I had no idea! I would never be accused of being tall anywhere in the world, but I feel like a ridiculous munchkin here. 6'5" seems to be "not that tall" for both genders. Craziness. Anyway, today I officially began my life as an Amsterdam bike rider. Deb's friend Amanda has been kind enough to lend me a bike for the week that she doesn't really ride, so after walking over to her place, we were off towards the center of town. Well, the outer rings of the center o...

After a 7 am bus to the airport yesterday, I quickly parted ways with Jeanne and 12 of the kids and got our two remaining travelers (who were both headed to Vigo, Spain to visit people they have hosted in the past) checked in and through security. Our flights were a couple of hours after the group, so we found a nice quiet spot to sit out the wait. I saw them onto their jetway and then headed to my gate. A couple of hours later, I was in Amsterdam! Deb and the gi...

We started out onsunday by heading up the funicular (right by our hotel) to Montjuic, one of the hills in Barcelona, and home to the events of the 1992 summer olympics. Now, not one of our students was alive for that (ugh!) but they really enjoyed seeing the stadium. And while in there I happened to overhear some other people talking about Medford, Wisconsin. Turns out there was a group of about 8 of them in town for work. Marathon Cheese is apparently buying a n...

Here are some pictures from our tour and our day of Antoni Gaudí! I decided to add them into the original blog entry to get some of the commentary near them just in case anyone wanted to connect some of it. So unfortunately for at least a couple of days (or maybe longer), this blog will be an unillustrated blog. My stupid memory card reader decided to break in the slot I need for my camera's card. Pins going every which way - not good. And since I didn't bri...

Although we expected a nice sunny day, we got, once again, a cold, grey and windy day. So, our plan to start slow became a plan to start monumentally slowly, organizing the suitcases and what not, and then we still headed up to one of the nearby beaches to just check it out. Turns out the one we went to was kind of a surfer town, completely devoid of surfs in such a ****** day. So we were back to our good old local mall by 4 pm, had a really good late lunch and w...