Utrecht

I really like Utrecht. Everyone here rides bicycles and it's pretty flat so it resembles what Davis might be as a larger city except with less parks and less frisbee. There is some frisbee golf. The population of Utrecht is 340,000 so there are even more bikes and bike lanes and bike streets than Davis. Also, if you hear a bicycle bell, and if you look around super quickly, you might have time to see the bicycle that is about to run you over before you die. Little scary. Almost all of the bicycles are kick-back breaks which was a little hard for me to get used to when I rented a bike. We walked around the city a lot and ate breakfast at the Best Western which was delicious. Then we walked around some more and met up with Jesse. :)
The tower behind us is RonDom - the tallest tower in Utrecht. We tried to get on a tour to go up it, but the timing didn't work out.

Now let me tell you about this morning a little bit. I was not jetlagged one bit, but I was rudely awakened at 6:30am by someone in my party who did have jetlag and wanted to walk around. So we walked around and discovered that nothing opens until 8AM. So this was a cute sign on a store door this morning at 7:30.
Most of the signs are in English and everyone here speaks English. It's pretty easy. However, it is really nice having Jesse here as a Dutch language guide so we don't feel as stupid ordering Broodjes (pronounced bro - chus). And it's always nice seeing Jesse! My final picture of this blog is me somewhere in the downtown area posing with a statue.
It's kind of difficult to blog and upload pictures so I might not update till the end of this trip. Uploading photos is especially difficult. So far, our future plans are to go to Rotterdam tomorrow and Amsterdam with Jesse on Friday. Then on Saturday, Bill, Dennis, Chris and I go to Cologne, Germany, then we'll go to Strasbourg, France, then to the Black Forrest and eventually probably Bern, Switzerland, Paris, Dresden... OK, so the plans get fuzzy after the Black Forrest, but eventually, maybe in 6 months, I'll upload some pics.