New apartment pics

Getting comfortable

New digs

We're in our final place. So nice to be home. Ellie loves it here, although the move was stressful to her. Maybe it stressed all of us out, but her way of showing it had a certain dramatic flair--she threw up a couple times. It was sweet to watch her try to comfort herself by talking about who was coming to visit her soon. I bet some of you didn't know you were coming, and so soon! Anyway, the anxiety has given way to excitement. Her friends Kai and Emerson are a few apartments away. We're right across the street from a library with great children's books, puzzles, games in the basement, so although right next to the puzzles was one of the places where she vomited, she's excited to be so close. All shall be well. Pictures to come.

Matins and Vespers

So this is where we have coffee in the morning. It’s a Dominican cathedral, built in 1292, converted to a bookstore/café, and around a couple of corners from our apartment. Ellie plays in the children’s section while I sip away. Although the shape of the table in the middle of the café isn’t obvious until you’re on the third floor, it’s fitting as the café is located where the altar once stood. You can see a woman walking over a tomb (square on the floor) as she passes through the bestseller section. We got there right as they opened so I could furtively snap away (sorry for the blur) and wouldn’t embarrass myself too much with my camera. If you click on the picture with Ellie, I think you'll see that she's embarrassed anyway.

This is where I came at 1 am last Friday to get the final Harry Potter. No lights were on inside-- the place was illuminated with candles. They handed out cider and snacks to the eclectic (all ages, many different nationalities) crowd mingling and anxiously checking watches. At 1, after a short speech in Dutch, they cut the ribbon that had cordoned off the cafe, where the books were carefully piled on the white table. Postulant-like, seeking answers to all our Harry Potter questions, we all neatly filed up to receive our books. The ceremony, the setting, the company--I'm so glad I traded a few hours of sleep for it all.

I'm sure Ryan will want to post something on here soon, but his evenings these days are spent finishing the aforementioned book. Wish us well with our move tomorrow. More change for Ellie--I feel a bit bad about that. She's been doing well, but obviously misses friends/family. She told me this morning that "my Della" was coming over to play with her today. Sweet.

Green Dutch living

*Hi everyone--I just sent out our blog address to a b-jillion folks and realized that this most recent entry is a banal treatise on Dutch trash. SO, if you've just found us, scroll to the bottom entry and start from there. Then, if you're still interested, read about how we compost.* :)
Ellie's sleeping and I just finished bringing in our compost bin. I love that Maastricht has city-wide composting, with little green bins emptied into the compost truck at your doorstep each Wednesday morning. We generate very little trash here. We pay 1 Euro per Maastricht trash bag (about $1.33), which is a kitchen-sized, 13 gallon, city-approved bag that is picked up for free. (You therefore pay up-front for trash service by buying the bags themselves, which is an incentive to keep your trash minimal.) Even with diapers, we don't fill one bag in a week. Packaging in general is much tighter (or non-existent) and recyclable. If you don't bring a bag to the grocery store, you must buy one there as they aren't provided. There are just a few places in the city that have food or coffee to-go, as the idea is for people to sit and drink/eat together. People of all ages are out--from infants to the elderly, people are just together and less compartmentalized by age as in the U.S. The city keeps the common spaces quite clean, the streets are swept daily, the parks are beautiful, the statues, ruins and ancient monuments maintained, the libraries well-equipped and bustling. As I've said before, people bike and walk more than they drive, so there's a sense in which you're among your neighbors much more. There is a strong civic ethic, community feel. So while living spaces are small (think Ikea-like apartment), I don't think people feel hemmed in. But I'll reassess this when it's winter here. :) In other nerdy news, I finished Harry Potter 7 on Monday, and Ryan's nearly finished. Quite bittersweet--would love to talk about it with those of you who read as rabidly as I did. We move into our *real* apartment on Friday afternoon. This is a welcome move for many reasons, not least of which is our current apartment's toilet isn't working and we are bucket flushing. Good thing I've had years of bucket flushing practice! Love to you all!
By the way, if you want to enlarge any picture, just click on it.

