Hello:

It has been a couple of months since our last update. During this time, we relocated from Rotterdam to Budapest. Bert spent the last week in the U.S. visiting several Trend facilities (www.trendtechnologies.com) and is writing this message from Mike Vermeulen's apartment in San Jose, California. Bert's brother, Mike, provides the computer and support to house our website, so this is a convenient time to prepare an update. While Bert's in the states, Jean's been working on projects in Budapest and traveled to Vienna for the weekend.

Budapest is beautiful. It has plenty of amenities and an excellent public transit system. We were fortunate in finding a luxuriously furnished apartment, with a helpful English-speaking landlord in a safe and quiet neighborhood that houses several major embassies. We're within walking distance of the main railway station and close to a cute historic metro connecting us to the heart of town. After six months of living out of backpacks, it's wonderful just to sit in one place for a while. This picture shows a view of our street and the Polish embassy.

Living in Hungary has its challenges -- primarily with the language. In the supermarket, for example, don't buy most foods that require preparation instructions, because we can't read them. The main exception is frozen pizza, where the instructions on the back of the box are provided in 15 languages, one of which is English. Bert still has to work out how to attach his computer to the new ISDN line. The ISDN box came with a 100-page instruction booklet in Hungarian, with a not-very-helpful two-page English summary tacked on the end. Since traffic is bad and parking a nightmare, we mostly use public transit. This turned buying and transporting an ironing board into an adventure.

Bert's work took us to Ireland two times in the last couple of months. During one of those trips, we stayed over a weekend and visited Galway and Clifden on the western coast. This picture was taken in front of the B&B we stayed at in Clifden.

We were fortunate in visiting the area in good weather at a time outside the normal tourist season. This allowed us to drive along the rugged coast. This picture was taken along the coast outside of Clifden.

We also toured Kilkarney Castle, a dwelling built by an English landlord in the nineteenth century that is now a convent.

Because of economic growth, the traffic in Ireland is now terrible. It usually takes us 45 minutes to drive about five miles into work. On the west coast of Ireland, there are also traffic problems, but they are more often of the type shown in this picture.

We also spent a weekend in Cracow, Poland. Cracow was built as a walled city in medieval times and became the capital of Poland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Poland had an empire. During the last ten years, the town has been cleaned and restored. This picture shows the market square in the center of town. The building shown here has been a market for centuries.

This picture shows the church in the center of town. It was built by two brothers. When one of them saw that his sibling had built a more attractive tower than his, he committed suicide.

In Cracow, even the garbage trucks have a medieval appearance to them.

Here is a picture of the castle grounds from which Poland was ruled.

Although it's nice to have a home base, we don't plan to stop traveling, either for work or for pleasure. We're looking forward to Turkey (the country, not the bird) for Thanksgiving, St Louis for Christmas and Colorado for New Years. This picture was taken at the station in Katowice while waiting for our train back to Budapest.

Email and the web have worked well in allowed us to stay connected with many of you. During the last several months we've also been reconnected with several long lost friends who found our website (or were referred to it by others on our distribution list) and then sent us a message. If you know of someone else that should be added to our distribution list, let us know.

Sincerely, Jean and Bert

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This page was last updated on \\\12/31/01.