Home cooking from Holland

Early on, one of the biggest struggles to adapting to life here, was the grocery store. I had to get used to all the new foods, the absence of the familiar foods I knew, and the inability to tell if the foods I needed were there because I didn't know the Dutch names of them. I would spend many a moment in the aisles, tearing up because I had no idea what to get. There was a few times I can home to Dan in tears, empty-handed because I just needed to get out of that store.

However my friends, those times are now in the past. I can whip into the store with my cloth bag (you should bring your own bag or pay .20 for one) and go immediately to where I need to go. I can ask for bread that is just coming out of the oven. I now know the name of things in Dutch so I don't get many weird looks from the stockboys when I ask for something. When I get low on vanilla, I can use the vanilla suiker substitute and not freak out.

Most days I do my entire transaction at the check out in Dutch. It doesn't involve a whole lot more than me saying "yes", "Nee" ,"bedankt" (thanks) or "Tot Ziens!" (see you later). But I can understand most of what the cashier is saying. Occasionally, they will say something I don't understand and I'll stare at them like a deer in the headlights until they switch into English.

Being more confident in the grocery store allows me to be more experimental in my cooking. This weekend we bought a new dish--that I absolutely love! It's a clay casserole dish, covered with a ceramic glaze. It's dishwasher and microwave safe...not that we have either of those but maybe one day...:) Here is a picture of it

Note the beautiful turquoise color and the pretty scalloped edges. :) It's French.  The French know something about cooking, right? So I made my first meal in it tonight. I tried another Holland traditional dessert. It's basically an apple turnover or appelflap. They also turned out pretty well for the first time.

So, the food situation here is coming along nicely. Maybe by the time I come home, I can have my own cooking show, "Home cooking from Holland-where we make the brownies 'special' " . :)

Bike Wreck

I've debated on telling this story to save our mothers from anxiety regarding the safety of our future children. But this is life here and the story must be told.

One of my good friends here was involved in a bike wreck last week. She was making a quick run to the store to pick up groceries. She has two small boys, 4 and 1, and strapped both of them into their bike seats and it looked a little something like this (this is not her)

So they head out to the store, like any normal day. As they are riding down the bike path, approaching the intersection where they will turn, my friend signals (which means pointing your arm in the direction you are turning. None of this bending your arm up or down to indicate left or right). She notices a scooter

coming the opposite direction, in the other bike path lane. She slows down to let the scooter pass and signals again and starts to make her left hand turn. BAM! Another scooter comes up from behind her and hits her bike, knocking it, her, and her two children to the ground. Amazingly, they were all mostly ok. The older child sitting in the back was unscathed and still just sitting in his bike seat. The younger boy in the front had hit his face on the pavement and was bleeding. Everyone had stopped and was helping her and her boys. Luckily, she was close to her huisarts(doctor...kind of) and everyone walked with her to the doctor's. She found out that the guy on the scooter did not have brakes.  I mean, really?? No brakes??

When she arrived at the doctor's, basically all they did was look at the baby's face, look inside his mouth, and told them that he would be ok. Did they bother to check his head that hit the pavement? no. Later that night, my friend's arm started really hurting. Hurting so bad she couldn't move it. They headed to the ER, only to be ushered into the huisarts department of the hospital, where they x-rayed her arm and determined she needed to go back into the ER. Several hours later(now, that is not much different from the US) she figured out she had a broken arm. They wrapped it in an ACE bandage and put a bandanna around her arm as a sling. Literally, it is a piece of cloth, folded in a triangle with a safety pin at the back to keep her elbow in. They apparently don't do casts here. Medication for pain? How about 2 aspirin every 6 hours. Nothing stronger.

This is my first experience with knowing someone in a major bike wreck. It's crazy. I'm so glad that everyone is mostly ok. My poor friend is one-armed for a week or two and without any good pain meds. She's bus bound for a few weeks. Both of her boys are tough and are ok. One has even ventured back onto the bike.
Unfortunately, there's not much of an option. You have to get back on the bike because bikes are our gateway to the rest of the world. Well,  the rest of the city anyways.

Don't be scared moms. Bike wrecks are a normal part of a childhood, right?? :)

The Refrigerator dilemma

This is the size of our refrigerator. No, not the one we only put wine or pop in, but the ONLY one we have, where all of our food must go.  Actually this one might even be a little bigger, but ours has a small freezer! Our fridge is hidden in one of our bottom cabinets. When we first got here, I was freaking out that we didn't have a fridge but a quick review of our cabinet space revealed that I was wrong.