Hiking in Belgium

We went hiking in Belgium today with friends living in Maastricht, originally from Minneapolis. Lots of cows, blackberries, shades of green, waiting for kiddos and singing. Ended the hike with pancakes at the cafe pictured below. And there's Ellie ready to roll on the back of the Mama bike, aka "Pancake". More to come when my nose isn't wanting to get back in the final Harry Potter book. Lots of magic around us these days. Love to all!

Home in Maastricht

A couple weeks into our stay here, our feet firmly planted on the ground, and I hope this is the start of our blog being off the ground. Amidst cobblestone streets and a dizzying array of flowers, cafes and choices of cheese, we seem to have settled in. We've not been great about communicating where/what we're doing thusfar, so here's a life in Maastricht 101. (Hopefully this gets the word out sufficiently that I won't use the lame Q and A format again!)
So where are you guys anyway? Maastricht is the oldest town in the Netherlands, in the part of the Netherlands that dips way down south. The footbridge we cross the river Maas on each day was built in 1300. The bookstore/cafe we frequent is converted from a church built in 1292. There are lots of old Roman ruins around here, as the Romans founded the city. We're only a few kilometers from both Belgium and Germany. Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris and Cologne are just short train rides away.
And why are you there? Ryan is working at Medtronic in Heerlen, about 20 km down the road towards Germany. This is at least a year assignment. So far he loves the folks he works with and has gone to London to do some auditing for another Medtronic office there. Let's hope there's more travel that Ellie and I (Laura) can tag along with. (South of France? Norway? Italy? We'll see . . .)
What's life like there? People speak mainly Dutch and their second language is English, so it's easy for us Yanks to get around. We live in the center of the city, so cars are more a nuisance than a convenience. Ellie and I have fabulous wheels--a purple cruiser bike (3 speed!) with an enormous kid seat on the back and basket on front. Ellie named it Pancake. We ride everywhere, in the sun or in the rain, which seems to visit at least once a day most days. There's a very big cafe culture here-you can find Dutch folks drinking cappuccino, eating pastries and smoking cigarettes all hours of the day, filling the cafes that seem to make up 1/2 of the city. Other epicurean highlights are cheese, bread, chocolate and beer. Expect plumper versions of ourselves upon return.
We've been fortunate enough to make a couple friends; especially important for Ellie are her new friends Kai (3) and Emerson (1). I joined the Maastricht Int'l Playgroup and met some more mamas yesterday. Ryan has been out with a work friend to an Irish pub playing Tuesday Trivial Pursuit in English. Laura has done a lot with a mama friend and got to the new Harry Potter movie last weekend. Also, in our current apartment (we'll be moving to our permanent one in a couple of weeks) we're right next to a park. So, in some ways, life is quite similar to our Memphis life of work/caretaking/socializing. But we sure miss our friends and family!
On Tuesday we had our final day of orientation to Maastricht and we requested a tour of the countryside. We went hiking around a tiny village in Belgium. The colors of green, punctuated by wildflowers, were breathtaking. Our guide told us he thought the area looked like the Shire, and he was right. The farmhouses seemed out of Hansel and Gretel. A gorgeous brick bridge, that was really an ancient aqua duct built by the Romans, crossed the valley below. And church spires dotted the hills and valleys. We walked up and down hills and woods and pastures and stopped at a cafe for pancakes with fresh local fruit and cappuccino. We could get used to this. There's some question as to whether we'll be able to find it again, but we're getting more confident in just venturing out.
It's such a gift to be a stranger, to be so obviously in the posture of a learner. People give you a lot of grace and hospitality, which makes it easier to give it to yourself. Obvious differences aside, I find so many similarities between living here and in Tanzania--language learning, slowing down, a friendly street scene, walking (or biking) instead of driving, exploring nooks and crannies, new table jargon and etiquette ("do you want your water with or without gas?"), and even just little things like hanging out our laundry or not being able to find cereal in the store. (But we've got meusli, which is better anyway.) It's also so different to be a guest with Ellie. Certainly my days of carefree bus trips, fly-by-night travel and venturing into the club scene are gone. But in other ways, Ellie makes us more approachable, more easily understood and regarded with kindness. Thankfully, people seem to love children here and are quite tolerant of wiggles and fortissimo singing of the ABC song while eating out. We're excited for our guests to come and enjoy all of this with us. Ellie's up from her nap, so I'd best grab her and go to our park. Love to you all.