Sadly for blogging purposes, there were no thong-wearing or shirtless men seen on the breakfast run today, but as I was waiting for my bagels, a super-handsome man came in, with dark, curly hair, a dark long coat, and a dark scarf. Dubbs said she will be getting the bagels from now on.

Dubbs was in charge of things today, so that meant three things – museums, museums, and museums. She loves art. So off we went back to the Rijksmuseum, since we had only seen a very small part of it. We got there just after the museum opened at 9:00, and we had each room almost to ourselves (even the one containing The Night Watch). It only started filling up, largely with school children, at 9:45 or 10:00. Dubbs wanted to see the nineteenth-century paintings and then see all the Rembrandts in the museum. Sadly, a painting she really wanted to see, The Milkmaid, is on loan to a museum in  Tokyo currently. It took me much longer than it should have to realize that the Dutch national art museum would be almost all Dutch artists. Ooops. I tended to like the unusually lit paintings (sunsets, cloudy days, moonlit scenes), especially if they had water in them. Mer liked the ones with bare trees.

We spent about two hours in the Rijksmuseum and then took the Metro to Amsterdam’s southern train station, where we caught a train to The Hague, about fifty minutes away. When we did get there, we discovered that the train station was surrounded by “buildings of the future”-feeling buildings, with curved surfaces and shining metal, and some really seemed to be made of plastic. They all made getting out of the train station confusing, but we finally found our way out.

We grabbed lunch in a small shopping street, and then made our way to the main square near the parliament building, which was next to the beautiful Mauritshuis Museum. The museum was in a former mansion, so it was a living space. What that means was that the art hung in large, but human-sized, rooms, which made it much more intimate. There were only about fifteen paintings or even fewer hanging in each room, and there were only sixteen rooms on two floors. Seeing this museum was really easy, and the views out many of the windows were across a pond into a park ringed with cute buildings. This was definitely one of my favorite museum buildings.

Since the Dutch Golden Age (the seventeenth century) produced lots of wealthy people, Dutch painting has a lot of portraits – the rich liked getting their own picture painted. As such, there were a lot of portraits in the museum, but the most famous one, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, is a tronie – a made-up portrait. She never really existed, but she is plastered on everything in gift shops around Amsterdam (and certainly in the museum in The Hague).

One of the things that caught my eye was the flexibility Rembrandt displayed – he could create paintings of great detail, and then he could paint ones where the backgrounds were just suggested shapes, or the subject was painted with broad stokes and blurry lines. Some of his paintings seemed to me to anticipate the Impressionist movement about two hundred years before it actually happened.

We saw the entire museum, including a special exhibit on Dutch paintings found in great English houses (the English really liked Dutch paintings), in under two hours. We walked back to the train station and got back home around 6:30. I was not feeling totally well, probably as the result of caffeine from drinking too many Cokes over the last few days, so Mer and Dubbs went off to dinner without me, and took advantage of my picky absence by going to a Thai restaurant. When I was feeling a little better, I went to a supermarket and got salted nuts and fruit juices.

So it was not the best end of the day, but the day itself was quite fun. I wonder what Bagel Boy will turn up tomorrow morning?

I made a bagel run again this morning, and although I was not passed by any thong-wearing rollerbladers, I did get to see a really buff shirtless man standing in front of his huge window on the third floor. Dubbs has volunteered to get breakfast from now on.

This was another day when Mer was in charge, and we started off fairly early so we could get to the museum campus and the Van Gogh Museum at 9:00, for when our reservations were. There was a thirty-minute window, so our getting there at 9:30 was no issue. We decided to pick up an audioguide that walked us through the highlights of the collection, which took about an hour and a half, which was a perfect amount of time for us today.

The Van Gogh Museum was roughly organized chronologically, although they sometimes had grouped items (like self-portraits) for easier comparison. They’d also dedicated parts of each of the three floors to works by other artists who inspired Van Gogh. It was very useful to see, especially with the help of the audioguide, how Van Gogh’s style developed over time. Van Gogh tried to capture the emotion of a person or scene, and he did this by experimenting more and more with brush textures and using more and more bright colors. He also started using basic colors next to each other, instead of mixing the colors on his paint palette, which forces the viewer to mix the colors with the eye, creating color that is not really there.

Since the museum has hundreds of letters that Van Gogh wrote, it interwove his history with the history of his paintings, from working in his hometown, to moving to Paris and then to the south of France, to admitting himself into a mental hospital, to finally moving back north to be near his brother, before Van Gogh shot himself in the chest and died two days later. His brother, then his brother’s wife, and finally his nephew worked very hard to make sure that Van Gogh’s work became known, with the nephew’s being instrumental in getting the current museum to be founded and opened.

We all found it interesting and moving. The only downside was, even in off-season on a random Tuesday, the museum was fairly crowded, making viewing some of the paintings difficult.

We left the museum and actually took the fairly new Metro line to the train station, where we caught the train to the town of Haarlem, about twenty minutes away. Mer wanted to visit the house of Corrie Ten Boom, who, with her family, hid Jews during World War II, and later preached forgiveness and love through Jesus around the world. The museum really was her home, so the museum can only take twenty people at at time, in a first-come, first-served line outside the home. We got there two hours before the next English tour, and Mer was debating about if we should wait in line. Happily, since we were hungry and very, very cold in the wind and high-30s weather, she chose to risk the off-season line, and we went and ate.

When we got back from lunch, we still had forty minutes to wait, and there was no one in line. We queued up, and by the time we got admitted, it was still just the three of us (although a Canadian couple joined us thirty minutes into the one-hour tour). Our guide was a volunteer who had recently moved with her husband from South Africa. He was hired as a hockey coach, and she was asked at her new church to help out with the tours, and as she had been on the tour once before, she was eager to help out. She was very kind, and it was nice to have such a small group so we could interact with her.

