We were in the Netherlands from May 3 to May 10 to celebrate my sister’s wedding. I still have to sort through all the pictures and sketches, but here are some highlights:

Seeing Keukenhof again: My sister and her fiancé timed their wedding so that we could catch the spring flowers at Keukenhof , which has hectares and hectares of tulips and other blooms. My family and I had been there before, when I was in high school. W- had never been to Europe, so it was his first time for everything. Taking up gardening myself

The wedding: We had a small civil wedding ceremony in the gazebo in Agnietenberg, a campsite in Zwolle. Kathy wore a white terno (full-length dress with butterfly sleeves) beaded and decorated with hand-painted blue tulip appliques; a fusion of Philippine and Dutch cultures. John wore a suit. I wore the red dress I sewed myself. =) I’ll link to photos when they become available.

Moments that made me laugh:

• Seeing the world’s tallest ringbearer get pressed into service (Mathew filled in for the actual ringbearer, who was late)
• When they celebrated the end of the wedding ceremony with the Hallelujah chorus
• When my dad got flustered reading the witnessing statement in Tagalog and ended up putting in all sorts of other things

Den Haag: We visited W-’s friend Dan in The Hague and we had a lot of fun catching up. In the evening, we rented bikes from OV Fiets and headed to the beaches near the North Sea. The Netherlands’ biking life made me so envious: separate bike lanes going practically everywhere, rental systems, flat terrain, garages with grooves in the ramps, locks integrated into bikes, and the freedom to bike without worrying too much about opened doors or inattentive drivers…

Geek: One of the advantages of being a geek is that most people appreciate getting tech support. We don’t do this on a regular basis for family or friends, but if we happen to be in the same country and we have some time on vacation, why not? =)

Dan had warned her husband that we were both geeks and that we were not allowed anywhere near the computers or even the microwave, because we might reprogram stuff. We ended up looking into their WiFi router, writing down the password for them and their future guests, and setting the BIOS settings on one of the computers so that it could recognize the printer that was on LPT1. (Smart IO chipset for the parallel port! Gosh.) Most of the interfaces were in Dutch, but we figured it out. We also fixed up Auntie Katharina’s computer, but that’s the next story.

Germany: We were hanging out in John’s house in Zwolle, and Auntie Katharina mentioned she’s been having problems with her computer. My parents had been planning to get Auntie Katharina a new computer for a while, so that she could talk to them using Skype. Day trip!  After much back-and-forth, we convinced Auntie Katharina to let us go on this adventure. (After all, W- had never been to Germany, and it would be so nice to visit Wiesbaden again, and…) So we piled into the car, rushed back to the camp, packed our suitcases and backpacks, and headed off to Germany. (Don’t you just love being able to take a day trip to a different country?) We bought a laptop from the Media Markt near Auntie Katharina’s house, visited her son and her grandkids, then headed over to her place to set it up. Then it was a long drive back to the Netherlands for a short nap before W- and I took the train to the airport. That was definitely cutting it close, but we made it!