Jan and Angela go with our friends Marc and Megan to a concert by wunderkind musician Jacob Collier at the Showbox SoDo. He’s a remarkable musician, and while the music itself isn’t our cup of tea, it’s fun to get out and see something new.
Liya has covid. Her symptoms aren’t too bad, mostly a sore throat. She has to move to special isolation housing provided for students with covid, which is excruciatingly boring. Someone drops off a bag of food for each room every day, containing what turns out to be a large amount of uninteresting food. The isolation dorm sits inside Yale’s Old Campus. The students in isolation are only allowed outside into a special fence-enclosed area — a sort of Ivy League prison yard.
[Liya will ultimately end up staying in isolation housing for over a week. She says that, although she has a lot of time on her hands, it's curiously difficult to actually get any studying done there.]
Our friends Sarah and Craig are passing through Seattle en route to Eastern Washington to see their daughter Ruth. Jan’s on his way out of town — today he’s going to Utrecht in the Netherlands to visit his friend Bruce for a week — but he’s happy to have a chance to catch up with them for a bit before heading to the airport.
Jan’s Utrecht trip, Day 1. My friend Bruce is working in Utrecht, Netherlands, for a few months. He invites me to visit, and with Angela’s blessing I’ve arranged a short trip.
The direct flight to Amsterdam is fine. This is my first international trip since the pandemic began, and it’s a treat to be surrounded by different languages, architecture, restaurant chains, and so on. When I reach the airport’s train station, I see that there’s a train to Utrecht Centraal leaving in 2 minutes, giving me just enough time to buy a transit card and get to the platform. As soon as I hop on the train, it begins to move. I’m tired from the trip, but enjoy watching the canals go by.
I meet up with Bruce at Utrecht Centraal station. Bruce has just come down with a cold (not covid, thankfully), but is up for lunch. We stop for a Japanese lunch at Wagamama. From there we walk to his apartment on Neude Square, the town’s main square.
Like everywhere in Holland, Utrecht is full of people riding bikes. Bruce takes me to the same bike rental shop he’s renting a bike from, and I rent an identical electric bike. We park the bike at the huge, free, underground bike parking lot under the Neude Square public library. The stairs going down has a special track (“runnel”) for rolling your bike down, as well as a powered bike escalator track going up.
Since I’m too tired for much else, we do a canal boat tour around Utrecht. I’d never heard much about the city before this trip, but it’s quite charming, especially so from the canals. I’m too drowsy to get much from the tour, but one thing that does sink in is that there are small stone drains poking out over the canal. Water drips out of these, encouraging the growth of water-plants in the drain. In Utrecht these dripping drains are called “snotneuzen”: runny noses.
Bruce has been sampling the many cafes/pubs on Neude Square, so for dinner we go to one he hasn’t been to yet called Bierlokaal de Luifel. It turns out to mostly have burgers and similar pub food. It’s fine.
By now I’m wiped so I go to bed after dinner. There are bars on the narrow street behind the apartment, including one called Back and Forth that stays open all night. I have to keep ear plugs in because groups of people are constantly leaving the bar to have a smoke outside while they boisterously yell at each other.
Jan’s Utrecht trip, Day 2. Since Bruce has a cold, he wants to stay in bed, so I head out on my own. This area of Utrecht has a dizzying number of coffeehouses, so each morning my plan is to head to one for breakfast. Most places don’t open until later in the morning, which narrows down the selection a bit. Today’s coffee and croissant is Vlaamsch Broodhuys just down Voorstraat from the apartment.
After breakfast I retrieve my rental bike from the bike parking garage and set out on a long two-hour loop into the countryside and back. It’s sunny just as I’m leaving, so I make the mistake of leaving my rain gear at the apartment. After five minutes on the bike, it clouds over, then begins to rain, and then hail. I wait out the hail with a group of other bikers under a bridge, then resume biking in the light rain. For the rest of the morning, the weather flickers between sun and rain. The scenery is bucolic: small canals with geese and other waterfowl, windmills, wide green farms, and a larger canal with long boats carrying cargo.
In the afternoon, Bruce walks with me through the Neude library. It’s quite nice inside, half old building with timbers and half modern building with glass.
It’s windy today, and Bruce likes to fly kites, so we catch a bus to the edge of the city in search of a suitable place to fly kites. The wind is unfortunately too inconsistent and blocked by nearby buildings. We give up and walk to another park in hope of better conditions, but find no luck.
