August 26

We headed out this morning around 9:45 to go to Petra's brother Rob's house in Lelystad, which is closer to Amsterdam.  Petra had to pick up her goddaughter from Amsterdam airport, so we stayed in Lelystad for the night, at some friends of the Van Der Sloots, who have kind of a small bed and breakfast type of place.  Marc and I went with Rob in the afternoon to see the Batavia, which is a boat that was constructed in the old ship building manner, to be a full scale replica of an old merchant ship.  It was pretty amazing to see, because aside from using some modern methods to produce old looking things, the entire ship was made exactly like it would have been.  I guess they learned a lot in the building of it, because no one has done it that way for many many years now, and really no one knew how to do it.  They are in the process of building another ship, which was actually a military boat.  It will take 15 years instead of the 10 for the Batavia, because the man who made the Batavia isn't really involved in it, and they have already made some more mistakes that cost time.  We took the tour of the ships and saw the video entirely in German, because there were only German tours going on at the time.  It was pretty easy to understand the Dutch tour guide's German, and I only had some difficulty with some of the more technical ship anatomy and industry terms.  We also tried again, in vain, to locate a Dutch national team jersey at the Outlet Mall right by the dock.  Back at the Van Der Sloots, we had some food, then hung around, played Cluedo (Clue) with Rob and Marie-José and then later went out with Leonoor and her two friends Roxy and Patrick to a club where we danced until 4:30 in the morning!  It was pretty fun, and definitely my first time at a disco like that one.  It was a quieter night because it was a Thursday, but there were still quite a few people there.  I should mention here that I am a terrible dancer, but had fun anyway.