I knew nothing of Corrie when I went in. She and her sister, both in their fifties, along with her father (in his eighties), were deeply devout Christians who had a long history of praying for the people of Israel. So when the Nazis started rounding up Jews, they wanted to help Jews escape the Netherlands. They would open their door to anyone who asked, and helped over eight hundred Jews escape. They had a false closet built at the back of Corrie’s room, accessed by a small sliding door. The entire structure was built of brick so that it would not sound hollow, and could hold up to eight people standing back-to-front, crammed in together.

One day, a man stopped by to ask for money to help his wife get out of jail; he said she had been helping Jews. Corrie told him to come back in the evening, and when her sister went to answer the door in the evening, she heard a car, which tipped her off that the Gestapo was coming (no one else had cars). She hit a hidden buzzer, and four Jews and two resistance fighters fled into the closet. The Germans raided the home, but could not find the hiding place, and so decided to wait out the Jews, waiting about two days while the people in hiding suffered with no light, food, water, or heat in February. The Germans got bored and turned the guarding over to the local police, and as there was one policeman who was sympathetic to the smuggling group, he got the Jews and two other men out and away.

Meanwhile, Corrie and her sister and father were arrested on charges of having too many ration cards. The Nazis offered to let the father go, since he was old, on the condition that he would stop helping Jews, but he refused. He was sent off to a prison camp, where he died ten days later.

The sisters were moved from a jail to a concentration camp north of Berlin once the Allies started closing in. Corrie’s sister remained positive and kept reminding Corrie to forgive. The sister died in the camp, but had two very specific visions of houses where centers of healing would be set up, and one was at the camp in which she died. Both visions were realized after the war, to the point where the owner of the one home was shocked as Corrie described it in minute detail, even though she had never seen it. Corrie went on to tour the world, preaching forgiveness, even to the point of writing to forgive the man who turned her family in. She kept touring most of her life, into her early eighties.

I was amazed at the story. Corrie and her family were giants of the Christian faith, and I had known nothing of them. I was grateful to tour the home.

Afterwards, we went to the town square to tour the cathedral of St. Bavo. It houses a five-thousand-pipe organ, and we were lucky enough to be in the church when someone was practicing for a concert. The acoustics were amazing, even to one of Mer’s little “meeps” sounding during a quiet spell. The cathedral is simple, but impressive, with an intricate wooden ceiling and a very modern stained glass window that was installed in 2015. The floor of the church is all tomb covers, and they are all worn away from foot traffic so that no names are visible anymore.

From church, we swung by a chocolate cafe to get warm (it really was bitterly cold) and then took the train back to Amsterdam. We grabbed a canal tour boat for a one-hour tour of the canals, captained by a funny man who was a skillful sailor, getting the boat into canals not designed for a boat so large. It was pretty to see Amsterdam lit up from the viewpoint of the canals – the houseboats and the canal-facing homes were all very pretty.

We started walking home, but got very cold and jumped into a restaurant to eat and get warm. Then Dubbs, who thinks of these phone-related things, summoned an Uber driver to get us within a few blocks of home, saving us from a cold walk.

It was a long day, and the weather was not always kind, but we saw a lot of worthwhile places today.

Amsterdam’s city symbol is three side-ways crossed, which look like the letter “X”. I was amusing myself with laughing about Amsterdam being “XXX,” or triple-X. Then it occurred to me that this might actually be where the term “triple-X” comes from – that Amsterdam has long been known for, shall we say, looser morals, and that this may have worked its way into English. This theory pleases me so much that I have not bothered to do the seventeen seconds of web research I would need to verify it. I like my idea even if it is not true.

Today was “my” day, and I wanted to take a bit of a touristic risk. We all like seeing cities, and we all like games, so I thought we were a perfect match for City Challenge – Amsterdam, an iPad-based game in which you run around the city solving puzzles and racking up points in an attempt to get the highest score for the month. It is not a timed game (for the most part), so it lets you have time for picture stops and lunch and such. It has a four-hour option of the game that takes you through most of the old center of the city, so if we finished it, we would have a good overview of the city (which is not the same thing as being able to navigate a city based on circular canals).

So we picked up our iPad around 11:00 after a pleasant thirty-minute walk from our house to the main shopping area near the train station, on the northern end of the city center. We started the mission just south of the station, which meant we would end the day back at the station.

The iPad games broke into a few categories. There were many stops where we had to answer multiple choice questions about Amsterdam; generally, we were taking wild guesses at these (we did not allow ourselves to use an iPhone for the answers). There were several stops where you had to look at a picture of the famous building in front of you and spot the differences between the real building and the edited picture. And then there were multiple major challenges, which were the most involved, but worth the most points.

These were generally fun. We had one for which we had to help friends find their lost friend before their flight left, based on the photos he had posted online. We had to run through the shopping district collecting letters from signs to spell a word out (the only game we failed at because the instructions were not clear to us how the counting of the signs was to be done). My favorite game had us solving which one of the men in the statue version of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch had killed the captain; we had to run around the area and collect four hints from virtual eyewitnesses while being chased by virtual henchmen. We had to match photos of parts of houses along three blocks to help the police find drug houses. We had to collect clues on how to defuse a bomb near the museums (I had to keep telling Dubbs not to say “bomb” so much around crowds and police). We had to help two lovers find each other in the Vondelpark. We had to help reboot the computer system at the train station based on timetables for trains. It was a blast.

And we actually learned some things about the city. We did not know that fifteen thousand bikes are dredged from the canals each year. We missed that the main shopping street was also the most expensive, with rents of three thousand euros per square meter.  (We thought it was a different shopping area with Armani and such that we had seen on Sunday). There are a little over a hundred kilometers (sixty miles) of canals in the city. The “Old Church” is the oldest building in the city, and the “New Church” burned down three times.

