Day One: Utrecht

We intended to go to Amsterdam for our first day, but jet lag has something else in mind. By the time we woke up, had breakfast, and got organized, we realized the day was almost over. Rather than more traveling, we decided to stick around Utrecht and have an easy day.

Our first stop was at the neighbor, Bori's, house. Bori is in her seventies and grew up in the Netherlands. One of the reasons Lynda wanted us to meet her (besides that she's wonderful) is that Bori's father was Jewish and escaped the Nazis by hiding on a farm in a pigsty. Bori was six when her father had to go into hiding, but her mother told her that her father had died. Her parents couldn't risk letting their children know that he was in hiding because they were so young they might go to school or around town and tell others that Father was hiding. When the German soldiers came marching into town, Bori stood at the window and stuck her tongue out at them as they marched passed until her mother saw what she was doing and demanded that she stop. They could not risk drawing attention to themselves since their father, although not present, was Jewish. She learned to behave herself around soldiers. At the war's end, Bori was nine years old and one day a man showed up at the door. She knew it looked like her father and she had photos of him in the house, but he was dead, so it couldn't be him. But it was.

Bori re-enacting sticking her tongue out at the Nazis.

Bori's apartment, like Lynda and Wim's, is in an old church. Bori bought her place as the conversion from church to flat was happening so she was able to ask them to leave the original painting on some of the arches - beautiful!

After our visit to Bori's we wandered the streets admiring shops, looking at bookstores who all had the Wimpy Kid books in the windows entitled Loser in Dutch. We came across the Occupy Utrecht camp, saw a church tower and a church that used to be connected except the middle of the church blew down in a storm so now a large plaza separates the two. And, being the Netherlands, we saw things in windows that the boys claimed, "have scarred us for life," such as breast-shaped slippers and items referring to love. Photos available on Facebook and soon somewhere else, if I ever get organized to upload them somewhere else.