Spring is in the air!

SPRING!


Wow! The weather has been great the past week! And we thought spring would never come! I love it this time a year when the rain slacks of and the sun comes out! The whole city comes alive... everyone's sitting outside of the cafes drinking their coffees...students biking around town in shorts and skirts...birds singing...flowers blooming! At lunch we all sit outside in the courtyard to eat and soak up the sun. I feel so envigorated and full of energy! Thank you God for spring!


I especially love the flowers in Europe... They go crazy with flowers! The city has special gardeners who change the arangements in the "round abouts" every few weeks... and, like in the first photo above, they have flower baskets hanging everywhere! The flower shops are hard to resist too... this time a year, i'm iching to buy a bunch of plants to start a pot garden! I didn't do so well with my plants last year... haha! I have wide window sills, so I put my pots outside my windows. Well, the windows are kinda hard to open, so my plants didn't really get watered as much as they'd like, i'm sure. Plus, a few times we had some really strong wind, and my pots got blown out of the window and crashed in the courtyard below! oops! I guess plants don't have nine lives. I should stick to cats! =)
I guess we're appreciating the beautiful weather even more because of the harsh winter we had. Normally, it starts warming up by march, but we're a month overdue! We were still getting snow when it was supposed to be getting warm!



By the way, if you ever get a chance to come to Europe in the spring, you HAVE to make a visit to the Keukenhof. (see photos above and below) Its a huge garden in holland that borders tulip fields. There are thousands of tulip varieties in the gardens, and special flower expositions in inside. I saw one kind of tulip that was probably as wide as a CD and twice as tall (just the flower part!)