We saw most of the city, skipping the northwestern and the southeastern areas. While I had no desire to see the famous Red Light District, I knew there was a chance the game might take us into it, but I figured the “working girls” would not be working at 11:00 am on a Monday. I was wrong. I was looking at my iPad map when I caught, out of the corner of my eye, a curvaceous mannequin displaying lingerie. As I turned to make a snide comment to Meredith about her needing new clothing, the mannequin suddenly moved. I became very interested in my iPad, and our two-block tour of the District was quickly over.

The rest of the areas were quite lovely – the shopping district, in all of its holiday decor; lots of canals and lovely houses; the museum campuses; and the pleasant Vondelpark, where two nice ladies offered to help us when we were looking confusedly at the iPad. We explained we were playing a game and thanked them. I love the people here – they are incredibly nice.

We finished the “four hour” game in about six-and-a-half hours. We racked up over 45,000 points, but we will not get our official score and ranking via e-mail for about a day. The rankings hold the best scores for the last thirty days, and it looks as if we will fall into second place. Drat that letter-gathering game!

We had supper pretty much to ourselves in a restaurant next to the gaming place. It was great – two funny men running the restaurant, good food, and eighties pop music playing on the radio. We grabbed some dessert nearby and walked home. And walked. And walked. We ended up finding some new and pretty spots, but had to keep consulting the map and iPhone to get home.

So, between the game and the scenic stroll home, we set a new (for us) vacation walking record – 16 miles, or 31,000 steps. None of us was sad to get home, even if it was only 7:30. I think we will all sleep well tonight.

One of the reasons to travel is to see things you either can’t see or would rarely see at home. To wit, I ventured out to get us all breakfast this morning while Mer and Dubbs got ready. Normally, even in the metropolis of Cuyahoga Falls, I do not walk out the front door and get greeted by a canal. Add in mostly deserted streets (on a Sunday morning) and charming buildings and a beautiful day, and you have the makings of an astonishingly great walk. I saw some very cute children in life jackets getting bundled onto canal boats. All very European Normal Rockwell.

That is when I was passed by the rollerblading man. Since he came at me from behind (ha!), I did not get to see him from the front, but the backside was certainly in view. The man was wearing a hat, a coat, and a blue thong, and rollerblading. In thirty-six-degree weather. Even in relaxed Amsterdam, he was catching odd looks from the few people out and about.

Since many places are closed on a Sunday, I took a circuitous route to a bagel place we had seen on Saturday, to see if there was anywhere else open.  Along the way, I passed the Bag and Purse Museum, which I had not known existed. Then, I passed the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, which was tastefully guarded by a large man in an impeccable suit, who I am sure would have politely refused me entrance.

I finally got to the bagel store, where I learned several things: food is expensive in Amsterdam, with bagels running over four dollars each; Europeans spread butter and jams using spoons instead of knives; nude men on magazine covers is considered good possible breakfast reading material. A man at a table was talking about how smells are all frequencies, and went on to expound how all of life is frequencies.

The walk home was uneventful. This was just getting breakfast, mind you.

Mer was in charge today, and she wanted to go to church, so we went to church. We may have had one or two or a dozen photo stops along the way. We still made it on time, to an English-speaking service of a Vineyard Church, housed in an old church that had been updated with sound and other A/V equipment, as well as an extensive coffee bar. The people seemed very kind, and it was a good service. We opened with the hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” sung in Dutch, but projected with English lyrics, and then the rest of the songs were all in English with Dutch lyrics projected. The sermon was all in Dutch, but we were provided with headsets to listen to a live English translation, which is always an impressive trick to me. The sermon was on the importance of giving – being willing to give up time and money to serve God, and how God is faithful even when you give. He used a few examples, but one that stuck out was of a friend who was a doctor who gave up what could have been a lucrative practice in the Netherlands to go practice medicine in rural China instead. The doctor is retired and has little money now, but is full of life and joy; he gave away himself and does not regret it at all.

After church, we strolled over to the Rijksmuseum, which is the national museum of the Netherlands. It is enormous. We got a museum pass card that we can use five times in any number of museums around the city, and we signed up for a “highlights tour” for 3:00. That gave us time to eat lunch in the cafe before joining the tour, which was only five of us joining a charming guide who took us on an hour tour of some of her favorite works, which included talking about the building.

The Rijksmuseum was built in the late 1800s as part of a nationalist movement in the newly-created Netherlands, so the building was designed to be a museum. The architect had experience in building cathedrals, and so many aspects of the museum resemble large church buildings, from stained glass to large entrance halls, to Rembrandt’s The Night Watch being in a place where an altar normally would be. In fact, the place was so much like a Catholic church that the Protestant king refused to dedicate the building and never set foot in it.

Our guide, Anne, showed us several paintings. One was a beach scene that seemed happy, but she asked us to look more closely and explained more about it, and it was of fisherman’s children who were “Children of the Sea” (the name of the piece), so it was not so cheerful as it may have looked at first. She showed us a painting of a street scene influenced by photography, with the rooflines of the buildings cut off. The central figure was of a woman who originally was a maid, but the painting did not sell, and the artist heeded the advice of some friends and repainted her as a fur-wearing rich woman. The painting then sold.

We went upstairs to the seventeenth-century room, where we saw a painting of a family party that was out of hand, with even the children smoking and drinking; it had a moral of (more or less) “as the parents do, so will the children.” It seems paintings like that sold very well. We saw an extraordinary still life, and while I am not fond of still life paintings, this one was almost photorealistic. The artist really was showing off, and for good reason.

