I'm out of the house at 7:15 to make sure I catch Rafaël before he runs off to Enschede. I need to get him to renegotiate our meeting with Lucy because I didn't remember a prior commitment when I agreed to meet her next Saturday. The day is going to be gorgeous. Even now it's quite nice, a bit cool but the sky is solid blue and the rising sun is coming in at a good angle to heighten interest here and there. At this hour on Sunday morning, hardly anyone is on the streets, so riding the Segway is a pleasure since I'm not having to dodge other vehicles and pedestrians.

Besides, the elms are pretty much fully leafed out, so the Oudezijds Voorburgwal in Rafaël's block doesn't feel so much like the femoral artery in the red light district circulatory system that it really is. I decide to kill a little time taking in the sights before I ring Rafaël's bell. I roll over to the canal edge and am just blown away. It's a dead-calm morning, which turns the canals into mirrors. I never dreamed the OZV could be so lovely.

And to bring the tone back down to earth, here's an entertaining doorway across the canal from Rafaël's.

And well, to bring us back up, here's what I'm guessing the street looks like to some of the denizens stumbling around this early:

So much for meeting Rafaël. He's not answering his bell and I don't want to bother other folks in the house. So I head for the Spuiplein, oddly enough located at the intersection where Spuistraat dead-ends into Spui. On Sundays, artists erect on the Spuiplein a double row of perhaps twenty stalls where they sell their works. Some pretty good stuff, actually, and one of them has had the wit to have some of his paintings reproduced on postcards that he sells quite reasonably. Wil Wiegant. Nice guy. He's on Gomera Art Forum

But I'm saving the best aspect of the Spuiplein till last: Sunflower. Remember my raving about them in Dutch in Three Weeks? Well, you can go home again. I listen for a while and then buy another CD. This one titled Gentle. You can buy their CD's on their site: Sunflower

Soothed with sound, I waft over into the Athenaeum and purchase All Souls' Day and The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom and Siegfried and The Attack by Harry Mulisch, the only four English translations in stock of books by recommended authors. While I'm in there, my eye is caught by the van Dale Groot Woordenboek in two massive volumes Engels/Nederlands - Nederlands/Engels that must weigh ten kilos together. I grab these without looking at the price and head for the kasse with my six books. This attempt at self-deception is thwarted by my failure to have €217 in cash, and I am forced to use a credit card and cannot avoid seeing the total. Well it's not like I'm squandering this on chocolate or something.

On the way back home I stop at my corner cafe and have a totally tasty pastrami sandwich. I should have started eating their food sooner!

Over to Edward's for cocktails. We are joined by one of his tenants and talk mostly of my recent book purchases. They approve. I'm a bit tired and head home instead of joining them for dinner somewhere. At eight on Sunday night, the crowds on the OZV and Damstraat are mostly drunk and thus socially aggressive and not at all shy about wanting to talk about/touch/wrest from me the Segway, but by now my skills at broken field running are improving. Then too, drunks are easy to evade.

But everyone this evening is really chatty. A couple of gorgeous girls (I mean, young women) in front of the university on Spuistraat stop me for a couple of minutes while patrons at my corner cafe supervise from twenty meters. I don't even try to get past the cafe, and pull in and talk with three guys who turn out to be Brits. I accept their offer of a beer since I'm only fifty meters from home. We chat. At some point one of 'em throws out a line that calls for a declaration, so I get blunt in two words: "I'm gay." They decide they are, too. And two of 'em say they're in the Netherlands for the requisite time so they can get married legally.

As we're winding down, another threesome sits at the next table. I suspect them of being straight because they look like recently retired professional soccer players. You know, heavily muscled with banged-up hands, arms, and faces, not a stereotypical gay look. I field their Segway questions for a while before I announce my intent to give a little demo to see whether I'm too buzzed to ride. I'm not. I make it to Rina's door without incident.