Tuesday, May 23, 2000

Got up at 6:45 (well, Kim got up at 6:45, and graciously let me sleep in until 7:00) in order to catch our train. We quickly dressed, packed, ate, checked out, and zipped through the Metro with no problems except someone tripping and catching Kim's hand between a post and his head, hard. In fact, the lack of problems was almost in itself a problem, as we arrived at the station an hour early, in time to see the previous Thalys on the same route leave. If we had been five minutes earlier, we might have been able to change our reservation and take the earlier train. So we sat down to wait...

The only excitement on the train was when they made an unscheduled stop "for the convenience of the border police" -- the police appeared to escort two youngsters away. Our seats were still facing backwards (Kim dislikes this; I don't care much) but this time we had a real window seat, not a wall/curtain seat.

We returned to Utrecht just in time for more grey clouds and rain. We bought chocolate and fruit for a desert fondue for a dinner with the other students in the program, then took the bus back to De Uithof. The bus refused to stop at the normal stops on campus for reasons we do not understand, but we made it back.

When we got back to De Uithof, we found that the dinner was scheduled for Thursday night, making it impossible for us to attend, so we invited Kim's fellow students over for chocolate fondue desert, and we instead grabbed a pizza from the campus pizzaria for supper.

As I melted the chocolate in an improvised double boiler, I discovered that my choice to purchase 5 chocolate bars was a bit of a mistake; we didn't need an entire kilo of chocolate for six people. I quit melting at three bars, which ended up being about right; just a bit of chocolate left in the pot when we were done. The fruit was neatly polished off. We stayed up until 11 pm talking. Kim was reassured about the math homework that she found difficult during our trip to Paris -- everyone had trouble with plenty of the problems. So they worked on some of the harder problems together, and made some progress.