From: Rainer
Subject: Rainer's Europe Tour 1998 -- part 7
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1998 16:48:06 EDT

Dear Family and Friends,

Here's another in a series of installments.

Cheers,
Rainer

Wednesday, 9/30

We had breakfast at the City Hotel again.  It was raining a
bit harder this morning. We made another attempt at finding
a laundromat.  Monika, who seemed to be short one pair of jeans
since we left, we convinced to wear shorts so we could take
her other pair of jeans to the laundry, too.  We found the
laundromat off of Frankenslag (that's a street).  They would
do the laundry for you for just 4 guilders per load more.
What a deal.  And for another 6 they'd even fold the laundry.
Great.  We wouldn't have to hang out at the laundromat.  We
were so excited we didn't think through that Monika was in
shorts waiting for clean jeans to return an hour later.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, but not so good later.

The agenda for today was to find more places that Vera remembered
from her youth.  Monika was pretty chilly most of the morning,
Navigating today was much more successful than yesterday.  We
found everything on the first attempt.

After lunch Monika and I stayed in the hotel while Vera went
exploring on her own.  She visited a museum about Scheveningen
and also a couple of shops.  Monika and I worked on 
algebra homework and wrote journals, respectively.  I ended up
answering quite a few algebra questions, though, so the journal
entries were a bit shorter.

Vera returned from her excursion with a bottle of wine, some dark
beer, and a couple of books about her home town.  Monika and I
left to pick up the laundry -- navigating by feel rather than by
the map that I couldn't read anyway.  We've been here long enough
now and the place is small enough that it's starting to seem
familiar.  Even though I don't know street names (you can't see
the bloody signs) I can find my way around recognizing features
here and there.

For dinner we went to Kijkduin (pronounced like "cake down") which
literally means "look down" (over the dunes).  It's an area not
too far from here with several different kinds of restaurants.  We
had invited Vera's aunt and cousin (and her husband). So we picked
a place with beef on the menu and had some pretty reasonable T-bone
steaks.  There was only one waitress on duty, so things turned
out to be slow.  But, there was lots of conversation, granted in
Dutch, so for most it was not dull.  Monika and I exchanged our
own stories when we couldn't follow what was going on.

The waitress recognized that we weren't all Dutch and asked where
we were from in the United States.  When I replied, "Oregon", she
asked, "Which state is that in?".  I indicated that Oregon was a
state between California and Washington, and she said she studied the
U.S. 12 years ago, but excused the fact she'd forgotten it because
"I'm a blonde".  I guess blonde jokes are known here, too.  Which is
interesting, because so many of the Dutch are blonde.

We paid our bill, said our good byes, and took one more digital photo
in the parking lot, and then headed back to the City Hotel to call it
a day.