Guus Bosman

It's raining today, and everytime that happens there's a traffic jam on the road that we can see from far from our window.

Someone joked that the traffic in Washington immediately slows to a crawl as soon as it rains, snows or is too windy. A bit like the Dutch railways, I guess.

At work we're almost done with development of the new functionality and next week the first testers will try the programs. An interesting difference between the way things work here and at Chess is that in Haarlem we had a lot of automated testing, and only very little manual testing. Here is the other way around.

My cold is almost over, but I'm afraid it looks like it's Sasha's turn now.

The night before we left San Antonios we went out, so we woke up late in the morning. When we went to the Riverwalk after breakfast, there was a surprise: the waterlevel of the river was extremely low.

It turned out to be the annual river-cleaning period. In the week after New Year's weekend the river is emptied, and necessary work and cleaning is performed. The river was not entirely empty yet, see some pictures below.

This is the final part of a series of pictures of San Antonios, see also part one, two and three.

Yesterday Sasha and I went to the New Year celebration organized by the Washington D.C. Dutch Society. The party started at 16:00 o'clock in the Dutch embassy. I was curious to see the embassy, and it was interesting to see it, but it was not a very Dutch building, except for a picture of Queen Beatrix and a large photograph of Dutch tulip fields.

The Dutch society had decorated the embassy with Dutch and orange flags. There was life classical music, and a bar with drinks including Grolsch and Heineken beer.

We didn't know anybody when we arrived at the party, which was a bit scary, but we talked with quite a few people and we had a really nice afternoon. Some people have been living in the U.S. for many years and they were more comfortable speaking English than Dutch, others were just temporary in the States. It was nice meeting other Dutch people and I signed up to become member of this Dutch club.

The Washington D.C. reporter for the Dutch NOS news agency was also at the party. Of course there were Dutch snacks: young cheese with mustard, and freshly baked oliebollen. Those are a traditional Dutch New Year snack, usually around this time of the year everybody eats a lot of them. For us these were the first and only oliebollen this year, and they were very good.

After the party we went for dinner in Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe. Food in D.C. is generally speaking better than what we ate in San Antonios, if you ask me. To stay in style I had apple pie for desert (a Dutch favorite). Because the New Year party ended early, we were done with dinner early and were home around 21:30 o'clock.

The second most famous touristic attraction in San Antonios is the Riverwalk (Paseo del Rio). The river that flows through the city is far below the streetlevel, and around the river are many restaurants, bars and places to sit.

This creates a very nice atmosphere, beautiful, alive but not too busy.

Here's part 2 of the 4-part series of pictures from San Antonios: The Riverwalk (see also part one).