Utah in July

—guest post by Owen

I'm spending the month of July at a giant once-every-ten-years conference in Salt Lake City, my first time back in the United States since moving to the Netherlands almost two years ago.  There have been experiences in every quadrant of the pleasantness/familiarity square:

• pleasantly familiar: choice in grocery stores!
• unpleasantly familiar: terrible-looking asphalt roads.
• unpleasantly unexpected: lack of shade on the University of Utah's wide-open campus. 

Not pictured: the sun beating down relentlessly on every living thing.

But nothing has been so unexpectedly pleasant as the scenery.  Having heard about the Great Salt Lake, I imagined the environment of Salt Lake City to be the geographical equivalent of hard-water stains in the sink.  But it is actually quite beautiful, as I hope this photograph-laden post will convince you.

At a high elevation, there's not much atmosphere protecting you from the sun's rays, so it's easy to burn in the overhead sunlight.  A thin atmosphere also means, however, that it gets quite cool in the morning and evening, so a lot of people at the conference took the opportunity to hike up into the mountains on whose foothills the university rests.  Here's what we saw on one such trip:

From up here you can make out the Great Salt Lake in the distance.

This is the view looking the other way along the mountain ridge.

This past Saturday, several of us rode the earliest possible public transit to get to the Mt. Olympus trail.  The trail is only 3½ miles long, but none of us realized exactly how steep it would be: in fact, Mt. Olympus is the mountain to the left of center in the picture above!  After a few hours, we decided we hadn't brought enough supplies to make it all the way up, so we turned back after taking a group picture at the height we did attain:

The walk back to the bus stop was long and hot in the midday sun, but stopping to rest gave me the chance to photograph this guy, who is about as long as my index finger:

I want to close by showing pictures from two of the local attractions: Red Butte Garden ("Butte" is pronounced like "beauty" without the "-y") and its next-door neighbor, the Natural History Museum of Utah.

Red Butte contains so many different types of gardens, the two times I went I didn't see anything twice.  There's an herb garden, a rose garden, a medicinal garden, a five-senses garden especially for kids... all with signage that succeeds at being simultaneously informative and discreet.  There are places to wander on trails and places to sit under boughs of wisteria.

Some of the plants blew me away with their beauty, like these Blue Glow Globe Thistles:

And these miniature delights of whose name someone will have to remind me:

Then there's the natural history museum: it's located in a really well thought-out space, with interactive exhibits dedicated to the history of the earth (and especially Utah), the flora and fauna that are native to the region, and the indigenous peoples whose culture is still alive today.

But the star exhibit is the collection of dinosaur fossils!  I have never seen so many complete skeletons arranged in such stirring poses.  Some even swayed with the subtle currents in the air.

The fossils suspended in plates of rock are also beautifully arranged:

Several exhibits tried to give you the flavor of what it would be like to participate in an archaeological dig.  Here's a photo of a room where you could try to match cards to the grid squares beneath you, as if mapping an excavation.

I leave to fly back to the Netherlands on Saturday.  I'm so glad to be getting back to the home that I love, but I didn't think there would be so much here to miss too.  Thanks for reading!

Rotterdam Redeemed

—guest post by Owen

Until a couple of weeks ago, I had only negative associations with the name "Rotterdam."

• Rotterdam is the setting for the unhappy beginning of the Ender's Shadow series by Orson Scott Card. This series also led me to mistakenly believe Rotterdam was in Belgium.
• Our trans-atlantic shipment of household goods was held hostage in a Rotterdam warehouse for two months.
• Our trip to Prague fell through because our flight out of the Rotterdam airport was canceled.
• We were once nearly stranded in Rotterdam overnight because Dutch public transit stops at 8pm on New Year's Eve. (Kudos to my amazing family for being so chill through that unexpected part of the adventure.)
• And on top of it all, "Rotterdam" starts with "rot." (It doesn't actually mean "rot." In fact, the name "Rotterdam" comes from a word meaning "mud.")

