!! This is about a 100th of what I took.
Now back to Amsterdam. The first day here I decided to go to the town of Delft. I wasn’t ready for a city yet so I went back out into the country. Jonathan stayed in town.
Delft was a cut little town with, guess what, lots of canals and bridges. The old and new church there was spectacular. I had to pay to get into both of them so I acutally only went into one of them.
I’m getting cold now. I’m going in to have breakfast.
Having breakfast now. There’s a TV in our hotel lobby and it’s a report on the world food crisis. Hard to believe that so many millions of people don’t have enough food to eat. They just interviewed a mother who doesn’t eat so she can send her kids to school. Here I sit with a complete breakfast buffet sipping my coffee. It’s hard to feel good about myself at the moment. What can I do? Eat less? Send money somewhere? Pray? It’s just not fair. Why do I deserve to have all I have? So many things to think about.

the town of Delft