At first, I was shocked and wondering how we were going to survive like this. As I looked around some more, I realized we also did not have an oven. AN OVEN. What kind of people live in this country?!! So we decided that we would make do with our tiny fridge (or else we would have to put a bigger, albeit not full size fridge, in our living room-which I was not cool with). We decided that we would NOT make do without an oven so we did purchase a fantastic, near American sized oven. Best large purchase we have made here. But back to the fridge...

So, the fridge presents a few problems. We cannot fit a 1.5 liter coke bottle (no, they don't have 2 liters here) in it without taking out the bottom shelf. Anytime we have friends over, half of our food has to come out to make room for drinks. I can't keep my tens of bottles of condiments in the door that have been there for 5 years like I did back home (Meg, I'm pretty sure you know what I'm talking about). I go to the grocery store nearly every day. I have now started keeping my eggs out of the refrigerator and on the counter to make room for something else. Don't worry, it seems safe. The eggs are not refrigerated in the store. We haven't died yet so until that happens, I'll take my extra fridge space any day. One day, the light in our fridge went out but several months later when I was trying to shove some things in, it popped back on.  More often than not, we have to put something in the fridge and then quickly shut it and give it one more hip nudge to make sure it stays closed. Some days I go crazy, wishing for a real fridge again. I long for my friend's medium sized fridge.

But most days, I make it. Most days the fridge fits just enough. It's another part of our adventure here. One day, when I have a whole room that is refrigerated, just to compensate for the time I missed out on, I will look back on these days and laugh. For now though, I'll just keep checking to make sure the fridge door is shut completely and pray that we don't get salmonella from our eggs. 

Updates

I know I haven't been posting as frequently and I apologize. Life has become just that...life. Everything is not as new and exciting or crazy anymore. I've adapted a lot to living here but realize that things that seem like everyday, normal things to me now, are still crazy things to you guys! So I'm going to try and be more consistent in my postings. 

Here is a list of recent happenings

1. I've applied for 2 jobs with the American School here. One is a teaching assistant job and the other is a secretarial job for the Special Ed department. It's been a few weeks and I've only had one contact with them so I'm not getting my hopes up. But it would be nice to have a job and have the extra income coming in! In the meantime, I'm still continuing to clean houses (blah) and babysit my little Italian friend, who is getting cuter by the minute! I'm determined that her first word will be an English word! haha just kidding.

2. If I don't get one of these jobs, Dan and I have decided that I'm going to take the Intensive Dutch Language 1 & 2 classes at the University in August. This is a 5 week course, 5 days a week, 5 hours a day with 3 hours of homework at night. Hopefully it will allow me to apply for jobs that say "Conversational Dutch required".

3. Still getting around by bike. It's been nice because the weather has been so nice lately. It's amazing how much you can really do on a bike.

4. We are thinking about going to Maastricht, which is a city in South Holland, for Memorial Day. There is an American military cemetery there and they have a service that day and we thought it would be a nice way to honor our troops in a foreign country. It's a 2 hour train ride so we'll see. 

5. You already know about going to Sicily, which I'm super excited about. Our next trip depends on my job situation. If I don't get that job and some of my friends come out (cough cough, you know who you are) then we might be going to Rome and/or Paris. If not, our next trip will probably be back to the States in October for my Wheel of Fortune trip!! The details of that are still getting hashed out but hopefully it will be in October.


6. We've been enjoying a lot of time with good friends lately. A few weeks ago, we invited our neighbors (the ones we share the house with) over for dinner. There was 7 of us crowded around our tiny, 4 person table. 4 of them were Dutch and 1 was Portuguese.They wanted a "real American meal"...whatever that is. So I made a garlic cheddar chicken dish with garlic mashed potatoes and green beans.  But the biggest hit was the Black tie marbled cheesecake for dessert. The Dutch LOVE cheesecake and this one was no exception. One of the girls even said it was better than any cheesecake she had in New York! I'm not sure about that, but it was my best cheesecake yet

7. I still hate our fridge. It's so tiny and with us entertaining more, it's nearly impossible to get everything in it we need! 

8. This weekend, a few of us girls are renting canoes and canoing down the canals! I will hopefully have pictures, if I don't manage to turn us over into the canal.


9. And last but not least, I'm trying a chicken cacciatore recipe, just because I've always liked the way the name sounds. That's ok right??

Hey Mambo, Mambo Italiano!