But none of this is Rotterdam's fault. So I'm pleased to report that our latest intra-Netherlands excursion (incursion?) has lifted the mental stigma I've attached to Rotterdam in the past.

It started when a friend of Clara's noticed that one of the entries on a list of beautiful libraries was in the Netherlands. "Have you been?" she wanted to know. No, we hadn't, but a little digging turned up that it wasn't too far away, so we filed the idea away for later. A couple weeks ago, we had a Saturday free, and decided to go.

Photo from bustler.net

This amazing library—the Boekenberg, or "book mountain"—is in a suburb of Rotterdam called Spijkenisse. Here are some pictures from our trip:

Our first trip on the Dutch metro system we didn't know existed. It goes all the way from the Hague to Rotterdam!

The outside of the Boekenberg.

The top floor is a study area where we read Our Town together.

The inside of the mountain has rooms for reading, like this children's section.

Elsewhere in Spijkenisse, we saw our first example of yarn-bombing in the wild.

We also caught this beautiful rainbow.  Our cries of "Kijk naar de regenboog!" did not seem to excite passers-by, though.

We explored a bit of downtown Rotterdam as well.  The cranes are so beautiful.

The architecture is beautiful too.

That's it for today! Thanks for reading. Have you ever been pleasantly surprised by a place you'd put off visiting?

Switzerland Part 3: Gruyères and Le Moléson

On Saturday we went to Gruyères, the small town known for its exceptionally delicious cheese. Our friends came with us and since they had already explored the old town, they enjoyed a mineral bath while we went to the castle. This post is mostly going to be pictures, but just so you don't get lost I'm dividing it up into two sections. PART ONE: old town and castle.

The old town is exceptionally cute.

 

With exceptional views.

 And this delightful castle!

We spent a really long time in the castle. First because we didn't realize how much it held, and then because everything was so much fun to see we couldn't stop looking. 

Including every view out of every window

And dramatic pieces of history!

This center courtyard is just beautiful

The interior was also really spectacular, parts of it still decorated from various centuries. For a while the castle was sold to a bunch of 19th century artists of the Romantic era, so one of the rooms is covered with flowery pastoral murals. This room (the knight's room) has instead violent historic murals.

With a big table for feasting. Or discussing the next battle.

How the ladies of Gruyères drove away the attacking armies with flaming goats

PART TWO: Going up Le Moléson. If we were tough people or in better shape or owned hiking boots on this continent, we would have climbed up the mountain, but we didn't. We took the funicular train, (which is basically like the first part of a rollercoaster, a little train that goes straight up the side of the mountain), and then a cable car (for when the angle is just too steep).

Getting into the funicular!

And I'm gonna try to go easy on the pictures from the cable car, but it's tough, as Owen was the one snapping pictures, and I was falling over myself looking out the continuous windows of the glass box we were inside. 

Why am I this happy? 

Because this is what I get to see.

When we got to the top of the cable car there was still a bit to climb and I was eager to make it to the very top, so I raced ahead of everyone else. 

taking time to look back across the magnificent views

I was already eating pretzels by the time everyone joined me. I think I've eaten pretzels at lower altitudes on airplanes. Our sweet friends were disappointed about the clouds on our behalf, saying "the peaks beyond those clouds are much higher than we are here, shame you can't see the whole view." Owen responded with, "so you're saying the clouds are conspiring to make us feel like we are on the top of the world? That's okay with me." We had been afraid the heavy morning clouds would prevent us from making a trip up at all, so we were absolutely delighted it became so clear. 

A hiker took this picture for us.

After soaking it all in for a while, we headed back down. Cablecar to the midway point, and then on foot the rest of the way down.

Dutch cows have less developed leg muscles than the Swiss. 

Owen's written the other three blog posts, so I just want to say what a pleasure it was to spend time with our friends in Switzerland. It doesn't seem at all fair, and we don't feel like we deserve it but we are heavy with gratitude for all the opportunities we're having. Thanks for coming along for the pictures. If you'd like postcards from our next adventure, let us know!