We finished out tour with Rembrandt – his The Jewish Bride painting from late in his career, with a husband and wife holding hands, but I thought they looked slightly sad. Of course, we finished with the huge and magnificent The Night Watch, which was revolutionary for the time, with Rembrandt’s capturing motion and action instead of stiff poses. We were told the painting was cut back at one point because it did not fit where people wanted to hang it. No one knows where the lost portions went, but the museum has a painted miniature copy of the full canvas, so at least we know what it was supposed to look like.

That was a grand way to spend an hour, and I like art much better when someone helps me understand the history or symbolism of a painting. We will almost certainly be going back to the Rijksmuseum later in the week, but today we had a 5:00 reservation to see the Anne Frank Museum, which was about a thirty-minute walk away.

You need to have a reservation for the museum, which Meredith booked two months ago, because it is so small. The museum is mostly made up of the building where the Franks and four other people hid for two years before being discovered by the Nazis. That was the most striking thing for me – to see how small the rooms were where the people all had to live together for such a long time. Anne Frank wrote a diary during her time in hiding, and after the war it was published by her father, who was the only person of the eight to survive the concentration camps to which they were all sent.

The presentation of the museum was excellent. We had audio guides that were room-activated, and so would tell us the history of the Frank family and the people who helped them hide. The actual rooms where the Franks and the others lived had no audio guide descriptions, probably to keep people moving through the small spaces. They still had the marks in the wall that recorded Anne’s and her sister’s heights, and still had Anne’s decorations pasted to the walls of her room. It was a moving experience, and very worthwhile.

We had supper at a nearby pancake place, with the Dutch pancake somewhere between the American version and a French crepe. We took a slow and casual walk back home, enjoying the amazing interiors of the houses that we could see through the large windows, and we loved the various lights playing off the water of the canals.

So, whether it is looking for bagels or getting pancakes, travel always gives you food for thought.

Little delays can add up; our plane was delayed in loading cargo, and so we sat on the plane for thirty minutes or more before finally taking off an hour late. Then, at the Amsterdam airport, it was a bit of a hike to passport control, where there was a huge crowd of people being held out of the entrance area for reasons we could not tell. Happily, Dubbs saw a sign for another entrance to passport control, which was another fair hike. It was open, which was great. What was less great was that they only had one person working the desk for non-EU passports, and so it took a little over an hour to clear the passport counter. The good news from that wait was that our luggage was waiting for us, so that was efficient.

The delays made us all decide that getting a ride from an Uber driver was worth it, so after a ten-minute wait for the driver, we were shuttled to our AirBnB residence, which worked well. Our host, Andy, was super friendly and gave us lots of information about Amsterdam. I think the information will be useful, but it did take thirty minutes to communicate when all we could think about was bed. So, after a very, very long twenty-eight-hour day, we finally got to go to sleep for a couple of hours. If given a choice, I will avoid ever doing that long a day again when traveling – it is too hard to function in a new environment on so little sleep.

The world was both literally and figuratively sunny when we woke up mid-afternoon. It is a northern city in November, and so will still be cold (in the low 40s), but the sun helps a lot. After a couple of quick showers, we spilled out into the old city center of Amsterdam.

Not surprisingly, it is stunningly cute. There are canals everywhere, and all of the streets are lined with three- or four-story houses with colorful facades and fancy roof lines. The Dutch seem very fond of large windows, so we could see inside many houses and apartments, and it seems the Dutch love books; despite limitations on space, many houses had a room for a library.

Mer was in charge of the afternoon, and so she led us south to the museum district. It was a beautiful walk. The canals make the neighborhoods scenic and slow down motor traffic, although the Dutch seem to have the low-country love affair with the bicycle, so we learned very quickly to check to make sure we were not accidentally in the bike lane. We have an informal bet about who is going to get knocked down by a biker first.

A close-second bet is who is going to fall down the stairs first. Because so many of the buildings are so narrow, but still fairly tall, we’re guessing the old buildings in Amsterdam must have at one time been taxed on square footage of the ground floor. Our apartment is no different – we are on the third floor, and both sets of stairs are the steepest stairs I have ever seen, and for good measure wrap around at the top of the flight, just to make the steep stairs harder.

The museum area of Amsterdam is beautiful – multiple open spaces with dramatic buildings scattered throughout. The park was in use and was lit with tons of lights, and skaters were already skating on a rink. At the same time, a trio of people were tossing a Frisbee around, which is not something you usually see with ice skaters nearby.

We went into a museum to buy a Museumkaart, which gives you unlimited access to Amsterdam’s museums. Or, more accurately, it did. Now, you get five visits on the card, and have the option to register it to get the full version, which gets mailed to you. This is not the best option for tourists here for just one week. So Mer scrapped her plan of visiting the modern art museum for an hour, and we went to find supper.

Here too, we hit a bit of a snag. The first place we went was a small pub, and was packed out. Europeans eat later than Americans do, and it was only around 5:30, but that did not stop people from being social over a coffee or beer. We moved on to another restaurant, where we had more success.

Mer had no firm plans for after supper except to see the city, so we wandered south a couple of blocks to a park, which was very pretty in the dark, except for the few places that were not well lit. Otherwise, the lights reflected off small canals, and it was lovely, except for the cold that descended after the sun went down.

We all brought warm winter clothing, but I still got cold on the hour or so walk back to the apartment. I must be out of practice. We walked in the general direction of our home, but felt free to be distracted by lights or anything that looked interesting (including a friendly tom cat). While the Christmas lights are not anywhere near so extensive as Lisbon’s promised to be last year at this time, Amsterdam has the distinct advantage of having the lights already turned on. It’s a bit of a coup, really.

We got back to the rooms fairly early for us, around 7:30. That is wise given the little sleep we have had, and Amsterdam promises to be fun to explore tomorrow.

