Our last day here

Our last bag has made it's appearance so for this moment we have everything we left with- I hope I can say the same thing this time tomorrow.

Today we started at the Van Gogh museum. One nice thing about seeing art museums with young children is how fast you can see everything and still feel like you got your money's worth. We were disappointed thought that "Starry Night" is not on display here, but in New York. A. did a report on Van Gogh for school so it was "boring cause I already know all this stuff"

Then we took the kids to this underground playground. It is an old converted walkway (the kind which allow pedestrians to cross under busy intersections) There were 5 or 6 of the those maze climbers (you know the like the habitrails for kids that they have at Chuck E Cheeses) They were rated by age, though to keep the biggest kids separate from the smaller ones. There were lots of chairs for the adults and they even provided books and magazines for us to read. Now maybe this is a cultural thing and the children here are better behaved than at home but based on what I saw it is a universal truth that if you put a group of children together in a large space designed for movement and you don't have any adult supervision the end result is Lord of the Flies just without the pig. Poor D. was walking past a child when he pushed her for no apparent reason. She just shook it off (but if you know her then you know the risk that kid took). He was only 2 or 3 himself, but his grownup was no where to be found. After about an hour or so, we had had enough and came back to the hotel for a brief nap (unfortunately, no one actually napped)

We ended our trip here with a canal tour that had a pizza and ice cream dinner. We actually docked so that Domino's could deliver the pizza to the boat. The meal didn't arrive though until about 8pm so the kids were a little crabby until then, but after stuffing themselves everyone was much better behaved.

We are now back, trying to re-pack everything but I thought I'd post one last time before our internet times out. Wish us luck and safe and healthy travels out next post should be from Ethiopia (although I may not be able to post until Friday night Ethiopia time)