I have dinner at a restaurant called Koenraad just down from Bruce’s apartment, which turns out to be excellent. One notable ingredient on a chicken entree is a green sauce made from “daslook”, a wild garlic.
After dinner, I go for a walk along the canals and narrow streets.
At night people once again make noise from the alley bars all night. During one loud outburst, I check my clock: it’s 4:20 am. Thankfully the earplugs work well.
Jan’s Utrecht trip, Day 3. I walk a little further down Voorstraat this morning for coffee and pastry at Village Coffee & Music. I’ve noticed on previous trips to the Netherlands that, if I’m wearing a collared shirt, slacks, and shoes (and not a t-shirt, jeans, or sneakers), then Dutch people will try to speak to me in Dutch first. This happens again on this trip many times. When I say something in English, the other party will instantly switch to flawless English.
Bruce and I bike to his office next to Centraal station, and he gives me a tour of the office where he’s working. I’m curious whether European office coffee is better than American office coffee, so I conduct a taste test of the two automatic coffee machines in the office kitchen. Verdict: both coffees are bad.
We bike out of the city to De Haar Castle, which at some point in the distant past was a real castle, but in the late 1800s was rebuilt into a rich baron’s fantasy of what a castle should be. The tickets we buy for the castle won’t allow us to enter for an hour, so we get lunch at the cafe. We both get croquettes, which come served on top of slices of bread. We’re uncertain whether we’re supposed to eat these with forks and knives, or like a sandwich. I finally notice someone smashing their croquettes into the bread to make a kind of spread, which they then eat with a fork and knife.
We tour the castle and the adjacent chatelet (servant quarters turned into opulent vacation home). There are a zillion bedrooms.
On the long bike ride back into the city, we bike through a large park called Máximapark looking for more kite-flying locations.
We walk around Utrecht’s old town in the afternoon. It’s chilly, but also sunny, so we sit outside at a cafe called Paviljoen de Dom. We both order Radlers, Bruce’s favorite drink order in Utrecht: a drink that’s half beer, half lemon soda. Given Holland’s imperialist history, it’s home to plenty of great Indonesian restaurants, so we try one called Spekuk for dinner. The waiter takes forever to bring us a menu, but when he notices Bruce’s hat and jacket branded with the “Ghost of Tsushima” video game logo, he lights up. He’s excited to hear Bruce works at the game studio that made it.
Given that interaction, after dinner Bruce suggests that I play through the opening portion of Ghost of Tsushima. I’d never had much interest in playing the game myself, as it requires a substantial amount of graphic, bloody killing with swords. But the game does have an impressive cinematic feel to it, and it’s fun to play the first 20 or 30 minutes to the game’s opening title sequence.
Since it’s a Sunday night, the alley bars are blessedly quiet tonight.
Jan’s Utrecht trip, Day 4. This morning’s coffee is at De Ontdekking cafe. They are quite serious about maintaining a chill vibe: when I pull out my tiny little laptop to read the news, someone comes over to say that “work” can only be done in a separate level of the cafe. The laptop’s little screen swivels around to make it into a tablet, which I hope qualifies as a more chill form of technology permissible in the main level. On the plus side, when I order a croissant, the barista says “We’re still baking them”, so I get an amazing freshly-baked croissant.
I spend much of the morning hanging out in the pretty Noda cafe on an upper floor of the Neude public library. Back in the apartment, I attempt to use Bruce’s puzzling combined washer-dryer machine to do laundry. He still hasn’t figured it out yet either. (He’s using a laundry service himself.) After a couple of attempts to use a setting that should both wash and dry, we work out that it’s just drying the clothes. It’s also hard to work out which detergent goes with the washer-dryer and which goes with the dishwasher.
Bruce is feeling up for eating out, so we have lunch at a restaurant called Bunk that’s situated in a converted church. (The name refers to the fact that the restaurant is attached to a hotel as well as a youth hostel that has bunk beds.)
In the afternoon I bike to the Utrecht botanic gardens on the edge of the city. It’s a nice, sunny afternoon to be outside. The most interesting exhibit is probably the “bee hotel”: a wall of log ends with holes drilled into them to form little homes for bees.