Last spring, our friend Dubbs got a notification on her phone that there was a Cleveland-to-Amsterdam flight available for $550 (via Toronto). With the chance to eliminate the five-hour drive back home from Toronto while jet-lagged, we jumped at the chance. The only downside is that the flight left on a Friday, which is a school day. Still, it left in the afternoon, so Meredith and Dubbs thought they would only miss a class or two, and could get a sub to cover for those periods.

Little did we know – airlines have the right to make radical changes to the schedule of flights without notice or compensation if you book more than a few months out. Lufthansa did just that, changing our Cleveland-to-Toronto flight time to leaving at 6:20 am. Not only did that mean we would miss the whole day of school, not only did it mean we would have to get up at 2:30 am to get ready and get to the airport, but it gave us about a twelve-hour layover in the Toronto airport.

We decided to make the best of things, and when we got to Toronto, we found a baggage-storage place, ditched our backpacks, and took the train into downtown. Our main goal was the Art Gallery of Ontario (an art museum), but it did not open until 10:30, and we got to Union Station at 9:00. So off we trekked into the spitting snow/rain mix, off to St. Lawrence Market.

St. Lawrence Market turned out to be what I had hoped it would be – a giant indoor market where vendors sold meat and fruits and such. That is not much use to the traveler with no refrigeration, but it was interesting to wander around, and, as I expected, it also had some eateries. So we had a leisurely breakfast, and then walked it off on the thirty-minute walk to the art museum.

The museum was a bit of a surprise to me – it kind of springs up on you in the middle of a business and housing area of mostly tall buildings. It was also oddly busy for a random Friday morning, but that may have been school trips.

We spent about three hours at the museum, wandering from gallery to gallery. We lingered a bit more where there was an exhibit of personal photo albums from World War I, since Meredith teaches All Quiet on the Western Front (a novel about the war). That was interesting and sobering, and pictures of soldiers from India and of troops in Egypt were reminders that it was a world-wide war.

We explored the European art section, which started around 1200 and was laid out roughly in chronological order. As always, I liked the religious art and the examples of sculpture, especially since the museum had several Rodin works.

Mer and I had seen that the museum was offering a volunteer-led hour-long tour at 1:00, so we left to take the tour while Dubbs did her museum thing. There were only five of us on the tour, so it was very personable, and the woman took us on a quick overview of the building; it was equally about art and the building’s architecture. The building underwent an expansion in 2008, and they did a great job, adding wings made of glass, stone, and wood. In one painting by Tintoretto called “Christ Washing His Disciples’ Feet”, our guide said no one knew who Judas was in the painting. I pointed out it was probably the only disciple who had his back to Jesus, and he also had a money bag on his belt (Judas kept the money bag for the disciples, as well as taking money to betray Jesus). It seemed pretty obvious to me….even if Wikipedia identifies Judas as the man by himself in the left-hand side. Clearly wrong.

We met up with Dubbs at 2:00, and she summed an Uber ride to get us back to Union Station, which saved us thirty minutes of walking. That was a good call. The train ride back to the airport was smooth, and security was easy, so we had time for an early supper before settling in near our gate with about three hours to wait.

So, usually “Day 0” of our trips is just about getting to Europe, but today was a pretty fun day in Toronto.

I was sitting in a booth at Applebee’s when it happened: love at first sight. While we waited for our food to arrive, our friend Dubbs happened to mention an all-staff e-mail that she and Matt had seen earlier that day. A woman whose young son had developed sudden and severe allergies was seeking a home for her two cats, Linus and Skittle. My interest was already piqued, but then Dubbs showed me the picture included with the message, and I was smitten. I’ve long had a particular affinity for tiger cats, and when our beloved tiger Bocca died in 2009, we soon ended up with another one, Jackson; however, in the two years since Jackson had died, I’d had a tiger-striped void in my heart — and here was a picture of not one but two of them, a father and a son.

Matt apparently knew that once I saw the picture, we as good as had two more cats. Nonetheless, I was hesitant. We already had four cats, and though cats are relatively low-maintenance pets, each still comes with some degree of additional effort, expense, and shedding fur. The cats were temporarily living with the woman’s parents, but since her father also had allergies, albeit less severely than her son, the cats had been confined to the laundry room — not ideal, yet not urgent, either, so I e-mailed the woman to say that she could consider us as a backup plan, but that we wanted to wait a bit longer before committing.

Checking back a week or two later, I learned that the cats were still in the laundry room with no other offers of a forever home, so we went ahead and said we’d take them. Upon learning that our hesitation had come from the fact that we already had four cats, the woman said that six cats was just too many, and they’d keep trying to find a different solution, but I insisted that since we’d had six cats in the past, we knew we had room in both our home and our hearts.

In their picture, Linus and Skittle looked much alike, but in person (or “in cat”?), there were more obvious differences: Skittle was a more conventional short-haired tiger, whereas Linus was a long-hair with brownish-gray tiger coloring, but without the clearly delineated stripes. Skittle was cute, but Linus was the looker, almost like a small Maine Coon. Their temperaments differed as well, with Skittle rarely leaving the bedroom, his safe place, while Linus roamed all over the house and gladly greeted visitors.

Despite Linus’s more venturesome spirit, he stuck close to his son, especially in their first weeks with us. When we’d go into the bedroom, they’d often both be under the bed, but when they’d come out to see us, they’d walk back and forth next to each other, rubbing sides affectionately.

Even as they both got more accustomed to us, our house, and its other feline residents, Skit remained a skittish and bed-centric kitty. To try to keep him from getting dehydrated, we started putting a water bowl in the upstairs hallway, in addition to the one we had in the kitchen. Linus developed a predilection for curling up or sprawling right next to it, prompting Matt to take a picture of his sacked-out form and caption it, “If you don’t talk to your cat about drinking, who will?”

