Slam Bam Am'dam

It's amazing how far and how quickly one can travel going 500 mph at 39,000 ft.  It takes 3 to 4 days for your body to catch up with your body (?)-just what the hell is going on here?  Time:  What a concept!    Perhaps I framed the question incorrectly?  It takes your body time to adjust to the new time?  Well by now it's obvious I don't really know what's up; I'll muddle through.  Flying from Seattle to Iceland takes 6.5 hrs and breaks up the flight to Europe.  I liked it.  I had a couple hour layover in Reykjavik where Karen from WA state chatted me up.  She's visiting a friend in the Netherlands.  She brought a smile to my heart when she told me I neither looked or acted my age.  I'm still smiling.

I've been hiking around Am'dam, north of the city and tomorrow will drive to East Holland near the German border with my friend Mark-Hans.  Mark is a gracious and gregarious host.  He and I and Ernst-Jan, another friend I met 7 years ago, discussed culture and our affinities and dis-affinities towards our native culture and supposed foreign ones. Ernst-Jan asked me, after I made the comment that Am'dam seemed more livable than San Fran, why I thought so.  One thing you can count on from the Dutch is there directness and forthrightness-they often say what they think and ask what they want.  It's refreshing and perhaps that is one reason why I find their largest city more livable?  There are many reasons:  an efficient and modern public transport system, an apparent commitment to clean air, water & energy systems, recycling, bicycling, multi-culturalism and widespread tolerance of human diversity and vice.   Perhaps their attention to the maintenance of civil infrastructure and civility is a direct consequence of their need to constantly combat the water's rising tide and the sand's continual shift?  They literally live on moving ground and water.  Mark and I stopped to look at a street in a village north of Am'dam under re-construction;  sump pumps were humming, steel pilings were being driven and ancient beams uncovered.  The brick path atop the dyke we walked bowed from the center to its edges.  Marks hikes regularly around the polders out to Marken Lighthouse and informed me that he has noticed an obvious change in the path since last year's hikes.