Whew, it's been busy around here lately. Last week our car arrived safely in the Netherlands, so on the weekend we took advantage of it and did a little bit of adventuring. First, on Saturday we drove to Tongeren, Belgium. Tongeren is the oldest town in Belgium, has a big basilica, and has an antique market each weekend where we were told we could maybe find a nice bed. A friend told us that the market is on Saturday morning from 7 until 1, however, when we arrived we discovered that the market is on Sunday morning instead. Oops. So no furniture was purchased, but we did get to walk around a lovely Belgian town and take a few pictures. First, the one angle of the basilica that doesn't show any construction:


Then, across from the church, was...


Who knew Ben had a cafe in some old Belgian town? Not us.


On Sunday, we woke up to sunny skies so we quickly whispered to each other (lest the sun hear us and change its mind) and decided to head to the American WWII cemetery at Margraten, Netherlands. We both have great uncles buried there and were very interested in going to see it. Margraten is just a short drive from our house, but by the time we got there it had, of course, gotten cloudy and much colder than it had been when we left the house. But it wasn't raining yet, so we considered it still good weather and spent a little while walking around the cemetery.

There are 8,301 American soldiers buried at Margraten and many, many more in cemeteries throughout Europe. I don't think I grasped exactly how many men, real people with family and friends and lives outside of the military, died for our country in WWII until I visited the two graves and saw the thousands of white crosses surrounding them in a rural area of the Netherlands and realized that it was just a small fraction of the white crosses that are spread across Europe. It was really a humbling experience.




In other news, our household goods were delivered on Monday. Yay! We have boxes and boxes all over the house. Today I finished unpacking an organizing the kitchen which is, of course, the most important room of the house. Now we only have 3,384,297 boxes left to unpack. I hope to have it all done by next week. If we don't update the blog, it's because we're lying buried somewhere beneath packing paper and cardboard boxes.

And with that, back to work. But I'll leave you with one of my favorite parts of the Netherlands so far...


The fuzzy ponies. The world may be moving so fast, but the fuzzy ponies don't care. How can you not love them?