Linus’s other favorite spot was on the arm of the couch, usually on my side. When I’d sit down to read, eat, or watch TV, he’d often be quick to join me, which meant that my left hand had to be occupied in petting him, or he’d let me know that I was slacking in my duties. His typical way of letting me know was to try to reach out and prick me with world’s sharpest claws, but occasionally, he would go with world’s loudest meow instead. He didn’t use his voice often, but when he did, it was impossible to ignore. My father might have described it as a “stentorian squawk”; Walt Whitman might have described it as a “barbaric yawp.” It was startlingly low, as well as startlingly loud, and if Linus had resorted to it too frequently, it probably would have been rather annoying, but as a rare phenomenon, it cracked us up every time, because it was hard to believe that such a raucous noise could come from such a delicate creature.

Though not a lap snuggler, Linus would, after a few minutes of my petting him, either turn around and just sit on the arm of the couch or curl up against my feet as they rested on the recliner. More than once, I remained in an uncomfortable position for far too long, in an attempt not to disturb such a comfortable-looking cat.

Linus had the ability to seem comfortable pretty much wherever he lay. Lounging in the sun streaming through the bay window, he’d give the impression of having melded and become one with the wooden window seat. Sometimes he’d put his head down in such a way that he appeared to be sleeping on his face, burying his nose into the surface on which he was lying, and we’d check his sides to make sure he was still breathing.

Just a week ago or so, I came upstairs and started to laugh at how Linus was lying stretched out in the doorway to my office; I remember thinking that if I hadn’t known about his melding tendencies, I might have thought he was sick, allowing himself to be in such a vulnerable position in a high-traffic area. While I was still standing there looking at him, Matt came up and let me know that when he’d set out food, Linus had showed no interest, and that wasn’t like him. Worried, Matt planned to make a vet appointment the next day.

We had actually taken Linus to the vet just three months earlier, because even though he’d eat, he was skinny when we got him and seemed to be getting skinnier still. I never ran my hand down his back, because feeling his bony spine was too disturbing; I’d just gently pet his sides or scritch his head. But even his head was starting to feel more skeletal than usual. However, the earlier vet visit hadn’t revealed anything obvious, so we knew he was skinny, yet convinced ourselves he wasn’t sick.

Last week, the illness became undeniable. When Matt brought Linus back from the vet, he warned me that the prognosis wasn’t good, but Linus had gotten some subcutaneous fluids, anti-nausea medication, and steroids. We hoped they’d make a difference, and initially, they did. The vet wouldn’t say anything firm about life expectancy, and when Linus appeared to rally, I thought maybe we’d at least have months, if not years, and even wondered if someone would have to give him his medicine when we went out of town for Thanksgiving. A foolish worry, in retrospect.

Friday night, a friend came over and brought Linus downstairs to hold in her lap. When he got up and tried to get off the couch, he didn’t land on his feet, but splashed down in an awkward heap. He’d again stopped eating, and his meows were uncharacteristically high and faint.

I didn’t sleep well Friday night, and woke early on Saturday. Linus was by his water bowl, but rather than lounging, he sat like an uncomfortable sphinx. Not wanting to disturb him or to risk his falling off furniture, I got out an exercise mat and unrolled it next to him, lying where I could face him and reach out to stroke his still-soft fur, his empty stomach gurgling multiple times, my tears making small pools on the mat’s gray plastic.

Linus’s eyes were leaking fluid too, and they’d somehow gotten smaller in the night — smaller and more triangular in shape, with disproportionately large pupils. This was the sign we’d prayed not to see, and yet it was almost a relief, as well, because now we knew what to do. We remembered this eye change happening to both Jackson three years earlier and Macska the year before that, and it seemed to be the confirmation that the time for medicine was past, and that we now had to give Linus the best gift left us to give: the chance to rest in peace.

When we’d first gotten the e-mail about Linus and Skittle, our hesitation to adopt them was mainly because, let’s face it, six cats is a lot of cats … but it was also in part because the e-mail mentioned their ages: twelve and ten. Yet Jackson had also been around twelve when we took him in, and he was with us for six more years. Linus, however, was only ours for a little over a year.

To be honest, I’m not sure exactly where I’d draw the cost-benefit-analysis lines: in Jackson’s case, six years was about three more years than I’d expected we’d have him, so I was grateful; if I adopted an older cat who died the next month, I’m guessing I’d feel that the costs outweighed the benefits. And in Linus’s case? Thirteen seems too young for a cat to die, especially if that cat was a doted-upon indoor-only pet. And barely over a year seems not nearly long enough to have a cat. So was our adopting him worth it? Absolutely.

Linus

Back in May of 2017, I opened an e-mail. It announced that a woman had to get rid of her two sweet tiger kitties because her young son was allergic. I knew then that our household had gone from four to six cats.

Mer has always loved tiger cats, and our tiger cat, Jackson, had died two years before. She kept saying she had a tiger-shaped hole in her heart, so I knew as soon as a she saw the two tiger faces in the picture that she would want to adopt them. She did wait a week or so to see if anyone else would take them, but when no one did, we welcomed Linus and Skittles into our home.

They were a very unusual pair in my forty-plus years of being around cats. Linus was Skittles’ father, and they adored each other. Usually, male cats take off after mating, and if they do stick around, they can be a danger to litters of kittens if they feel threatened by the new ones. Skittles was extremely shy (and still is), and spent a lot of time under the bed. Linus, who was very outgoing, still often took time to snuggle with his son under the bed.

