Caroline and I left Brussels on a train for The Hague in the afternoon.  Since The Hague is pretty close by, we got there pretty quickly.  We were going to visit Charlotte.  Charlotte is a fellow AMSer with Caroline, back when Caroline was an AMSer.  Charlotte is an expatriate of the first order.  She is fluent in all the major languages of Europe, and still retains a fine sense of humor in English, which I tested regularly.

Charlotte is a delightful host, and as much as I teased her about "having to mark things down on the management feedback card...", the accommodations were first rate.  Tim and Charlotte were wonderful about showing us their part of the world.

Charlotte took us touring around The Hague, which is so comfortable and cozy you can't believe it.  Coupled with the fact that everyone speaks English, it's kind of like visiting a set, but the people and a lot of the culture hasn't changed.  The expatriate community is very large here with the world court, NATO, and various other professional offices.  You are as likely to see and hear English as not, which is somehow comforting and disturbing at the same time.

We visited one of the plazas with a church in the Dutch tradition.  It's a lot simpler looking than all those French and Italian churches.  And of course the weather blew itself silly and rained pretty solidly all day.  I decided that if you don't do things in the rain, you won't do anything in this part of the world, so we shouldered on.

The fountain in the plaza was a terrific combination of illuminated patches over a jet black sculptured base for some saint of local importance.  We had to wait for a break in the wind so Caroline and I could get close enough to the fountain to not get thoroughly splattered by the horizontally blown water of the fountain itself.

We went to Delft to look at a pottery museum that specialized in the type of pottery this town is famous for.  It's the white pottery with the all blue or multiple colored designs in a simple designs.  

We ended up walking a lot in the wind and rain to get there only to find that it's just a workshop for producing the stuff with a heavy emphasis on the store within the factory.  As much as Caroline felt the pull of the bowls (she is a bowl-aholic, for those that aren't aware) we managed to escape the place without acquiring any new ones.

In the mean time, Tim had closed his shop for the day, rented a car, and met us at the train station on the way back from Delft.  A more dedicated guy couldn't be found in all of Holland.

We went out to a fish restaurant by the sea, and with the wind going as strongly as it had all day, the waves were truly impressive to watch.  We had a nice dinner, a bunch of good conversation even though Tim and Charlotte were feeling the effects of a work week.  Caroline and I tried to sympathize, but we've done such a good job getting away from work it was hard to imagine what that work week feels like...  :-)