From: Rainer Subject: Rainer's Europe Tour 1998 -- part 6 Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1998 16:48:01 EDT Dear Family and Friends, Hope you're not tired of this stuff yet. There's a lot more to come, too. Cheers, Rainer Tuesday, 9/29 The breakfast at the City Hotel is quite nice. The coffee is good, not hot, but is served in a little silver pot with enough for two little cups each. There are hard boiled eggs, cereal, fresh fruit, breads, meats, and cheeses. It drizzled and rained most of the morning. Vera got very frustrated navigating to places that she remembered from growing up in Scheveningen: her schools and houses she lived in, and the clinic where she was born. All of the places we tried to find today had changed a lot over the years. We did find everything though. It was good for Vera to find these places from her past and capture them on film. In between looking for old schools we'd stop at some of the many small parks which usually had a small canal or some body of water associated with it. There are many herons in the area, and Monika delighted in photographing them up close. We found the Egyptian Goose, Grey Heron, Blue Tit, Coot, Moorhen, Jackdaw, Wood pigeon, and of course, the ubiquitous Mallard. The drizzle stopped. After a quick lunch at Burger King we visited with Vera's Aunt and Cousin. It was a very nice reunion, and although some English was spoken, most of the conversation was Dutch, leaving me to pick up snippets that were similar to German and translate to Monika what was happening. In the afternoon, we tried to find a laundromat. We found it but there was a power failure and all of the machines were out of order. I called the Hertz place to find out where to get the tire fixed that had a large spike sticking in it. So I drove into town to Kwik Fit and got that taken care of. Dinner was at the New York Pizza restaurant next to the Kurhaus, a famous old resort on the beach. Monika was glad to stay alone in the hotel with her chocolate mouse, journal, starcraft, and email while Vera and I visited her old neighbor and school mate, also named Vera. We had a hell of a time finding the place to visit at night. It was raining again and we spent much time driving (some even on a bike path) trying to find a house that was quite close. But the one-way streets, and the divided streets made getting from here to there a challenge. This was a good visit for Vera, too. It was a lot more formal, however. There was little joking and mostly just question/answer dialog -- pretty much all in Dutch. We got back to the room about 2200 and finished the day with journal writing and photo viewing. Vera had run one of her typical films through the local 1-hour processing place to do a sanity check on the quality of her new camera. It works fine and takes good pictures.