Bike Peddlers

After all the stressing about schools, I just visited 1 school and decided to sign the kids up there. The "Tjalk"is 1.6 miles away. It's right next to my dad's house. It has a continurooster. The other English speaking new kids attend there too. The principal was a super nice and welcoming lady. She is already planning to do some kind of program to help the kids learn Dutch. The kids can start tomorrow!

This morning I was a big stressball again, but now because so many things have to get done, and there's just not much time to do it in. We also still don't have a phone, so when I find bikes on Craigslist, I can't just call the people to set up a time to take a look at them. Instead, I just had to go to Talita's house, and use her phone.

For Winter's bike we went to the "flat" neighborhood. These areas are inhabited mostly by foreigners from Turkey, Suriname, and Marocco. As the nice man brought out the rust bucket with barely working lights, I almost just walked out again. But, since I came all the way there, I had Winter take a spin on it, and then told him it was just too expensive, old, and that my daughter didn't like the color. I told him I wanted to keep looking for another bike. He speaks broken Dutch, but he understood öther" bike. Then he went back into his house, and pulled out another bike. "here, you like this one better?" Uhmmm... actually... yes, this was a nice bike. But it did make me wonder where exactly he gets these bikes. Hopefully Winter's bike doesn't end up back in his house being sold to another unexecting upstanding citizen.

I also found myself a bike, which takes the pressure way off. Now I don't need the car to go grocery shopping or take the kids to school tomorrow. The guy who sold it to me fixes up bikes, and sells them on the Dutch Craigslist. It has a standard bike lock, which is attached to the frame, and basically just locks the back wheel. As I was leaving, he made sure to tell me to get an additional lock, a cable lock. To lock the bike to something else. If I didn't, he said, "someone could just carry if off". This, again made me wonder just where he gets the bikes he sells.

Of course my full sized bike doesn't fit in the back of our mini-sized car, so Winter and I rode home together. As we were riding our bikes on the dikes, I was getting a bit nostalgic, and feeling almost like a real Nederlander again. It's good to be back!