Update: Tuesday 8 Jan

I made soup yesterday. Sara said it was beautiful and that I had to take a picture.

I think it looked better in person. Doesn't matter, it was delicious. More than I needed for one meal, though.

Two exams down, six more to go. The first two were easy. French and economics. Most of the stuff for economics I remembered from my high school economics class. Good thing, too.

Tomorrow I have American Studies and Politics. They are both open question, I'm really not looking forward to that. American Studies shouldn't be too bad, and if I'm honest with myself Politics should be okay as well, but I worry myself over things that are not a big deal so. I'm worried.

Then! Tomorrow night Jenn and I are going to go see Les Miserables. I remember having to read parts of that in high school French classes… It looks really good, so I can't wait.

I really have nothing more to say. I was going to post the bit about the soup and leave it at that. You're lucky you got a bit extra. I'm going to go make tomorrow's lunch now, bye!

Update: Saturday 5 Jan

I just want you to know that for the first time in my life, I have New Year's resolutions.

I also want you to know that I'm not telling you what they are. I want to see how long I can keep it up before I go advertising it.

Because, you know how people are. Those people who actually make resolutions make the same ones every year and they last less than a month before they go back to their normal routine.

I don't even think I have a normal routine… Oh well.

I'm turning into a legal adult in all ways (in the US anyway) next Friday. Twenty-first birthday, nothing special around here really. I don't want to get older. I just can't wait because Tessa and Simona and Jennifer and I are going to go to this all-you-can-eat sushi place that I've been dying to go to, but avoiding because it's expensive.

Tomorrow I'm going to go to the bookstore and see if there are any cookbooks I can get that have simple enough things to cook in my limited kitchen, because the things I cook regularly are getting pretty boring.

I don't usually use recipes or cookbooks… I really like to improvise… It's nice to have a starting point though, I guess.

I'm not even sure why I'm writing this update. I'm kind of just rambling. You don't mind though, right?

I think I just have food on my mind, and Italian food at that because what sounds really good to me right now is a pizza, like the pizza I got from this really cool Italian restaurant here called Vapiano. Oh I think I could write a whole blog post about Vapiano. Okay fine, I'll tell you about Vapiano.

Okay, so Vapiano is this decently cheap Italian restaurant (probably not cheap in comparison to anywhere in the US but that eating out stuff is expensive in the Netherlands). They have really good pizza and pasta. So what happens is you walk in the door and they hand you a little electronic card. Two walls have counters where you can order pizza, pasta or salad, the third wall has a coffee bar where you can order coffee or desserts. When you order, they have you hold the electronic card up to a machine where they punch in what you ordered and it scans into the card. You can keep going to whatever counter you want and order whatever you want and they just keep tacking it onto your card. At the end when you walk out, you pay for it all at once.  Their pizza is very good, their tiramisu and hot chocolate are also very good. We haven't tried the pasta or salad.

So when we went to Vapiano the first time, we got pizzas. I got a veggie pizza, it had red and yellow bell peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, zucchini, and eggplant (which I picked off because yuck eggplant). It's a thin-crust pizza, kind of light on sauce and cheese. My lovely Italian roommate is always whining that most places here don't have "real" Italian pizza because the crusts are too thick and they are drowning in sauce and cheese, etc. Vapiano pizza is good. Very good. I want that. Right now. Followed by tiramisu, which Jenn and I nicknamed Heaven in a Cup. Yes, it was good.

Next time I go to Vapiano I will take a picture for you, of my pizza and my heaven in a cup.

Update: Tuesday 1 Jan

Hi! Happy 2013! I hope everyone's New Year's was good! Mine was great. A few hours ago, I got home from a weekend in the UK and I had a great time.

So let's see then. To start off with, last Friday Jennifer and I went to the airport to meet this internet stranger for the first time ever. My Finnish friend Anni is very silly. Also, I will have you know that although we took tons and tons of pictures all weekend, this girl cannot take a good picture to save her life.

This is the best I've got:

And of course it's also not the best, but it'll do. Some runner-ups are…

This one which I only just saw now… It's grainy.
This one where I was talking and she was making weird faces.
THIS ONE that she wasn't supposed to even be in.
This one where… Well, there came a point some time last night where we all just started acting goofy… This was a long, long time after that.
Finally, this one featuring a silly face from Anni again.

Okay. So we met in the airport, flew to Birmingham, stood waiting for a bus for a long time (during which I sent a few voice messages to my parents just for fun using the airport's free internet). We had an awesome time wandering around trying to figure out where we were in Birmingham before just taking a taxi (about 10 pounds) to the hostel.

The next morning, we got up bright and early so we could get back to the center of Birmingham and figure out where we were supposed to meet our bus to London. We took a coach. It was cheaper than the train, and it wasn't too bad of a ride. Even if it took a little longer (three hours each way). In London, we met up with another internet stranger who comes from Wolverhampton in the UK and took a train to come meet up with us.  His name is Hal.

This is me and the side of Hal's face on a random bridge in London. It was a little windy.

Also not a great picture. What can I say, we had Jenn as our photographer. Never hire Jenn as a photographer. This one of Hal and Anni at Pizza Hut in London is quite a bit better, and I think this picture that I took is absolutely adorable but I might be biased... We met up with one of my American friends from France with her boyfriend at Pizza Hut though, it was nice to see her.

