Amsterdam Pics

I know I owe y'all pics from our recent quick trip to Amsterdam.

The intersection right in front of our hotel. You can see a tram.



Me on a bridge over one of the many canals.

DH and I couldn't stop laughing over this sign we saw in a coffee shop window.

 

Ah yes! The Dutch are famous for their flowers. This was at one of the stalls in the flower market which was a few blocks from the hotel.



An Amaryllis. We bought one of these bulbs and brought it back. I planted it in a pot on our balcony and the thing grew SO FAST and just 2 days ago the first blooms opened. I have never seen such a huge, perfect flower!



Bicycles rule! And if you step into a bike lane, you take your life in your hands!



The first evening we were taken on a guided canal cruise.





Right beside our hotel was this fabulous park. I wish I could have spent more time there but it was massive with even a man-made lake. I miss having that kind of green space to roam in!



DH



More bulbs in the flower market.



The beginning of the flower market.



School issues

It's been a long time. A lot of stressful stuff has been going on, namely huge school issues with T.

She was at a boarding school this year which is located 20 minutes from where we live. I was very happy with the place and the staff. She really blossomed there socially but academically she had a hard time. My daughter is very good with her hands, not so much with the books. At the start of the year, they gave her lessons twice a week with their remedial teacher but at some point she decided not to attend the lessons b/c she didn't like the teacher! I told her I didn't agree with that decision but as I wasn't "onsite", I could not top of her and insist she go and even if I had insisted she go, forcing her would have accomplished nothing if she was already feeling "anti".

So at the end of May, in the last PTA meeting, her teacher told us that they'd accepted her for next year but in the same breath said the staff felt she would do "better" academically in another framework. But we left the meeting with the understanding that the issue was closed and, "OK. She's staying. Whew!"

Then 2 weeks after that, I got a call from the school's social worker with recommendations for 2 other boarding schools for me to look into. I had heard of them both. One I am not interested in, the other I was willing to check into more. I spoke to the school and scheduled a day for T to come take the entrance exam. I took the day off work and we got in the car to drive to Bnei Brak where this school is located and ........the car wouldn't start. We were forced to implement Plan B and get there by public transportation which took us AN HOUR AND A HALF! When T saw how long it took us she just about had a stroke. To make a long story short, she was accepted to this school but is not willing to consider it because it's so much farther from home.

In addition, we went last Thursday to look at the local WIZO (vocational) school which offers some vocational training in some subjects that would suit her very much but the down side is that it is not a religious school which makes me very nervous. Again, to make a long story short, T took the test there and we found out yesterday that she was accepted there as well. As unhappy as I am that the place is not religious, I do want her to be in a place where she will have the best chance at succeeding so maybe I just have to hope that the religious education she's had up until now will see her through the next 3 years.

So what are my choices? Push the issue and demand that the school she was in this year keep her for next year JUST because it's a religious school and then just stand by and very likely watch her fail and be depressed/discouraged/frustrated? Or move her to WIZO where she very well may do better academically but it's not religious (with everything that that implies)?

At this point, I am leaning strongly towards moving her to WIZO. I do not at all like how her school this year handled the whole thing - telling us she could stay and then changing the story 2 weeks later. When my daughter was finally feeling like she was worth something, that she'd gotten accepted for next year on her own merits, then they come and talk to me about other schools?? IMO, they've set her self-confidence back to ZERO and I do NOT appreciate that. And let's not talk about them dropping this bomb on me TWO WEEKS before school lets out! If they'd told me earlier, I would have had more time to research the options and the whole thing would have been less pressured.

My biggest problem at this moment is my ex b/c in my agreement with him it says that I have to keep her in religious schools until she's 18. T is going to talk to him today and tell him she was accepted at WIZO and see what kind of a reaction she gets. I'm expecting him to cause problems over it though.

Amsterdam

The company I work for just paid for all employees and spouses to spend a long weekend (Thurs - Sun) in Amsterdam - no kids allowed. Once upon a time, it was common for hi-tech and bio-tech companies to do this but with the downturn in the economy, it's become pretty rare. So I consider myself very lucky to work for a company that does this every couple of years.

