Five of us flew to Holland on June 12, 1998--Michael, Hennie, Amanda, Helen, and Amanda's friend Jenna. Jenna and Amanda went back to the U.S. after two weeks, so that Amanda could proceed to summer school in mathematics at Boston University. You can scroll down this page to see about ten photos taken in Holland, and links to other pages containing more. On July 4, Hennie and I travelled by train to Lindau, Germany, to attend the Conference on Automated Deduction held there.  You can see a lot of photos of Lindau.

We were met at the airport and soon were at Hennie's parents' house, where Hennie's two sisters and their families greeted us. You can see some photos of the family taken in the first hour of our visit.

Here's Helen and her two-year-old cousin Eliza as a sample:

You'll notice it's sunny in those pictures. That didn't last long--it rained most of the time we were in Holland.

You may be wondering who that is on Amanda's lap. No, it's not another cousin.

One of the best things about Holland is the cheese. I took a photo of some cheeses for sale in the local open-air market.

You may have heard that part of Holland is below sea level. Here's a photo that shows it. In the photo, you're standing on a dike, and the water on your right is at the level of the North Sea. The land on your left is several meters lower, and all the land you can see from this viewpoint, except the dike and an island in the water, is at that lower level. This photo was taken near Volendam, north of Amsterdam. This water used to be actually connected to the North Sea, but now a huge dike walls it off from the North Sea, making it a gigantic inland lake. This should prevent the recurrence of a disastrous flood like the one in 1953.

In the old days, water was pumped by windmills like this one:

We went to see Volendam with Henk and Nellie de Weyer, people I first met in 1976.

There are lots of canals in Holland, and where roads cross them, there are often drawbridges like this one:

South of Amsterdam there is a river, on the banks of which the wealthy magnates of the East India Trading Company built their mansions in the nineteenth century.

These mansions were pointed out to me by my friend Jan Willem Klop, on the way to his house to have dinner with him, his wife, and Jan Bergstra.  These are computer scientist friends of mine whom I have known since 1978.

The following photo was taken from the train station after leaving Jan Willem. Note the high-tension lines behind the old windmill. Holland today has a very well-developed industrial infrastructure, as is necessary to support such a high population density at a very high standard of living.

One day, the five of us went to Amsterdam by train, and then by canal boat we traveled to Anne Frank's house, to the van Gogh Museum, and the Rijksmuseum, where many of Rembrandt's paintings, and those of other Dutch masters, can be seen.

You can see several more Amsterdam photos if you want.

Hennie's sister Arenda is an artist, and has recently helped paint a mural on the wall of a public square. Look closely, there are lots of birds in the mural. You can also see a close-up of part of the mural, and on the same page, a photo of the artist and a photo of her garden.