The Museum and The invasion of the Frogs...

     When I woke up our hosts Piet and Mieke were using my brother to crush leaves in a giant plastic sac. He was jumping up and down in the bag, for some reason clutching his trumpet the whole time. He's a strange one, the Burble.

     We went out to walk the dog and I found that the Dutch like to radomly wrap their lamp posts in yarn just like in California. Piet said that Mieke's mother is in her 90s and she does it at her nursing home! It's such a strange thing to do- hey let's go wrap poles in yarn!! It was cool tho cause it made me feel like home. 

There are horses and ponies EVERYWHERE. A lot of Fresian horses too which are all black and have hooves the side of dinner plates and thick tufts of fur on their feet. Apparently they come from here and are imported to the US. In America they cost tens of thousands of dollars, but here they're all over. Practically every house has an arena with jumps, except unfortunately Piet and Mieke's. I'm seriously thinking of moving here and marrying a cute Dutch buy who will buy me lots of horses. The Burble is OK with that, apparently he wants to live here and work at the local paper mill. He changes his mind about everything every day. Today he says he's decided not to go to school (he wants to turn down a $20,000 scholarship and I think he's crazy), he just wants to become a deck hand on a ship somewhere. Halfway through our walk he started playing his trumpet, making everyone in the small quiet village stare. However Piet is the chairman of the music committee and he feels that it's good PR to be followed everywhere by a shaggy hippy playing music. He says it might help him recruit people for the music school. 

     Today we visited the Kroller-Muller museum. It's a small museum in the middle of the dutch equivalent of a national park. It was founded by Helen Kroller-Muller. She was a rich socialite who took an art appreciation class one time and then decided to collect a bunch of priceless art and make a museum. (I take an art appreciation class I maybe buy a poster. She goes and buys 11,500 art works and makes a museum. That's the difference between the rich and the poor. I bet the was in the 1%. Or at least the 1907 equivalent.) The museum was fantastic tho, its surrounded by a huge garden of sculptures by famous artists like Rodin. You can only drive to the park, then you take one of hundreds of free bikes and ride the 7 km to the museum. The bikes were all fixies and as I tried to figure out the complexities of braking by peddling backwards I was thinking that my hipster roommate and her boyfriend back at home would be so proud of me.
     The Dutch are not used to hills tho, and they got off and pushed their bikes up a 5% hill on the way.

Helen Kroller-Muller had a thing for Van Gogh apparently and some of his most famous work in the the museum. I love his stuff, there's always an element of darkness and evil there even in his most innocent pictures. You can totally feel like he's a dude who would cut off his ear and send it to someone. I told Piet that I was glad no one has sent me an amputated body part. He agrees but I think if he keeps teasing Mieke the way he does she might cut off his ear...

I like to be able to touch the art... and there were even some we could climb on.  Most of the time you had to stay off the dress tho, because apparently the Dutch take their grass very seriously. And their skating also, Piet says when it's cold for more than a week the Dutch go insane and skate everywhere. They even have a special event they hold in the north where you skate around a bunch of cities, but because of global warming they haven't had it it more that 20 years, it just hasn't been cold enough for the thick ice. That must be why the Dutch bike everywhere, they're trying to offset global warming so they can skate more and have nicer grass.

Mieke told us she had finally found a real man. She doesn't know who he is and Piet says she'll snuggle with anyone.

      In the middle of the garden there's a huge sculpture you can climb on. It's called Jardin d'email by Jean Dubuffet. It was my favorite. It's an all white landscape of shapes you can only get to by going through a tiny tunnel and stairs.

Burble said it reminded him of a skate park. Everything is on different levels and there's huge shapes that come out of nowhere. 

      There was even a pond with tons of frogs, which is weird because we've seen storks here, they build their nests at the tops of trees and eat frogs. But they must have missed this pond because there were about a hundred frogs and they had laid a huge cloud of eggs on one corner. If they all hatch it'll be like the invasion of the frogs. They're going to take over the world. They're sneaky too, they lured me into a blackberry bush trying to catch them. As we ride back I wonder what it would be like if frogs ruled the world.

So tomorrow we head out to Lieden to stay in a squat with some friends of my boyfriend. (Do I still call him that despite the fact that I've ditched him to travel around the world? Do I lose the girlfriend role after a month or 6 months? Or is it like a college application... Dear Miss Mcalpine: You have been accepted to have the great honor of being Greg Lorentzen's girlfriend. If you would like to defer your place as girlfriend until you've run out of money and have to come back to California please send a reply immediately.) 

Apparently Lieden is beautiful and The Burble is looking forward to staying in a squat. Then we'll head to Germany. I find myself wanting to move every couple of day while the Burble wants to find somewhere he likes and stay there for a little while. We might split up at some point but in case that happens Piet and Mieke have given us cell phones. They're from the 90s and after my snazzy smart phone I'm a little at a loss how to use them. But it's one more awesome thing our hosts have done for us and I'm incredibly grateful. We're going to head off on the rest of our travels clean and well-fed which is fantastic.