We were away May 26-29 and I arranged with T's teacher that T could have 3 days off school to help us out by looking after the little ones at home. It was the first time we'd been away without the kids since we got married - 8 years.

We arrived back safe and sound early in the morning on May 29. We walked in the house at 5 am, hit the sack for an hour then had to get up to distribute the kids. T had a field trip from school to Jerusalem today and had to be back at school by 8 am which meant we left the house at 7:15 am. Once the kids were distributed, I came back home, unpacked and went back to bed until 1 pm.

Here is a summary of our 4 days there.

Day 1 (Thursday)
We arrived mid-morning, took the train from the airport to the central train station and then switched to the tram (another 15 min ride) which let us off a 5 minute walk from the Marriott where we stayed. If we hadn't been with the group, I think we would probably have gotten very very lost but this way, we just stuck with someone from my company who looked as if they'd read the guidebook and knew what they were doing so we made it to the hotel to find out our rooms weren't ready yet. We left our luggage there and spent a couple of hours wandering around central Amsterdam. We were obviously in a very posh, touristy area. Pretty much everything was expensive. We walked up and down the flower market and the Dutch are famous for their flowers. OMG! The variety! And depending on what, pretty reasonably priced. We found an IKEA-like store that was reasonably priced and picked up several nice gifts for each of our kids there, I got some makeup and skin care products, etc. Behind the mall we found an amazing, very posh, upscale, cafeteria-style restaurant. I don't know when I've seen such a variety of ready made food both hot and cold - soups and quishes and pastas and salads and fruit shakes and teas and coffees and meats and and and and.........it was endless. We bought some tuna sandwiches there and went upstairs to the seating area to eat them and take a load off. (The weather was gray and very very blustery and cold but a refreshing cold - not a painful cold - and it was spitting rain off and on for the first three days. A drizzle, really. It would drizzle for 5 minutes then stop, drizzle then stop. We bought an umbrella and promptly lost it within the first 5 minutes but luckily we didn't really need it.) After a couple hours of wandering around town, went back to the hotel and got our rooms and took a 2 hour nap. Then at 7 pm that evening the whole group of us (35 employees and spouses from my company) took a short walk to the start of our guided canal cruise in a glass covered boat. That was really nice. They served cheeses and wine and soft drinks and munchies on the boat during the cruise. The guide was excellent. Dutch is a really strange language but everyone speaks perfect English. After the cruise, the guide took us on a walking tour of the Red Light District - ahem! After that, we were again free to do our own thing so we did more exploring and ended up eating dinner at a small, quaint restaurant that we found down a very narrow side street and that offered several vegetarian options which were very very tasty. We got back to the hotel sometime after 11 pm. It only gets dark there at this time of year around 10:30 pm +/- since it is so much further north than Israel is.

Day 2 (Friday)
We went out to a supermarket near the hotel and stocked up on bread, cheeses, milk, muesli, fruit, yoghurt, tomatoes so we could prepare some basic food in the hotel room on Shabbat (the Sabbath). Then at 10:15 am we had to meet as a group at the Rijksmuseum where they had a photographer waiting to take a group photo of all of us. Inside the museum is where many of Rembrandt's original paintings are displayed. I have seen many of them on the internet or in art books but they don't even come close to the awesomeness of standing in front of a real one. I mean where you can see the texture of the paint on the canvas and the shine of it. And the SIZE of some of them! Wall to wall, floor to ceiling of an art museum so .....you can imagine. The tour of the museum was guided as well. After the Rijksmuseum which was a 10 minute walk from the hotel, we were taken to another nearby hotel for a buffet lunch - light fare, finger sandwiches, fruit salad, orange juice, etc. Then at 2:45 we had to meet again at the Van Gogh museum, literally next to the Rijksmuseum, and we had a guided tour of that as well. I didn't care for Van Gogh's style as much although there was one painting there that wowed me. A picture of a few branches of an almond tree that are in bloom against a vivid turquoise sky. I couldn't stop looking at it. I made it into the gift shop there (haha - I was too quick for DH to stop) and thanks to the prices could only drool over most of the things in the shop although I did buy a coffee mug that had the same design on the outside as that painting that I'd liked. The week before we went on this trip I'd broken my favorite coffee mug so.......After the museum, more walking, more exploring, with me dragging DH into every junky souvenir shop. I was looking for a nice gift specifically for T. I ended up getting her a beautiful scarf, a small bottle of perfume at The Body Shop (she had requested perfume) and a set of nice bangle bracelets, all of which she liked and will use. Around 9:15 pm we grabbed a felafel that was billed as "vegetarian" (when is felafel NOT vegetarian??) then raced back to the hotel for the start of Shabbat. We collapsed into bed and I read to DH out of the book I'm reading right now - Eat, Pray, Love - until sometime after midnight.

