Read Online Melanie Martin Goes Dutch by Carol Weston - Free Book Online Page B

fun?”
    I would! I feel so bad for her!
    She would have loved to be in my shoes.

    Dear Diary,
    Mom told Dad that she was going to Rembrandt's house, and that Dad should rent a canal bike with us, stay away from topless beaches (!), and meet her in two hours at the Rijksmuseum. (She knew 2 museums in 1 day would be 2 much 4 us.)
    “Kids, be good,” Mom said.
    We said we'd try, but I think being good might not be my specialty.
    A canal
bike
is a boat that you pedal with your feet.
    I thought pedaling down the canals would be as fun as clip-clopping down the streets. But our bike-boat was a four-seater, and Matt immediately said, “Cecily, sit with me.” Cecily looked right right right at me. It was like she expected me to say something, but I didn't know what. I almost said “No, sit with me!” but I didn't want her or Dad to say “Matt asked first.” Well, she sat with Brat Boy, so guess who got stuck in the second row with Dad (no offense to Dad or anything)?
    This is
not
how I pictured our trip!
    Matt started pretending he was a tour guide (ha! a shrimpy one with freckles and a loose tooth!). He was talking with a Dutch accent and making stuff up about every bridge. Under one, he said, “Zees is a luffly example uf Dutch archeeetecshure.” Cecily encouraged him by laughing her head off.
    I didn't laugh once. To be honest, I ignored Cecilyand I called Matt a nitwit. I even whispered that the canals were full of starving pointy-toothed alligators that, if Matt fell in, would take bites out of his heart and eat his guts right up.
    Matt looked scared, and said, “You're mean,” and for half a second I worried that I was. But then Cecily mumbled something to Matt, and he said, “Alligators like hot places, not cold places,” and he smiled at Cecily and stuck his tongue out at me. Then he made his hands into snapping alligator jaws and started pinching me, saying, “My fingers are pinching machines.”
    I don't know how much longer I can stand this! Matt is a dumdum and Cecily is part bunny, part tiger, and I had an urge to push them both overboard into the alligator-infested (not) water.
    Well, I wanted to go to Pizza Hut, but Dad said no, so we went to a fish restaurant and I had spaghetti and it was okay, but my tomato sauce had too many lumps in it.

    P.S. That's my name without the L and that might be my personality too.
    P.P.S. Did I tell you that our luggage didn't come this morning either? This is day four!! Even Mom and Dad seemed surprised.
    P.P.P.S. Matt saw my P.S. and P.P.S. and started making peepee jokes.

    Dear Diary,
    Cecily and I just had the

    We had it in the Rijksmuseum, which is like the Metropolitan Museum back home. It is a “must-see” that is huge and quiet and full of tourists and old paintings.
    It is not a very ideal place to have a fight, but it's not like I started it on purpose.
    Here's what happened.
    We met Mom in the entrance or
ingang
(In Hahng),
    which is spelled like “Come in, gang!” Then we headed upstairs to the Rembrandt section. Mom was talking about how Rembrandt was the greatest painter who ever lived and how he kept getting better and better and how she was glad she saw his house and sketches and how he painted piles of portraits of himself, from when he was young to when he was old. Mom said that some of his self-portraits are so honest, you almost feel impolite when you look away. She said he left a whole “autobiography in paint.”
    I said, “I wonder if an artist who paints self-portraits is like a writer who keeps diaries.”
    I thought Mom would like that question, but she just said, “They didn't have cameras back then, so painting was a way to record what people and things looked like.”
    She showed Cecily and me this “masterpiece” of Rembrandt's mother reading the Bible. The mother's face is all ghosty, so I said, “It's not all that good.”
    Cecily disagreed. She said to look at the tiny wrinkles on her hand and the gold threads on her bonnet.