May 1st, 2011

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Sunday May 1st The morning after

Sunday, May 1st, 2011

Judging by the trash in the canals and the streets Amsterdam must be one giant hang over this morning

But it did not seem to have affected the usual sparse church attendance.  I attended the Jesuit St . Francis Xavier church the “Krijtberg” on one of the Amsterdam canals. The mass was sung in Latin with an incredible good choir and organ accompaniment. I will miss these opportunities. The only drawback for me to visit the Eastern Orthodox countries like Romania and Bulgaria is the inability to attend a service that I can understand and go to communion. In the nearly fifty countries that I have visited since I left the West Coast in 2005 that had never been a problem.

This afternoon I visited the Boosman friends in Bergen. Their mother Tiny Boosman worked for the same resistance leader as our mother and was arrested a month after our mother. She and two more women of this group went through the same treatment, prisons and concentration camps together till their liberation. Tiny wrote in detail about her experiences part of which I have been able to use to put together the book I am writing about my mother’s life. On the way home I stopped in Monnickendam where I was moored last summer and met my friends Carin and Marcus who still keep their boat at the same dock “Fleetwood” was at.