Dear all,

waiting on Schiphol airport, Amsterdam, for my flight into the States,
reading your website...

if I'm well informed, New York is the only US town where the sidewalk
is called "stoep", right?
"stoep" is dutch... ;-) So... our DNA is even embedded in your streets !

I don't know if the wikipedia page on this
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_stoop) is correct though ; it
seems to me that the Wikipedia explanation is way more complicated
than real life, little over-analysed ;-) All the sidewalks in Holland
are simply called "stoep". So, not the staircase is de stoep, but the
sidewalk itself. Every parent in Holland will after their first steps
tell their children "walk on the stoep!" ; where dogs are trained
-not- to shit on the stoep of course but to do their thing in the
"goot" (gutter).

Cheers! Frank
Holland