September 23: The First Morning

(this is post 2; the first post is here)

I woke up at about 5:00 in the morning, wide awake. For the next few days, this was going to be normal: waking up somewhere between 4 and 5, and becoming a zombie by around 8--I'm talking so tired that it actually takes work to stay on my feet. (For anyone who knows me well, you'd know that being in bed before 1 a.m. is unheard of.) Most nights I'd also wake up multiple times, making my sleep a rather unpleasant one. I've just now broken this pattern.


I wandered outside around 7:30 to start taking pictures. My room is in a guest house in the back yard, which you can just see to the left in the first picture here.

This is their house from the front. It was built in the 1930s. It isn't small.

The next pictures are all from the street in the neighbourhood. I live in a town called Bussum, which is about a 30 minute bike ride from Amsterdam. The population of the immediate area is about 30,000.

This area of town is, I think, more upscale (it wasn't lost on me that most of the vehicles were BMWs and Jaguars instead of, oh, you know, Volkswagons!). Even so, on average all the houses here are larger than what you'd find in a Canadian neighbourhood. A general lack of basements partly accounts for this.

The photos here don't really do it justice, but the streets are very narrow. Two cars have a difficult time passing, even without any parked vehicles. And as far as parking goes, you may notice that the sidewalks are not really for walking!

Throughout the town are canals, including one that starts only a few houses away. They are sometimes clear, sometimes covered in thick algae-sort of stuff.

The foliage everywhere is dense. Case in point: There is an expressway that runs by, literally, only one house down from our back yard, and I didn't even know it was there until I stumbled across it.

The school for two of the children is also only a couple houses away, which is very nice.

After coming back from my walk, I found the kids watching cartoons in the living room, and I joined them for Batman and other mostly American shows with Dutch subtitles.