Late August in Amsterdam

Raising a finger in Gaziantep bus station, originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

It is cloudy and wet again today... and this seems to be the weather pattern we can get used to here in Holland for the next eight or nine months. At present, the North Sea is too warm (normally it is too cold), this because the sea was heated up during the heatwave we had in June and July. For some reason, with unstable air above, this creates a lot of rain. July was the hottest month here in 200 yeras adn August is turning out to be one of the wettest as well. Oh well, at least we had our fill of sun in Turkey.

Today we are going to see Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest at the cinema and then going to meet up with Annemiek to hear about her trip to Australia and China.

Fred is getting ready for schoool and yesterday received his roster which, again leaves him with a free day on Fridays, which he much prefers. If I understand well, Mondays and Thursdays are his difficult days and Tuesdays and Wednesdays his easier days. It takes me back to the days of school, when one also had favourite and unfavourite days. I liked days with Maths, English, History and Geography. I was not so keen on days of double Science, double Woodwork or French!

I am not sure what I would make of History as a 13 uear old having to learn about '-ism's', such as liberalism, communism and fascism. I did that at university when I was 19, but at 13 we were stuck in the Middle Ages or Tudors and Stuarts. In fact we never seemed to have gone much further than them. Interestingly, reading history-related books now it is strange to note how different the emphasis is between teh facts which we learnt and teh coinsequences of such facts which one rads about now. Having done the English Civil War, the Protectorate and the Glorious Revolution, we knew all the dates and many of the battles, but never really looked at the development of parliamentary democracy, the philosophic contexts of what was going on (Hobbes and Locke's liberalism) and so on.