Zaterdag is pronounced just like it looks if you say the a's like in "father," lightly trill the r, and unvoice the g, which turns it into more or less a German -och. Pile enough simplicities like this up, and you've got another language. And speaking of simplicities, I think it says a lot that "Louis" is Lodewijk in Dutch.

today's pic is of the building that guards the entrance to the pedestrian pathway out to the spectacular Nemo building, of which I have written.

Slowing down the pace, I write in the morning and then segway over to Cyberlounge at noonish. It is most definitely terrassen weer, terrace weather, so no seat in the sun at a sidewalk cafe is unoccupied. Hmmm. Hoist by my own petard, I realize that in order to make the observation that I have planned following this paragraph, I must first confess that there was the tiniest bit of exaggeration in my whining about the uninterrupted lousy weather the past two weeks. Yes, I admit it, there have been on a handful of occasions during the past fourteen days, brief periods never exceeding a couple of hours and normally measured in tens of minutes in which the sun actually shown. A miserable, pallid sunshine but nevertheless sunshine totaling maybe six hours.

And now, the observation: within five minutes of the appearance of the sun, the terraces are full. It's as if people are lurking inside the adjacent buildings fully dressed to go out and watching intently for the sun to trigger a race with their neighbors to the closest terrace, from which they then disappear almost as rapidly when the clouds return. The past two weeks have not been warm, and many of the terraces are not protected from the wind. But today, today the streets are thronged.

This contributes to a luxuriantly fine few minutes during the journey when Wolvenstraat is completely blocked by a giant truck that can't get past an illegally-parked car. Among the vehicles ahead of me behind the truck is that carriage pulled by the pony in bellbottoms about whom I wrote the other day. The truck turns right at the next corner and the bicyclists caught behind the carriage one by one slip past on either side.

Which leaves me stuck behind the carriage. I don't want to go whipping around it in one of the brief passing opportunities and cutting in right in front of the horses, thus causing a runaway carriage as the frightened horses bolt. Besides, I'm in no rush, and somehow, I take some entertainment in the cognitive dissonance evoked by being on a Segway stuck behind a horse and carriage in an eighteenth-century street on my way to the Cyberlounge. Quite a lot of entertainment, actually.

Afterwards, Rafaël comes over and we walk out to shop for books in a couple of nearby stores that Edward has recommended. No hits today because I poop out before we get far enough south on Kalverstraat, but I look forward to tomorrow's planned motorized excursion to the Spuiplein, where I'll listen to Sunflower and then pop into the Athenaeum, a highly academic store where I know I'll find some treasures.

Sometime fairly soon when I start studying Hellish for all eternity, I expect the following linguistic features: grammatical gender; nouns, adjectives, and adverbs fully inflected for all five genders; all verbs irregular except for a handful of exceptions; thirty tenses; twenty second-person pronouns; ten cases; six moods; and all words containing a ui phoneme or a tedious consonant...or both.

On the way home, I pop in Albert Heijn and pick up some ordinary necessities. I am also tempted beyond my power to resist by a dainty little 196 g. package of speklapjes. To put it another way, this is a pair of half inch thick slices of pork belly together weighing about 7 oz. At home, I cook them very carefully, so that none of the fat is wasted, thus creating a rough home version of babi pangang.

Did I mention, Rafaël has cruelly observed that I do not seem to be losing girth? And that if anything.......