The baby took his first wobbly steps as we watched. He nosed gently against his mother as she groomed him. Margaret was so excited about the baby that she couldn't wait to tell the next person who stopped, a young woman on a bicycle. After we'd turned in our skates, the same young woman saw me near the rental stand. She stopped to say she'd enjoyed talking with my daughter, who had been absolutely thrilled to talk with a real Dutch person.
Communication is one of the pluses in Amsterdam.
While there's never a doubt that Holland is a foreign land with a language all its own, almost everyone we encountered could speak English. Margaret, with her blond hair and blue eyes, looked enough like a native that people sometimes greeted her in Dutch if she was standing apart. She loved that, and they could share her amusement in her own language. We also laughed about the panhandler who'd approached us while we looked at sunglasses outside a shop one afternoon on our own. We ducked inside before he'd finished more than a couple of sentences of a story about spending the previous night in jail and needing money so he wouldn't have to sleep in the street.