As seems to be normal with cats, Linus had his favorite places. He liked Meredith more than me, and so one of his spots was the arm of the couch on her side. He would often be found there, sometimes asleep in the most strange and contorted positions; he seemed to like sleeping on his face, with his nose buried straight down. I still don’t know how he was breathing like that, but he seemed fine. He also loved the arm of the couch because then he was right there if Mer sat down. When that happened, he often left his haunches on the arm, and put his two front paws into her lap, standing and kneading on his front legs. It was very cute, but dangerous – Linus had the sharpest claws I have ever seen on a cat, and they grew back so fast it was hard to keep them trimmed. If he grew tired of that, he would return to the arm of the couch or head to the footrest, where he would settle down. I often returned home from work to see the couch in reclined position, which meant that Meredith had wiggled her way off the couch to let Linus keep sleeping on the footrest.

Linus also loved the window seat, where he could watch the world go by or sleep in the sun. His last regular place around the house was a bit odd; he loved being by the water dish upstairs outside our bedroom, even though it was on a wooden floor, which could not have been as comfortable as the beds or couches. He was such a great “melder”, where it looked as if he was fused to the floor, that it looked like he had passed out from drinking too much water. It was funny and cute.

Linus was generally a quiet cat, but he did once or twice a day let out a foundation-rattling “Mrwap!”. I have never heard a meow that loud. He would do it if you scratched his head – just once, and then he would sit there happily getting love. Or, he sometimes just did it. On rough nights (for us), he would let off several in a row over a few minutes in the middle of the night, but these were thankfully rare. His loud cries usually had us laughing, because you always knew who it was.

Out of six cats, we had four who fled anytime anyone came over, and two who were social with visitors – Linus and our outgoing black-and-white cat, Catness. Since we love our kitties, we do like visitors to get to see them, and since Linus and Catness were both long-haired cats, they were very striking. We think it likely that Linus was at least party a Maine coon cat.

Maine coons are usually huge, but Linus was always skinny to the point of being bony. He never weighed more than about eight pounds, and we felt like he was getting even skinnier over the last couple of months. We took him in to the vet in June, and he weighed seven pounds, but his blood work all came back normal. I started feeding him high-calorie kitten food, which he loved, in the hope he would put on weight. It did not seem to help much.

About a week ago, Linus stopped eating his canned cat food, which he usually ate. I took him to the vet again, and he now weighed five-and-a-half pounds. The vet thought he might have intestinal cancer, which is difficult to detect, but interferes with food absorption. He gave Linus an anti-nausea shot, and sent me home with steroids to give him. The vet said some cats responded well to them.

Sadly, Linus was not one of those. He rallied nicely for two days, eating again and gaining some strength back. We gave him his steroids and hoped. Then, on Thursday night, he ate only to bites of canned food, and would not eat anything Friday morning. I got some anti-nausea pills from the vet, but Linus still would not eat Friday night. One more pill for one more try on Saturday morning, and he still would not eat, and his eyes looked glazed over. It was time. We took our sweet, loud, long-haired, tiger of love to the vet, and we stood there and pet him as he passed away.

Fifteen months is not a long time in a human life. Turns out it is plenty of time to have you heart changed. We loved Linus, and we miss him. If kitties can go to heaven, I expect to hear a loud single “Mrwap!” when I get to the pearly gates.

And so, all good things must come to an end. We fly out tomorrow, Paris to Toronto, and, God willing, will be sleeping in our own beds by 10:00 or 11:00 tomorrow night. We did not want to risk train breakdown, train strikes, etc., so we came into Paris today after a leisurely morning in our Brussels hotel. We got into our Paris B and B a little before 4:00, and so that left us with a little time for sightseeing and exploring.

When in doubt, I like to walk in cities. If I do not have a specific destination, or if I am not in a hurry, I like to walk so that we can see the city on foot. In so doing, we stumbled across a pedestrian street full of restaurants about four blocks from our B and B. We ate a late lunch there, outside, and got in some good people-watching.

Sadly, my illness flared up and caused me some distress, so we had to go back to the B and B until a little after 5:30. By then, I was feeling better, so we went back down the same street to the pedestrian area, and we kept heading south toward the river. My plan was to get to the Seine, then turn west to go to a large formal park near the Louvre. Along the way, we stumbled across multiple pedestrian areas, including a small square where tons of people were just hanging out (or, in one area, having a dance-off among friends).

Once we got a block from the river, we went west, which brought us along the back side of the Louvre. We had never seen the museum from that angle before, and it is quite elaborate, with carved columns and decorations along the entire wall. And it just goes on. And on. And on. I finally felt we had to duck into the main courtyard to see the famous entrance of the museum, and discovered that the courtyard bordered the park I was aiming for, the Jardin des Tuileries.

Imagine our delight when we saw not only dozens of classical-style statues, and miles of well-kept hedges, and multiple large fountains, and myriads of people everywhere, but also, along one side of the gardens, a with-rides fair set up. We obviously detoured into that area; it was a great chance to get to see Paris at play. It was also odd to see these large fairground rides throwing people about with one side of the Louvre as a backdrop. We laughed with people laughing at their friends screaming on rides, and navigated fried-food lane and many win-a-prize stalls. It was much fun.

The fair dumped us out on the far end of the park, which overlooks the Paris obelisk and, further away, the Arc de Triomphe. It was a great place to sit and watch, so we did just that. The city has provided many movable chairs around the park, including some that recline, so we reclined and watched Paris go by. By the time we got up, it was after 7:00, and so we took a very very crowded Metro train back to our B and B. From there, we wandered around looking for supper, and then wrapped the evening up a little after 9:00.

It has been a great little trip. I look forward to these times away with Meredith – it breaks up the routine of bills, chores, and grading. Two weeks together is wonderful, though I am looking forward to some routine now, especially one involving petting kitties at home. We saw several Belgian cats, but they were too wary to come close enough for to us to pet them, so we are both going through withdrawal. It will be great to see the people back home, once the jet lag wears off (I’m usually fine by day three, which will be Monday). It is amazing to live in an age where you can go from Paris to Cuyahoga Falls in about twenty-one hours, and I am grateful that Mer pushes for our going on these trips. Every time, they keep us wanting to come back for more.