In the late afternoon, Bruce proposes going out for another attempt at kite flying. We decide to take a train to The Hague on the coast. We get to Utrecht Centraal and see that a train is leaving right now. It’s completely packed, and I have to lever myself into one of the crammed doorways. We’re happy we made the train — but it’s a local, so it takes twice as long to get to the coast as the express.
Arriving at The Hague, we transfer to a city tram that runs out to the beach. We walk down the beach until we come to a spot where the offshore wind comes through a big break in the long run of buildings that parallel the beach. Bruce sets up his quad-line kite and successfully gets it into the air. The wind isn’t very consistent, so sometimes the kite flies great and sometimes it gently settles back down on the sand. Bruce gives me some instruction and I try my hand at flying it.
It’s now getting dark, and we notice it’s 9:00 pm — no wonder I’m starving. We take a train back to a restaurant district on Kazernestraat. We come across an Italian place called Impero Romano, and since it’s on the late side, we’re able to get a table. I have a risotto that’s pretty good.
We walk back to the tram, passing a temporary carnival area that’s all lit up, then ride back to the central station. This time we’re careful to find an express train back to Utrecht.
At the apartment, I find that the washer-dryer machine has finally washed my clothes, so I run the dryer cycle overnight.
Jan’s Utrecht trip, Day 5. I’ve got a lot of things I’d like to do today, so I’m up early. I see that the dryer didn’t really get my clothes dry overnight, so I run it again before getting ready for the day. When I’m set to leave, the dryer’s still running, so I have to cancel the cycle to get something damp to wear. The drier stops, but the machine door remains locked. The machine displays a message to the effect of, “Your clothes are too hot. You can’t have them yet.” The dryer is very concerned for my safety. I cobble together an outfit from what remains of my clean clothes. On my way out the door, I hear the dryer play a happy jingle to let me know it’s safe to touch my clothes now.
This morning’s coffee and croissant is at Café Ddadi. Owing to the early hour, the cafe appears to be closed, but then I see the owner puttering around inside. He’s very friendly, and seems happy to have a customer to attend to.
I walk down the block to a rapid covid testing facility for an early appointment; the airport tomorrow will want to see official proof of a negative test. With that out of the way, I visit Museum Speelklok, a museum dedicated to player pianos and other clockwork instruments that can play music. A docent gives a tour, demonstrating some of the machines. The craziest is probably a machine that plays the violin — or, rather, several violins, each used only for one of its strings. That arrangement was apparently easier to create than a mechanism that could change the angle of a bow.
It’s almost lunchtime, so I pop into Soep-er, a tiny soup cafe. They’re still making the soup, so I wait until noon when they begin to offer lunch. I get the spicy Singaporean laksa, which is amazing.
In the afternoon I get my rental bike and pedal to the Centraal Museum. Most of the museum is closed for renovations, but there’s a cute exhibit that faithfully reproduces the studio of famed Utrecht illustrator Dick Bruna, creator of the Miffy bunny books.
I try to visit a museum dedicated to Dutch architect Rietveld Schröder, but when I arrive I discover that there are no more tickets available for the day. Since it’s a pretty warm afternoon, I decide to make another long bike out of the city, aiming for a random spot on the edge of a lake area called Loosdrechtse Plassen. When I get to the random spot I picked, I discover there’s a cafe there called De Strook, so I stop for a cold drink and to rest for a bit before heading back. The bike highway back runs alongside a pretty canal. When I approach the center of the city, the highway eventually becomes rather busy with other cyclists.
For my last dinner, Bruce and I eat at a Thai restaurant called River Kwai that’s down at the level of the Oudegracht (“old canal”) that runs through the center of Utrecht.
Jan’s Utrecht trip, Day 6. I get up early for the trip to the airport. The covid testing facility has posted the result of my test, but I have difficulty getting to the point where I can view the actual result. I’m beginning to panic that, with a result, I won’t be able to catch my flight, when I’m finally able to see the negative result.
Bruce walks me to the central station in time to catch a slightly earlier train than I’d expected. This will turn out to be a crucial thing. I get to the airport with a bit over two hours to go before my flight.
The Delta Airlines site has some issue that prevented me from checking in, so I need to print a boarding pass. Sadly, all of the Delta self-serve check-in kiosks are cordoned off for some reason. I ask a Delta staffer what to do, and they direct me to join a very long line of people who have bags to check. That line eventually reaches a point where another staffer directs me into a second line. That line has very few Delta people serving it, and after a while, even some of those people leave. Out of six check-in windows, only three are open. One of those staffers spends the entire time dealing with a single couple that look frazzled and despondent, so there are only two people handling a huge line. Most of the people in front of me are students returning to the U.S. from a semester abroad, and each of them has several huge bags that need to be handled specially. It takes about an hour and fifteen minutes to make it through the line and get my boarding pass.
