The afternoon we're travelling to Williamsburg. Rosa invited us to join us there for the weekend, an invitation we were very happy to accept!

Williamsburg is well known for a restored colonial area in the center of the city and it's located a few hours driving south of D.C. (Google map).

I'm leaving work in a little while; many people told me that it will be very busy on the road (the Friday before an Easter weekend) but we're looking forward to it a lot.

Yesterday I went for lunch with a colleague to an Afghan restaurant around the corner. The food was very nice; somewhat similar to the Middle Eastern and Arabic cuisine.

There's a huge variety of restaurants in this area, from all over the world. In general people go much more often for dinner or lunch to a restaurant than I was used to in the Netherlands. Our company for example, doesn't have a cafeteria, instead people go to places outside to have lunch or bring back lunch from there to eat in the office.

For coffee it works the same: Starbucks and other coffee places here are triving on all the office workers around. This morning when I was crossing the street towards Starbucks, a group of school kids entered just in front of me. It didn't take that long however, the guys working there know how keep moving and I got my morning coffee ("a grande coffee") quickly.

Here are three pictures of New York.

The images are not as good as I wanted them to be, but I hope it shows how crowded the streets are.

Wonderful city.

We were just on time for the bus yesterday morning. The organization of the bus company is not as smooth as it could be, and it's important to be on time to make sure you actually get a place on the bus, even when you bought tickets in advance, like we did.

As a result of this, there is usually a fight just before the bus leaves, and this time was no exception. Sometimes it's between the operators and guests that were overbooked, but often also among the operators themselves, which is quite amusing to see. From a secured placed in the bus, of course.

The bus leaves from Chinatown in Washington D.C. and is operated by Chinese Americans. There was only one seat open when we left New York, after two ladies were left behind because they were travelling together. The first stop on the journey was in Baltimore, where the last passenger came aboard. There were more people waiting there, but the bus left and they had to wait for the next one, probably an hour later. The bus drove through to Delaware, and then to Philadelphia. We had a short break on the way which was very welcome -- we had left early after all and we didn't had a lot of coffee in the morning.

On arrival in New York the bus makes three stops: one on Times Square, near Madison Square Garden, and finally in Chinatown. We got of at the second stop, near the trainstation. It was great to travel together, with a nice destination and no rush.

We're leaving in a little while to catch the 9.30 bus to New York. We'll visit Jonathan and Irena this weekend.

This week I transferred some money from my US bank account to the Netherlands. It was pretty quick, I signed the "wire transfer" papers Tuesday, and Friday the money was on my Postbank account.

The exchange rate came as a shock: 1 dollar is 75 euro cents now.

The book Girl with the pearl earring is a bestseller here. This is a picture of the window of a bookstore close to my work.

September last year Sasha and I went to see the original painting in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, after seeing the movie with Steven in the Toneelschuur.

It's nice to see the old 'skyline' of Delft in a bookstore's window.

Yesterday we bought tickets for U2!

U2 will be touring around the world this summer with their Vertigo tour: they're in Amsterdam in July and in October they'll be in New York. We have two tickets for the latter. The concert will be in Madison Square Garden, a famous location for concerts, on a Friday evening.

I bought the tickets on-line, on TicketMaster.com. The sale started exactly at 9.00 o'clock. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the buying process -- the site was very responsive, even at the most busy moment. I wanted to get four tickets, but the system only allowed two tickets per transaction and everything was sold out quickly. A couple of additional concert dates were added after 9.00 o'clock and they quickly sold out as well.

It's something really nice to look forward to, a concert by such a great band. And, very good news for the readers that don't have tickets yet: there are two additional concerts planned in New York (November 21 and 22), and the tickets for that will go on sale next Monday.

We had an easy weekend. Because I wasn't sure if I'd have to work this weekend we didn't make big plans, but the project is going well and it turned out that I didn't have to work.

Saturday evening we went out with Bella and Ramiro to a Spanish restaurant, La Tasca. We had sangria and tapas, the small dishes. My personal favorite recipe in the Spanish kitchen? The cured meat, delicious. Sunday I went to the office for an hour, there was something small I had to do for which I usually don't have time during the day.

I finished reading the first play of Shakespeare in the book bought two weeks ago. It took a few pages to get used to the style of writing but now it's a joy to read. In addition to this large book, I'm also reading a "Guide to Shakespeare" next to it, which is about the same size (and weight...). This guide is extremely useful for me; it explains many things I would have never realized while reading only the main text. It's written by Isaac Asimov, a great science-fiction author.

Actually, Asimov says that some experts doubt that the first play that I read, Henry VI part I, was really written by Shakespeare. They say it's written to badly for a real Shakespeare play. It's certainly confusing to read, as the chronology of the story is often rather mixed up.

A nice tool that I recently tried out is Google Maps.

If you type in an American address in the Google search bar, you're given the option to see a map of that address. Of course I tried it immediately with our own address.

The main thing I like about it is that you can zoom in & out, and so get a good idea of the entire area. In the map of our address, you can see the Iwo Jima monument that I saw last week. In the lower-left corner is Quincy park, that's where our library is (about 25 minutes walking).

In the shadow of the address sign is the location of my work (at the crossing of Wilson Boulevard with the Fort Myer drive). The bridge of the river is the Key bridge, that leads to Georgetown and downtown D.C.

If you move the focus a bit, or zoom out, you can see Washington D.C. Another thing I tried was following the river, the Potomac from its beginning to the Atlantic ocean.

Two Dutch brands that you'll find a lot in the U.S. are Douwe Egberts and Philips.

A few years ago they combined their marketing efforts and started selling "The Senseo".

This is a picture taken in Macy's, a department store in Pentagon City.