So we confirmed last week that we are going to Sicily next month!!!! Dan has a conference there and he knew if he went to Italy without me, he'd have a slim chance of making it to his 31st birthday:). The best part is that his work pays for our hotel, all of Dan's food and Dan's airfare! So we have to fork over minimum cash! 

We will spend our first week in Cefalu, which is a small town in Sicily. (For those who don't know, Sicily is an island part of Italy.) It is right on the Mediterranean and boasts of black sand beaches and beautiful sights to see.

 I am so excited about this trip, I can hardly wait! After spending a week in Cefalu, we will be taking a ferry across to the Aeolian islands (if you look at the map above it is called isole Eolie). We'll be staying on the island of Lipari and as is Italian custom, we'll be renting a scooter to get around.

 This will probably be us

 Apparently the mafia used to be pretty big in Italy but not too much anymore. It used to be considered a more dangerous place to go, but not these days! They say to watch out from catcalls from Italian men, but little do they know that I'm married to one so I'm already used to that :). 

Europe is as great as it sounds but there is one negative side to living here and I'm afraid that I will experience this in abundance in Italy.

I mean really, who ever thought the speedo was a good idea???

Ciao!!!

International Relations

 
So anyone who says God does not have a sense of humor, clearly hasn't read this blog to hear about my International faux pas. The latest one has to do with my interactions with one of Dan's co-worker's. We had a Japanese friend over for dinner the other night for a "real American meal" (which is a lot more difficult to come up with than you might expect...we had lasagna. I know, it's Italian, just go with it). It's a good time for him to practice his English and we enjoy getting to hear about Japanese culture and develop this friendship.

At the close of the evening, as we were saying goodbye, Dan was shaking his hang and giving him a pat on the back. He explained that this is how we might say goodbye in America and asked him if there were any traditional ways that Japanese people say goodbye. He thought about it for awhile and said, "well a more formal way to say goodbye is Sayanora". At this point I got really excited because I had heard the word Sayanora so before I could grab my foot it was inserted into my mouth, I said, "OH! yeah! we know Sayanora! Sometimes in America we say 'Sayanora Sucker!' ... Our Japanese friend kind of stared at me and then said, "what? really? say it again!" By this time, Dan is looking at me wide-eyed and I have realized that it probably wasn't the most intelligent comment to make. I was forced to repeat myself and then stumble over my words to try and explain why we sometimes use that phrase. You know, action movies. . .eek. It was a mess. But hilarious and we spent the rest of the night laughing about how I should not be allowed out of America.

Anyways, Sayanora Suckers!!

Keukenhof

Today we went with some friends to the famous Keukenhof! This is a world renowned park that has some amazing landscaped flowers. It has over 100 different types of tulips. There were some tulips that were so tall, they came up to my chest! Beautiful colors, amazing designs, and we got to go into a real, working windmill! We all piled into a wooden shoe, while other tourists looked on and took pictures. I also heard more American accents in one day than I have the whole time I've been here! We saw wooden shoes being made and people in traditional Dutch clothing (which, now that I'm thinking about it, I didn't get any pictures of!) Words can't really do the flowers justice so here are the pictures. Make sure you view them full screen for the full effect:)

Koninginnedag

Today was Koninginnedag in the Netherlands, otherwise known as Queen's Day. It's a day where the entire country celebrates the Queen's birthday. Yes, you may not have known it but the Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy, meaning they have a royal family. Queen Beatrix is currently the reigning Queen.  This is her

So, every year, the country throws a huge party and the Queen shows up in some random cities. Everyone dresses in orange, bands play, and there is a countrywide yard sale. No joke. It's mostly kids stuff but we did get a few antiquey type things. 

We had a good time walking around Leiden, experiencing our first Queen's Day. The real parties are in Amsterdam and The Hague, where people fill the streets and canals and party into the wee hours of the morning.

A few things you'll see in my pictures is Dan using the bathroom in an "outdoor urinal". He's not really using it, only for artistic purposes:) But the urinals are set up all over the city during big events like these and they are definitely outdoor. It's very weird, to say the least. Also, we found a Wheel of Fortune game. . .IN DUTCH! Naturally, we had to buy it, even if we can't play it because all the phrases are in Dutch. Maybe by the end of our time here, we'll know enough Dutch to win that game too:)

Overall, our first Queen's Day was a fun experience but not really sure what all the hoopla was about. I'm pretty sure my mom would've loved it though, as it really was one big yard sale. Not sure how she would get everything back home though :)

* Remember, click on the photo album to make it full size!