Birthday week

My birthday was more of a birthday week, with things happening here and there!

First, Rosie took me out to lunch on Wednesday since she as leaving for England that evening and wouldn't be here on Thursday. She invited some friends and we went to a restaurant at the east gate of the city (it's actually attached to the gate), right on the bank of a canal. It's near where Rene and I live and I've wanted to go there since I saw it right after I arrived, but Rene and I don't eat out often and we've never gotten around to it. It was really swanky inside, and we sat at a really fun wooden table with colorful velvet chairs all around. I felt like I was in India! Rosie also gave me 5 different colored rubber duckies, so I brought the green one to lunch. While were were there we got the idea to take pictures of the duck (now a girl duck known as Ducky) with all the food and all around the restaurant and around town! Rosie and I spent the afternoon taking Ducky to the park and the supermarket, capturing every special moment with Ducky on camera!

Our cool table

Ducky, the cake, and me

Ducky gazing longingly at the other duckies

Ducky paying for the groceries

Thursday Rene took the day off so we could go somewhere special for my birthday. I had wanted to go to De Hoge Veluwe, which is a national forest where you can take a bicycle from them and cycle all around the forest. It's near Utrecht, so then afterwards I wanted to go to the Dick Bruna House- he's the creator of the Nijntje books (or Miffy for you non-Dutch people) and he was from Utrecht. I thought it would be a fabulous day, but the weather had different ideas. We woke up to it raining, and the forcast said it would be raining on and off for the whole day. We decided cycling through the forest wasn't the best idea, but we didn't have an alternative. Finally, we decided to take a long trip down to Maastricht, because we had train tickets that gave you free train travel all day along to wherever, Maastricht is about the furthest we could go to make use of the tickets, and they have Hollands best vlaai. What is vlaai, you ask? Well, I should have asked, too! I always thought it was a type of flat cake, so I thought, what's better than traveling hours to go get birthday cake with free tickets? Well, turns out that vlaai is more like pie! Which is still good, but not what I was expecting! So we walked around the city a litle bit (which is really quite beautiful) and then headed home. Or tried to, that is! As we approached Eindhoven, we were informed that there had been a collision ahead of us between a train and a person, and we wouldn't not be able to get to the whole western part of the country by train until it was cleaned up. Well, as we (and every other person on the train) tried to figure out what to do, we decided not to wait for a bus that would be coming in half an hour to take us to a train station on the other side of the accident, but to take a different train to the east part of the country and the up and around. I didn't think it would take that much longer since we'd be passing though Rene's hometown and then making the same trip that we normally make come home from his parents. But I underestimated the trip TO Boxmeer from Eindhoven, and the trip went from being merely 3 hours back from Maastricht to 6 hours in total! I ate a sandwhich from Albert Heijn (a chain of supermarkets with stores in train stations) for my birthday dinner and was very tired when we got home!


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It's ok, though, because Friday and Saturday went much better! Friday I met Rene after work in the Hague and we went to a Korean restaurant for my belated birthday dinner. It was super yummy, and again I was so proud of Rene for trying all kinds of new foods! Then on Saturday we went karting at a huge sports complex in the Hague, where they have an indoor 1/2 mile karting track, an olympic sized (I think) ice skating rink, a whole section of the building full of climbing walls, an ice hockey rink, and a lot of outdoor stuff too! It was fun, and I beat Rene in our second heat, but I had two crappy cars for the first and third so he beat me in those. But I proved that with comparable cars I can beat him!! My birthday week was topped off by a party that night from some friends- we fit 16 people into our little living room!!

All in all it was an adventure, and I'm thankful that I have such a wonderful husband and friends to put together all that for me! Now I'm trying to recover from the festivities!!