We were reluctant to leave Hallstatt, but as we were leaving it was rainy and misty. Beautiful, to be sure (I find few things more lovely than fog over water), but I’m sure it would have been even harder to leave if it had remained sunny and idyllic.

Winding through the Alps, the mountains churned out mist like factories - it was gorgeous. We got in late to Nijmegen, and wandered around the downtown area near where his parents are staying, looking for food. Note: there are seemingly thousands of donner kebab places in the Netherlands. This is strongly correlated, I’m told, to the amount of smoking that goes on here.

A bit about the house - apparently it used to be the case, in the Netherlands, that people paid taxes according to how wide their houses were. To exploit this loophole, basically all of the buildings in the Netherlands are really skinny and tall. The stairs are a serious challenge; I found I had to walk sideways up the stairs in order to get my bearings. I have absolutely no idea how the elderly, blind, or otherwise disabled manage to live in this country without breaking their necks. Do they never have to go upstairs?

Dutch stairs, a.k.a. “neckbreakers.”

Even in the countryside, where there is plenty of space, all the buildings are tall and skinny and smashed together, like giraffes in a huddle, balancing on tiptoes. The setup of Dutch buildings and housing developments most definitely contrasts with the sprawling, spacious American suburbs.

The next day, we got up early to go on an expedition to the Hoge Veluwe, a huge nature park outside of Nijmegen, whose name I still cannot pronounce. I think E pronounced it about five different ways when pressed about the matter. Each pronunciation vaguely sounded like a cat barfing.

Outside a wonderful little modern art museum in the center of the park. It houses a rather large collection of Van Goghs.

The statues are kind of snooty here. But I posed with him anyways!

Triangles and triangular setups seem to be really popular in Europe. Here’s an instance of a triangular plane.

At first I thought this was a maintenance unit, like for plumbing or sewage. Upon closer inspection, I realized that maybe this was art!

Stairs to nowhere. A lot of the sculpture art here seemed like practical jokes. (There was one which E had seen without me, which consisted of fake trees - in the middle of real trees - which where then watered and tended by groundskeepers).

The entrance admission to the nature park included access to bicycles. There are parking lots in several places in the park, full of bikes. You can take a bike, ride it somewhere, leave it and pick up a new one, which is a neat system. I was initially nervous because these bikes did not have any brakes (!), but it wasn’t too bad once I got used to it. Really fun, actually. The Netherlands is super flat, which is part of the reason why bikes are so popular here, and there were no cars or many other people around - thus eliminating the two things I hate to deal with when biking: hills and traffic. I could really get into biking, some day - even faster if I lived near a park like this.

So we rode around for a bit, and the rushing wind against my skin felt so nice. We came across this area that was made to look like the African Savannah for some reason (maybe hearkening back to the Dutch colonial days? who knows). We played in the sand for a bit and then rode some more. Basically it was like a gigantic playground, expansive enough for us to pretend that we were the only two people in it.

A sheep farm just outside the park. Yep, we came all the way from Kansas just to see a farm!

This sheep had some sort of weird disorder (it was shaking a lot), but it was cute and we fed it some grapes. Hope we didn’t make it more sick!

The baby lambs seemed to be doing well, despite the mother’s illness. So cute and fluffy.

We rode around and played in the park all day, until we were exhausted. No rest for the weary, however - the next morning, we set off for Amsterdam.