How I Spent My Summer Vacation--2007

    This summer I did not do anything particularly interesting.  All the activiity took place in the fall, when I went to Italy to teach in Loyola's LLM program in American Law.  We spent the summer preparing and then headed for Europe in August.  First we spent a couple of days in London.  One of the things I like to do there is take the boat from Westminster to Greenwich.  Here's the Tower of London, which we saw along the way.  Incidentally, the quality of all photos has been reduced to allow faster loading:




We had a nice dinner at the Trafalgar Pub in Greenwich:



I had never seen the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, so we decided to check it out.  There is a lot of pomp and circumstance, but the tourists seem to love it:


 

The Netherlands

After a couple of nice days in London, we proceeded to the Netherlands, where we spent some time with Thea's family in the province of Noord Brabant.  Here is a shot of Thea and her nephews (and niece) in the area near Oisterwijk (I refused to get on one of these stupid tourist bicycles!):



There are a lot of nice ponds or lakes in this area (called vennen in Dutch):



We also made a short trip to Limburg, where Thea was born, to visit her uncle.  With him we visited Maastricht:





HEUSDEN

Thea's brother Joop and sister-in-law Lenie took us on a brief trip to Heusden.  I had never been there before, but it is a very charming place, as the photos below will attest:








FRIESLAND

Of course, we also had to go to Friesland, which is where I was born.  My friends Tseard and Nynke were vacationing on the Frisian island of Ameland, where they had rented a house, and they invited us to visit.  This is a fishing boat that we passed while on the ferry:



Here you have an overview of the island, with its famous lighthouse:



The western half of the island is very busy--this is where all the tourists go--but the eastern part is beautiful and the nature preserve there is very quiet:



The Frisian islands are in the Waddenzee, a very shallow sea.  Boats often get stuck in the mud, especially at low tide.  These boats are not necessarily stuck in the mud, because they were anchored here intentionally, but they clearly aren't going anywhere soon!



Amsterdam and North Holland

On the way back from Friesland, we spend a few days in Amsterdam and North Holland visiting some friends.  One of my favorite places in Amsterdan these days is the Waag on the Nieuwmarkt.  It is a lovely place to watch the world go by, and not as crazy as the scene at the Leidseplein or the Rembrandtplein:



On our way to visit some other friends who live north of Amsterdam, we spent some time in Edam, a town I had never visited.  There are several beautiful towns in this part of the Netherlands, and Edam is one of them.  This is a shot of a "hangbrug," a type of bridge that opens up to allow boats to pass underneath it.  The Dutch have done a terrific job preserving old boats and ships like the one that is passing under the bridge here.  Traditionally, the person who opens the bridge swings a wooden shoe on a fishing pole over to the boat, and the boat captain is expected to place the toll in the wooden shoe:



Our final stop was Alkmaar, famous for its cheese market.  Personally, I find cheese pretty disgusting, but I have to admit it's very picturesque:





We returned to Thea's family in the south and eventually made our way to Brussels, where we flew to Bologna for the next stage of our trip.  After a few days in Bologna to drop off luggage and get our bearings, we flew to Croatia for about 10 days.

Croatia

Our first destination in Croatia was the lovely Dalmatian city of Dubrovnik.  I had been here many years ago, when I was an undergraduate and made a trip to this part of the world.  The family of my high school girlfriend was from the former Yugoslavia, and her grandmother came from lower Dalmatia and never stopped talking about how beautiful Dubrovnik was.  So I decided that I should have a look, and it was indeed as beautiful as she said.  Today, most of Europe seems to know this as well, judging by the crowds.  But it still is as beautiful as ever (or, to be exact, it is again as beautiful as it once was, after the inhabitants repaired the damage caused by Serbian shelling in the 1990s).



The young folks apparently impress each other by jumping off the city walls into the Adriatic:



It was quite hot in August, so being in the water as much as possible is an excellent idea, although I personally prefer to appoach the water in a less dramatic fashion.  Most of the tourists also tend to stay near the water (either the Adriatic or their hotel pool) during the day.  But at night the city comes alive.  It's also lit up very nicely.



Not just tourists, but hordes of locals come into Dubrovnik to walk up and down the promenade.  Just about all Croatian cities and towns seem to have a promenade where the locals congregate at night. It can be a lot of fun to watch.



After a couple of pleasant days, we left Dubrovnik and proceeded to the island of Korcula, where we spent the night and then took a ferry to Hvar, our main destination.

Hvar

Just off the coast of Croatia, near Split, is a long and relatively slender island named Hvar.  We had heard it was a very nice place and when we asked a Croatian-American friend about it, he very generously offered to let us use his family's apartment there.  At the western end of this island is the city of Hvar.  This is a view from the castle:



Below are a couple of other photos of the town:





There is also a nice Franciscan monestary in Hvar, where they often hold cultural events during the summer.



Hvar has become a popular spot for wealthy people who have large yachts.  You can have a look at them when they line up at the harbor at night.  The boat in the picture below is not, I believe, a private yacht, but a type of small cruise ship that occastionally uses sails.  Whatever it is, it looks nice from a distance, even if it really is not a sailing ship in the classical sense:



Not far from the apartment where we stayed was a relatively isolated series of beaches, which you can reach by means of the road below (and then via some very rocky paths!).  I was able to rent a kayak on one of these beaches and kayaked out to this small island, which has a lighthouse on it (and also a single goat, as I found out, but you can't see the goat on this picture).



But before we knew it, our time here was past and we had to return to Italy, where I would be teaching for the upcoming semester.  So we took a different type of boat--a catamaran ferry--to Ancona and then went by train to Bologna.

We have, as you might expect, been sneaking off now and then to see some of the sights in Italy.  Stay tuned!