Cheaper Than Texting: hie thee to haarlem!

We already went to the franz hals museum, but when we were there before, we made a mistake. There's an excellent painting there, netherlandish proverbs, and it illustrates a bunch of different dutch proverbs. For example, my favorite is "she's a good woman; she can even tie the devil to a pillow." it means that someone is obstinate, yet very persuasive. for some reason, ryan thinks it might apply to me. Anyway, you can buy cards of this painting, and on the back are all the proverbs. There are 5 kinds of cards at the giftshop: german, dutch, english, french and spanish. but be careful, because if it's your husbands favorite painting, and the one thing he really wanted to take home, you better make ABSOLUTELY SURE you grab the english version, and not the german one.

or else you'll have to go back to haarlem.

and it's a great town, and we have extra days, and ryan likes portugese food, so we went back for a quick trip to the gift shop and dinner.

this is the view from our hotel room. not too shabby!

we saw this on the way to the museum: RAINBOW PLANTER! i'm stealing this idea when i get home to my garden.

that's ryan's favorite street in holland (so far).

we have the museumkaart, which is a great deal, and good for a year, so we got into the museum 10 minutes before they closed, and just went into the giftshop and got the english version. the real one. so if you want to come over and check it out, you can.

then we had some more azul...