Finally, a trip abroad... or more abroad... or...

The most comforting aspect of moving to the Netherlands -- as opposed to, say, East Timor -- was the knowledge that we wouldn't be in the middle of a civil war or anything. A very close second was the fact that we'd be relatively near our dear friends, the Richters/Moennichs, who may as well be family. Sisters Nina and Julia were both exchange students with our family when they were in high school, and there's nothing like the high drama of sharing teenage daughters for a year to bring families together.

Nina and Matthias have two boys quite close in age to Dylan, so we've been looking forward to getting them together for years. We finally managed the introductions when my mom, dad, and sister came into town briefly, eschewing a tour of Utrecht for a few hours in a rental van (which trumpeted the name of said rental company on the side in a fashion that probably made it appear as if we were renegade employees on the lam from the airport offices) and a lovely dinner in the town of Bocholt, where Julia and Christoph live. Nothing to test your knowledge of the Dutch rules of the road quite like a large, loud, stickshift van containing three generations of your family hurtling down the A2. We got there with only one small detour; enough said.

Aislin and Dylan don't speak German (yet), and Max and Felix haven't learned a whole lot of English (yet),

but the boys quickly found a universal language: THOMAS. Ah, how comforting to see the cross-cultural continuity of backpacks full of small but surprisingly heavy toys being dumped wholesale onto scratchable floors, and the concomitant continuity of mothers pleading with small boys to pick up their trains. In minutes, the boys had retreated to a back room of the apartment from which we subsequently heard only the occasional hoots and chugs of little boys in their paradise of vehicles.

I was encouraged that I could communicate with four-year-old Max, only perplexing him a few times with my rusty German. See, after four years of university-level German, I'm almost as fluent as a smart four-year-old. I'm sure Max will be teaching me what I need to know in no time.

We had a lovely walk through little downtown Bocholt, which was all dolled up for the Christmas season. Aislin enjoyed the Rathaus-turned-advent-calendar whose windows each contained a number in lights for each day in December. A short jaunt down a river path took us to the textile mill/restaurant where we promptly doubled the net decibel level. The boys? They played with trains.