Footsore

Ambitions for today were limited: Van Gogh museum and a bit of cycling. In fact so much was achieved, that I feel a list coming on:

1. Van Gogh museum. CarbBoy was entranced by the pictures on the ground floor, and looked long and hard at each of them. My fears that we would not be a compatible group for gallery visits were dissipating. Then I told him we were going upstairs to see more, and he lost heart. I think he thought there would only be one floor of pictures... Regardless, he found himself a quiet bench and sat down to get on with some drawing and colouring of his own while TallGirl and I continued our explorations.

Naturally he rejoined us for the shop, though mainly to sit in one of the ginormous armchairs.

2. Trip to the park for lunch. The sun was shining, the herons were strutting about, and the old men drinking on the next bench down kept their chat (in English) decent, so all was well.

3. Trip to bike hire shop for bikes... Not so good. They had no bikes the right size for CarbBoy. He was a bit downhearted, but coped.

4. Alard Pierson museum. This is part of the university and houses their artefacts of the ancient world. Very interesting. TallGirl was mainly there to see the Egyptian stuff. We were persuaded to stay for a multi-media show thingy, which was a lot more interesting than it might have been, though the lady giving it did somehow think we were French, which I'm going to blame on the kids bickering in French. I was very close to snoozing though - it was so warm and comfy in there... This is also where we found this fella seeing to a splinter in his foot.

5. Amsterdam museum: we were here mainly to see the Mondriaan exhibition - as TallGirl had studied him at school. This was his early stuff and it was fascinating to see the progression from traditional still life paintings, through Van Gogh inspired broad brush work towards the later works he did. (They had none of the later works there, so CarbBoy was a bit confused about what we were on about.) There was time at the end of our visit to go through the 'Orphanage museum' which is very successfully aimed at kids. A great interactive trip through an orphanage and I think the kids really learned a lot - and enjoyed themselves crawling through secret passages.

Finally, a very exhausted trio made it back to the hotel.