By now they’re already boarding my flight. so I walk quickly to the security area. My bag is pulled aside for special screening. My bag gets screened four different times on three different machines. I hurry to the next checkpoint for passports. The line’s moving quickly but there are many people. I finally make it into the airport terminal proper and begin sprinting for my gate. As I run, I can hear someone paging me and stumbling over my last name, “Last Call for Delta passenger Jan Mik… sov… sky.” (Since we’re in Holland, at least they say my first name right.) I run up to the gate just as they’re about to close up.
Bree and Jan attend the Sakura-Con anime and cosplay convention in Seattle. Bree cosplays as Denki Kaminari, an electric superhero from the manga and anime My Hero Academia. Since minors aren’t allowed to attend on their own, Jan comes with her as a chaperone. Bree’s slightly anxious as she puts on the final bits of her costume on in the car (photo), but in the parking garage elevator down to street level, another person heading to the convention says, “I love your Denki cos.” So that’s all right.
There’s plenty to see and do at the first full day of the convention, including panel discussions, artist booths, and a large manga library.
Bree and Jan return to Sakura-con for a second day, now with Bree’s friend Marina and Marina’s mom Lika. Marina and Bree coordinated their cosplays so they’re both dressed as characters from the same manga/anime series. Marina’s dressed as Katsuki Bakugo, a character known for his explosions and his distinctive grenade gauntlets. (Marina’s done a great job handcrafting the gauntlets, although they make it difficult for her to do basic tasks with her hands.)
Bree and Marina have a great day at the convention, and spend most of it just walking around and identifying the various cosplays around them. Jan and Lika tag along behind. Yesterday the convention was fairly busy, but today it’s packed. Bree and Marina stop people often to ask if they can take pictures of their costumes. They, in turn, are stopped many, many times by people wanting to photograph their costumes.
One highlight for Bree is getting an autograph from Robbie Daymond, a voice actor and a player on one her favorite show, Critical Role. Jan dutifully holds Bree’s place in the autograph line so that Bree and Marina can participate in group photos of all the people cosplaying as characters from My Hero Academia. Later we come across Robbie as he’s walking around and he gives Bree a fist bump.
Jan’s stepmother Marlee passes away. This is very sad news but also entirely expected. She’d been diagnosed with dementia eight years ago, and had been physically declining over the past two years.
He wishes the pandemic hadn’t made it impossible/difficult to visit her over the past two years, but is glad for the times before then when he was able to see her. She’d lost her grasp of who he was a long while back, but she was nevertheless always happy to see him.
Sabriya fills in on her school’s Ultimate Frisbee team so they have enough girls to compete in the region’s Spring Reign tournament in Burlington, WA. She had played Ultimate in previous years, so the coaches asked her to join the coed team for the event.
On the first day of the tournament, her team wins all 3 of its events.
Bree’s Ultimate team wins the Spring Reign tournament! Today her team repeats yesterday’s feat of winning all three of their games, clinching the tournament. She cites her teammates Verun and Hazel as standout players. (Bree’s kneeling in the first row on the far right, giving a thumbs-up.)
We give up our spot at Stanford Sierra Camp. We’ve gone to the camp eight summer out of the past ten. But we couldn’t go the last two years because of the pandemic, and now that the girls are older, it’s harder to make it happen. Both Anya and Liya have aged out of the kid groups, and Bree’s new high school starts in mid-August, right in the middle of when we’d been planning to go to camp.
After waffling on the decision for a while, we finally call them up and tell them that we won’t be coming. There’s a small possibility we could someday go back, but that would require getting back on a multi-year waiting list for a spot. So, in all likelihood, we’re done with our time at the camp. *sniff* It was a lot of fun while it lasted!
One last day of skiing! While it feels like Spring down here in Seattle, in the mountains the snow’s still falling. Jan and Angela head to Crystal Mountain for one last day of skiing — or, in Jan’s case, snowboarding. It’s drizzling a bit when we arrive at the parking lot, but once we get higher up it turns to snow. The snow’s pretty heavy, and varies between fluffy white powder and sticky concrete.