Day 3 (Saturday)
Saturday morning we woke up around 7:30, got ourselves ready and then walked about 20 minutes to a synagogue that DH had been told about before we went. He ended up bumping into the brother of a friend of his from our synagogue here. Small world!! We spent the rest of Saturday walking around. He wanted to see the concert hall from the outside at least so we went there. We also wanted to visit Anne Frank's  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Frank) house on Sunday and we were told that it would be wise to make reservations to avoid having to stand in line for hours since it's such a popular site. So on Saturday we walked probably an hour or so north to the house but we couldn't get in and there WAS a long line. From there, it was only another 10 minute walk north to a nice little flea market - antiques, funky clothing, kids toys, fresh herbs, cheeses, aromatherapy oils - you name it. Had a snoop around there then back to the hotel for a nap. My feet and back were KILLING me. At 7:00 pm we walked to a 17th century tobacco warehouse that has been turned into a concert hall for a fancy dinner with live jazz. I could have done without this. DH and I had requested vegetarian food but when it came neither of us liked it. Too la-dee-da. Too fancy. We both picked at our food. Lucky we had stuff in the hotel room. The dinner finished at 11 pm.

Day 4 (Sunday)
We made a point of being back at the Anne Frank house at 9 am when it opened and we didn't have to wait long in line before going inside. Not a happy place to tour but very famous and sobering. From Anne Frank's house we went to see the huge Portugese synagogue. It's currently being renovated but still beautiful and interesting. We had to check out of the hotel at 2 pm. After that, we went back to the flower market and bought an amaryllis bulb. They are these monster flowers, very dramatic. The bulb is the size of maybe 2 of the largest onions you've ever seen put together. And we also bought this carboard box full of 150 varieties of flower bulbs for 6 euros (~$8.50)!!!!!!! I will try to start them in pots on our balcony and if they "take" then I'll transplant them to the yard of our building downstairs.

There are more bicycles than cars in Amsterdam. It's not a big city - 830,000 people. You can walk from one side of the center to the other in an hour. A long walk, but doable. EVERYONE - grandmas down to babies - rides bikes and if you step off the narrow sidewalk into the bike lane you are taking your life in your hands. I am amazed that we didn't come back with tread marks up our backs. I saw one young mom who had a baby zipped into a Snugli on her front while riding a bike. Another bike had a seat on the front for a baby. A baby was sitting there fast asleep - amazing considering how cold the wind must have been blasting him in the face like that at that speed - and he'd fallen asleep. The mother was steering the bike with one hand while the other was clamped onto the top of the baby's head to keep him or his head from falling off the bike! That was TOO funny. She went by so fast I couldn't get a picture. A lot of bikes have green plastic crates strapped on the front. They put kids in there, dogs in there.......And NO ONE wears bike helmets.

T did an AMAZING job along with her friend from school of looking after Y and E. She's a natural! I knew she'd be fine but I didn't know HOW fine. I'd left them money to order pizza and to go out for ice cream which they did. She and her friend also took the little ones to the park often. T said she gave them baths every day. When we got home the kitchen looked like the housekeeper had just been here. Nothing out of place, no dishes in the sink, counters clean and cleared off, etc. She'd also done a load of laundry.

While we were there, 4 days seemed like a long time and I was missing the kids but now that we're back, I'm like, "Where'd the time go?"

Pics to follow soon.......