The Netherlands

After leaving London on Saturday July 11th, we took the chunnel to Brussels and then took several trains up to the Netherlands so I could work at the Natural History Museum or "Naturalis" in the city of Leiden. In a lot of ways this "work" trip was a great opportunity to go back home, as my family and I lived in the suburban city of Wassenaar in the late 1980's (my little sister Caroline was actually born there). Getting to the Netherlands on Saturday allowed us to spend all day Sunday in Wassenaar revisting my old stomping grounds. We took the bus from our hotel in the small town of Leiderdorp (just west of Leiden) to Wassenaar in the morning and walked through the town looking for my old street Dominee Honderslaan. Once we found my old house (#11) I was amazed at how much I actually remembered about my old neighborhood considering it's been nearly 20 years since I lived there. I remembered that my room used to be on the top (3rd) floor of the house witht the left window; I remembered that my mom had planted little 3 foot tall evergreen trees as a natural fence (they're about 10 feet tall
now); I remebered that our pet hampster "hampy" was buried in the flower bed in the backyard; I remembered trapping mice in the shed with my dad; I remembered falling into the pond across the street while trying to catch frogs, getting out covered in pond scum, then stepping on a rust nail, letting go of my bike in pain which then proceeded to roll into the pond, having to go backing into the water to retreive the bike, hopping on one foot back to the house looking for comfort from my mother only to be told that I couldn't come into the house covered in pond scum and bleeding frot he foot, being forced to strip down to my whitey-tighties on the front porch to be hosed down with an ice cold garden hose, and then finally having to go to the doctor to get a tetanus shot...good memories. But seriously, I do have a lot a great memories from Wassenaar. Somehow I managed to remember the location of a great little pancake house a few blocks from my house where Tressa and I ended up having lunch (we shared a classic dutch strawberry and cream pancake). We managed to find the main walking steet in Wassenaar near the town's windmill. We found the old bakery where we would go as kids to get little almond cakes and fruit-covered custard tarts (I don't care what anyone says, nobody makes pasteries better than the Dutch!). We found the old toy store where I bought my weight in Transformers action figures as a kid (ironically enough, they are now selling them again becuase of the new movies...I'm expecting a Thundercats movie ASAP!). We had a great time in Wassenaar, and I was really glad that Tressa finally got to see where I grew up.

On Monday, we took the bus from Leiderdorp to Leiden so I could work at the Naturalis Museum. The Naturalis Museum houses all of the archaeological and paleoanthropological material excavated by the illustrious Eugene Dubois (The first professional paleoanthropologist and discoverer of H. erectus). I was there to specifically study the terminal Pleistocene Wadjak 1 and 2 specimens. As Tressa and I were walking to the museum, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of two other people wheeling equipment towards the museum, it was none other than Matt Tocheri (who I had just seen in Belgium 3 weeks earlier) and Bill Jungers who were there to study some neolithic H. sapiens remains from Java as part of their ongoing research on Flores. After lunch, the curator, Rainer van Zelst, took as all into the museum to see the exhibits. The highlight of the museum for any paleoanthropologist is the Trinil skullcap and femur which are on public display when not being studied by visiting researchers. Other interesting exhibits included the world oldest rock (3.8 billion years old), A fantastic skeleton of a mammoth, and a skeleton of a dwarfed elephant.