I'm from Holland, isn't that weird?

We're in amsterdam, although the last couple of days we have spent outside the city.

Yesterday we got together with Michelle's second cousin Netty, who took us north to Alkmaar, which was a very cool little Dutch town despite our having missed the famous cheese market. She also took us to Sint Pancras and another town whose name I don't know how to spell (or pronounce for that matter), and showed us where Michelle's family comes from. It was really cool! After that, we went to the beach, and wandered along the beautiful sandy dunes until we found a place to eat dinner, which was fantastic!

Today we met up with some girls from Taize who live in Utrecht, a half hour train ride away. They took us to this cool site of an old Roman border, which also had a whole bunch of bunkers from WWI that we could explore. Did you know that the Dutch had this insane 85km long stretch of land that they could flood at any time in order to keep out their enemies? I didn't. How clever!

After that the girls took us to a Vineyard church service in Utrecht, where there happened to be an English guy speaking today, so that was nice, and also, you know, interesting. Then we went and had dinner at one of the girls' apartments, and discussed the social problems in our two great countries. It was really fun! Two out of three of them have family in Canada, and are planning a trip next summer, so we are working on talking them into coming out to Vancouver as well. Talking about Vancouver, I realized how much I really love my hometown, and as much as I'm sad that the end of this trip is in sight, I won't mind returning home. On the drive to the train station Michelle and I sang lines from Five Iron Frenzy's "Oh Canada", a song that truly lists all the good things about our home.

And that's really all I have to say about that.