I have now been on over fifteen trips to Europe with Meredith over the last twenty-two years or so. In all that time, I do not remember getting sick on the trip; I have gotten sick several times after the trip, but not during it. That streak ended on this trip, but happily, the touring could continue, just at a more subdued pace. I have been feeling off since Monday morning, but today was tougher. I could tour, but got tired very quickly, and so we came back to the hotel twice during the day for me to rest. It was difficult to get up the energy to go out for our evening jaunt, but I managed, and it was a good day of touring.

We stumbled onto a Brussels tradition – Ommegang (Flemish for “walking around”). The Ommegang festival used to be a religious procession, but fell out of favor around the time of the French Revolution, which frowned on such things. It was brought back as a historical celebration in 1930, and now commemorated Charles V and his son visiting the city in 1549. The “king” leads a parade of fourteen hundred in-costume people through the city, ending in the Grand Place (the main square), where they have a two-hour-long show which includes medieval lights and fog machines. It only happens two days a year, and this year that was today and Friday. It seemed as if we should make the effort to catch some of the festivities.

Part of the celebration is a small Renaissance faire in one of the city parks. They have a small “village” with people selling wares, and some people explaining life from the 1500s. They also have combat demonstrations and a jousting tournament. And it was all free (although donations were accepted by individual re-enactors).

Since the village did not open until noon, it left us with some free time, so we headed over to the area to go to the remains of the Coudenberg Palace, which was an enormous palace built over five hundred years, that burned down in 1731. The ruins were torn down to build a new grand square in 1774, and it was mostly forgotten about until the 1980s, when the ruins were excavated. Once the foundations, cellars, and even part of a road were unearthed, the city covered the site with a concrete roof and opened the site up to the public.

In addition to the appeal of ruins underground, there was an advertised exhibition on giants, which sounded intriguing. The website said giants have a special place in the lowland countries, especially Belgium. I was up for that.

The ruins of the castle were impressive, and the cobblestone road that was uncovered shows the original slope of the steep hill that existed before it was leveled to make the new square. That was all interesting to me. What surprised us both were the giants – it is a term used to describe the large mannequin puppet people you see in Mardi Gras parades in New Orelans. It seems they have been really popular in Belgium for a very long time. So we got to see a bunch of oversized people scattered about the ruins of the old palace. It was a bit surreal. It helped explain some of what we had seen around the country; we had seen some giants in the psychiatric hospital art museum in Ghent, and we had seen three of them when we exited the cave near Dinant. We’d thought they were fairly random, but it seems they have an important place in the festivals of Belgian cultures. We even got to see one of the giants being prepared for the parade later in the evening. The Coudenberg Palace experience ended with a small museum, and we were through the whole place in a little over an hour, and so we went back to the park to see how the village was coming along.

Not very promptly, as it turns out. It seems “noon” is a rough time for these sorts of things, so we went back to the hotel for the first rest of the day. We returned to the park around 3:00, and things were more lively. It was a small village, and, different from Renaissance faires in the US, the normal civilians were not in costume – only the actors were. You would think a faire like this in a city that was actually around in 1500 would be bigger, but maybe people are too close to the history Americans don’t have. It was small. We did get into a long conversation with a “monk” who told us how a barber would have repaired a badly healed broken bone (in an unpleasant two-hour operation that involved cutting into the leg, scraping out any fat, moving the muscle, and then manhandling the bone back into place). It would have been for only the rich, and people only survived the surgery half the time. He was fun to talk to, and his English was pretty good.

It was 4:00, and we had found out earlier that the Magritte Museum, which was very close by, was free today after 1:00, so we went there. I had liked what I’d seen of Magritte at the Atomium yesterday and wanted to see more. After blitzing though all three floors of the museum in forty-five minutes, I still liked much of what I saw. Magritte seems to me to be playing with minds a lot – he does things that can’t be seen in the real world, like a painting being half in the day and half in the night, or the background of a painting being full of trees growing upside down. A few paintings were just odd or did not click with me, but on the whole, I liked Magritte’s work.

I looked on the map and realized that to take the Metro required us to walk away from our hotel about fifty percent of the actual distance to the hotel, so we took it as an opportunity to walk the city. We stumbled across a small park that was perfectly manicured, across from the church where the procession would meet up with the “king” later in the day. That ended part two of the day. I got back to the hotel and lay down, and after another hour, it was hard to go back out, but we both really wanted to see the Ommegang procession. Off we went, at a bit of a weary pace.

We swung by the huge and fantastically-named Palace of Justice to look out over the city. We could see the Atomium from there, and the city had even put out lawn chairs for people to hang out on the square. It seemed to be a popular place with the under-thirty crowd. We walked up toward the upper town until we got to the church, where we just caught the various guilds marching into the church. I did not know it was open to the public, so we found a spot on the road to wait for the pageant.

It was fun. The king and his guard led the way, followed by a modern street-sweeper to clean up after the horses. That was followed by a drum and fife group, and color guard throwing flags in the air, and crossbow men and musket bearers and small bands of instrumentalists and lords and ladies and commoners, and, wait for it, four or five giants. That was satisfying. Everyone seemed to be having a good time, and we were glad we had made the effort.

We grabbed a quick to-go supper and ate in our room while watching an obscure American film; we were enjoying the Flemish subtitles.  I’m hoping today will be the toughest day of being sick, so that I can have more energy as we leave Belgium for Paris tomorrow, and then home via Toronto on Friday. Belgium has been very good to us, and I am not sick of it at all.