Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam

Oh my. I just wrote out a list of what we’ve done in the past week, and it turns out it was a lot. Good thing I am staring down a six hour train ride to Berlin…
Paris. Of course Paris has significance to Scott and me as the place I said “yes!” to the most important question asked in my life, and this time, as a much older and wiser (…right???) person I appreciated the elegance, the history, and the art of the city. The city is still dazzling, but the density of people could make everyday life challenging. Scott and I found ourselves muttering, “If there are this many tourists now, can you imagine this city in July?” more than once.
We arrived on Saturday night with a much smoother process than in Heathrow and found our hotel in Bercy, complete with a Zumex machine for fresh-squeezed orange juice at breakfast (I may never get Scott out of here). The next morning we headed out to Musee d’Orsay, and lost ourselves in impressionist art and Grecian statuary. Thank you, Rick Riordian. Because of your literary contributions both my kids took pleasure in seeing the Greek and Roman figures featured in the Percy Jackson books and schooling their parents on why this one was holding a snake and this one was battling a lion. The impressionist art was a slightly harder sell for Harley, but for me…walking among Monets and Renoirs was a fine way to start our visit. Harley gained an appreciation by the end of the tour, and now says d'Orsay is his favorite.

That afternoon we visited the Arc d’Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower (stopping by the Champs-Elysees Peugot dealer along the way). Harley needed to make both for his DI challenges during the 2015-2016 year, so seeing them in person was terrific. We climbed the stairs for the Arc d’Triomphe and took the elevator for the Eiffel Tower. Security around both monuments, and really everywhere we went in Paris, was very present. We figure our eyeballs have been scanned daily during this trip.
Monday we went to the Louvre and the Catherdral of Notre Dame. Now, with 35,000 items in the Louvre museum, the estimate is that were you to spend three seconds with each item it would take you three months to see everything. Yowza. We had each person choose one gallery. I did make sure we saw the Mona Lisa, but the tourist crush around this one painting is significant. Turns out Fiona was the most successful of us in getting to the front of the crowd. Our afternoon was spent among the gargoyles/monsters of the Cathedral

of Notre Dame (built 1163), and thanks to the timeliness of the Eagan Community Theater production this past summer everyone could imagine Quasimodo among the bells.
Tuesday we spent at Versailles, the palace for Kings Louis 14-16. We toured the extensive 77-hectare formal French gardens imagining the best game of Nerf gun tag EVER. We saw Petit Trianon, Marie Antionette’s personal home, the Trianon, a smaller palace on the palace grounds as a special getaway for the king to escape court life, and finally the palace. Exquisite, all of the rooms trimmed in gold. We returned to the city center for a cruise on the Seine and collapsed exhausted in our hotel. I think this one was our kids’ favorite because they had an adjoining room. Otherwise we’ve been a very close family so far this trip! ...Next page, note the fence laden with the locks of love; the area right around where we took our river ride was filled with them.

Wednesday we rode the bus to Brussels. Here we had reserved a studio apartment with two pull-out couches through AirBnB, so it was a different experience from Paris (we each got bit up by mosquitoes while we were sleeping, but the apartment was a bit warm and we needed the window open. Mosquitoes in Brussels in late September apparently find me tasty and Scott not as much. This must be an Eastern Hemisphere thing as usually my best anti-mosquito plan is to bring him along). We walked to the Grand Place, with elegant buildings from 1697-99, and found the statue which has become iconic for the city, the Mannekin Pis. (Yes, it is a boy peeing.) Scott and I shared a Belgian waffle (yum) and myriad chocolate shops lined the streets (more yum. I need lots of stairs-climbing to offset this kind of yum). We discovered a large gathering of beer-drinking Scots in one square and learned there was going to be a playoff soccer game between a Scottish team and the Brussels team. Harley and Scott opted to watch the game in a pub that night; it was apparently a party atmosphere with the two of them sitting in a separate balcony area away from the inebriated folk but still enjoying the scene. Fiona and I opted to pursue chocolate shopping that night instead.

Thursday we rented bicycles (so proud of ourselves, we figured out how to do this from the automated bike racks) and saw the city from its bike lanes, which were on about half the roads. We visited the Atomium, the monument from the Brussels World Expo in 1958. The structure is designed as an iron crystal and I am definitely going to work that in as a test question somewhere, somehow. The interior had historical displays from 1958, an era when nuclear power had so much terrifying promise, and this monument was supposed to show the more peaceful side of the atomic age. After our visit we traveled to the Museum of Comic Arts. The two languages spoken in Brussels are French and Dutch with English a distant third, and some of the exhibits would have been more interesting with English, but we found some comic artists able to convey their message without dialog and enjoyed them quite a bit. The Smurfs and TinTin both originated in Belgium.
Brussels, to me, is obviously smaller and less grand than Paris, but

that allowed the city to be more quirky too. I saw a Brussels wrestling with a new identity: only 60% of the population is Flemish and fully a quarter of the population would be considered New Belgian, having immigrated from far-flung corners of the world. Maybe it was because I ducked out early Friday morning and did laundry in the Wash Club several blocks away, watching the diverse city wake up and head about its daily business, but this seemed a city in conversion more than I observed in London or Paris.
Friday we headed to Amsterdam via bus. We dropped off our luggage at a nearby hotel and took a taxi into the city center (never again. Thirty euros ($38) for under three miles). We arrived at the Anne Frank House at about 3:30 PM. For those who have visited Amsterdam, you may know this is the #1 attraction in the city currently and it is recommended to get tickets online two months in advance. Not kidding, and I failed on this part, since we didn’t really know our travel plans into Amsterdam or out on Sunday to Berlin until

recently, and yesterday was Yom Kippur, the one day of the year the House is closed. We arrived only to be told there would be no walk-up tickets, only online tickets that day, but we should check for cancellations. I was devastated, but Scott tried online a few times and managed to snag tickets for the last entry that day. The museum experience was extremely moving; I think to me personally it was the marks on the wall to show the 13 cm Anne grew during the family’s two years of successful hiding that affected me most. I feel very fortunate to have been able to get in. Thank you DHMS for requiring her diary as reading for seventh graders—Fiona knew exactly what was going on.
Saturday we visited Micropia, the world’s only microbiology museum. Fascinating, so well done. The museum had different cultures of bacteria, fungi, diatoms, and molds for people to view under microscopes and see in gorgeous photos; excellent exhibits of how microbes affect our world. I think the kids had a blast. We walked around the canals with my former colleague Karyn and her family, who live outside Amsterdam now, and then took a canal boat ride at sunset. Amsterdam’s golden age was the 1600s and many of the canal homes date from that time. Current real estate shows available buildings on the canals running about 2 million euros. The atmosphere in Amsterdam, right around Dam Square, was a party, definitely. I would say the number of 20-somethings traveling to somewhere for a weekend was extremely high here; higher than any other city I have seen so far on this trip. The Dutch speak excellent English so we had no problem getting anywhere. We just needed to watch out for the heavy bicycle traffic--these people mean business!

Today we are headed on the train to Berlin, homework is being done, and Scott is catching up on Netflix. Happy October to All!