6-12 August 2011

Last Friday and Saturday, we were able to host Evan and Beth Stewart. They are a young couple we knew of serving an internship in Brussels. We invited them to come and spend the weekend for a Netherlands experience. this is in front of the Corrie Ten Boom house in Haarlem.

Later we went to the Dutch open air museum, Zaanse Schans

We wanted to see wooden shoes being made, but not today. Just a lot of already made shoes in brightly painted designs.

Zaanse Schans is one of the places that you can see several working windmills (molen in Dutch).

More "molen" and canals.

Then we went to the little town of Edam. It's a town known for cheese, so we're in front of a cheese shop.

Some beautiful flowers we saw as we walked around. Fortunately for us, they are every where.

Tuesday we drove to the Belgian city of Turnhout to open a new apartment. When we went to pickup the elders at the train station, Elder Bickham was contacting a young man on the train platform. He had already given away a Book of Mormon before he got to the apartment for the first time. Turnhout has not had elders living there for almost two years.

Elder and sister Salden are the hardest working couple in our mission. They are constantly working to improve the apartments for our missionaries. they came to Turnhout to help us move the furniture into the apartment. Elders Bickham and Bair are the new elders in Turnhout.

President Sterri is our Branch President. He's Norwegian and Sister Sterri is from Sweden. Their 14-year old twins are Rebecka and Andreas.

This used to be an "apartment" in Den Haag (The Hague) for guests of the queen. Look at the elaborate ceiling. Now it's a Pizza Hut.

Sister Brubaker and I went to The Hague to do some shopping one afternoon. This is the queen's offices in that city.

Here we are, laughing, as we try to take a picture of ourselves eating ice-cream cones on a park bench across from the queen's offices.

President Brubaker and I spent the afternoon together and met Paula An Sister Brubaker in Den Haag. While we were waiting for Paula and Sister Brubaker, he took me down this beautiful little alley with flowers and a loaded apple tree.

He brought me down the alley to show me this work shop. This craftsman works without any power tools, doing everything by hand. Most of those tools above his workbench are different sizes and shapes of chisels and wood working tools. He has two old workbenches built completely from wood. There are no metal parts in them.

We used my birthday as an excuse to go to dinner. Since we won't be here for any other birthdays, we celebrated everyone's birthday. Here's a toast to our birthdays.

Here's the toast from the other side.

Our little village of Rijnsburg has been celebrating all week. The celebration started Monday and will go to Saturday night. These are some of the decorations on the canal that runs through the middle of town.

More decorations.

This afternoon they had people climbing the bell tower of the old church across the way.

Sugar Waffles are one of the foods sold at the festival.

Tonight there was a really good brass band playing in the square in front of our apartment.
During the week they've had bands, a children's parade, chalk drawing, car sliding (kind of like Slip 'n Slide for cars), food booths and tomorrow there is supposed to be a large flower parade.