So we kind of just wandered around London. Anni had never been and there were a few places I hadn't been as well, and it was just something to do. Our day in London was pretty nice though, and we escaped without spending much money.

The next day we had to ourselves, because it was Sunday and the trains weren't running so much. We had reserved that day for exploring Birmingham, but we ended up spending most of the day at the mall. The UK has that annoying kind of rain that is cold and very light, like a constant misty sprinkle, and it was also windy. So spending the day inside seemed like a good idea. Not to mention, they have this really awesome mall and I haven't been to a mall in so long because the Netherlands doesn't have any. Neither does Finland, so Jenn and Anni were also equally happy to spend the day in the mall.

We bought a few too many books because the UK has very cheap books and they were having a lot of book sales. We also managed to find a Build-a-Bear workshop and well… These are just not the kind of things you can find in most of the world, so everyone insisted we make bears together. Which we did. I love them.

Monday, New Year's Eve, we went to Telford to meet the final two of the internet strangers that we were meant to meet this weekend. I know, meeting internet strangers isn't always safe, but we made it home alive and we had a good time. I wish I could show you pictures of all of us together but Anni has them and she went to bed before uploading anything.

Due to shortness of staff, the trains on New Year's Eve were often cancelled so we had to head back to Birmingham the first chance we got. We ended up back in Birmingham around four in the afternoon and were tired after a long weekend, so we went to Starbucks and sat there using their internet and chatting with each other for two hours until they closed, at which point we walked around the city a bit and then went to find dinner and sat around using their internet and talking amongst ourselves for several hours before they were closing around nine, then we walked to where we had intended to watch fireworks just to make sure we could find it.

We found it rather easily, so we walked as far down the road as we could (this road was lined with nightclubs and bars and lots of happy drunk people saying HAPPY NEW YEAR! It wasn't bad) before heading back down a side road where we found a café and sat around drinking tea and hot chocolate and eating bread until around 10:30 when we headed to Centenary Square. There, we sat around and waited, and took goofy pictures for an hour and a half, then the square filled up and people started counting down and then everyone yelled "happy new year!" and there was an awesome firework show, then we hurried down the street to catch a taxi back to our hostel to get ready to leave for the airport the next morning.

I had a great weekend. And I have some pretty great friends from all over the place. The entire trip was very well worth it.

So to my grandparents, thank you for the generous Christmas gift, and if you would like to know where it went, I have a picture for that:

Meet my lovely new bedmate Max, and my stack of 14 books that I purchased brand new for awesomely low prices. I love them both!

Update: Wednesday 26 Dec

Hi!

Today I want to tell you about my Christmas.

I mean, really there isn't much to tell. But I had a lot of fun anyway so here you have it.

So I guess at midnight on Christmas eve (or I suppose then that is very early Christmas morning), it is Dutch tradition (for those who are still religious) to go to midnight mass, and then go home and have breakfast (yes, at one or two in the morning) and open gifts. I was not there for that part, though Tessa's mom thought I would be. I wasn't. It's okay. I got Tessa's house at about half past noon Christmas day, we would have sat around and watched movies but Tessa and I had planned to go to the cinema. We went and saw a movie in Dutch, I was so proud of how much I understood. I'm making progress. Then we went back to Tessa's house, and we had dinner. Just me, Tessa, her sister and her parents. Nothing fancy, it was still a good dinner though.

After dinner, we played Monopoly and ate Dutch apple pie. You know I hate Monopoly, but I was trying to be a good sport. When Tessa's sister said let's play Monopoly and Tessa said "no, no, no, no, no!" I said sure. So we played Monopoly. In Dutch, of course. It wasn't too bad, but when Tessa was the first to run out of money, I lost interest in the game and it was harder for me to pay attention to the amounts of money they were demanding from me, so I did my best to also run out of money so I could join Tessa. Tessa who was cooking appelflappen and peerflappen. They are… these little pastries… Like this: flat sheet of dough, put apples/pears in the middle, fold it in half so it is a triangle stuffed with apples/pears, press the edges with forks. Bake. They puffed up nice and pretty. The pears were an experiment. Usually they only make them with apples.

This morning, Second Christmas day, was the more extended-family Christmas day. Yes, all Dutch people celebrate two Christmas days. The 25th and the 26th. We watched movies on TV all day. Tessa told me they do that every Christmas. Her family started arriving around three in the afternoon. I had met her grandmother before, but couldn't remember if I had met any of the others. Either way, every one of them came in and gave me an enormous hug. I may have met them at Tessa's graduation party, I don't know. I was drowning that day. I had only been in the country for 2 weeks and my ears were completely untrained to Dutch.

Probably around four or five, we all got ready to sit down to dinner. The fun part was that the electricity kept blowing. On the second Christmas day, they do this thing with a special kind of grill that sits in the middle of the table, and then a bunch of raw meats that you can cook and eat yourself throughout the meal. It was really cool. The problem was that there were 10 of us, so we had one traditional grill thing and two of those kind of grills that have a grill lid that—well I'm not very good at describing any of this. Here is a link to the one grill (I managed to find the exact grill for that one) and the others were kind of like this, except probably bigger and… nicer. Anyway, all three of those were plugged in and the power kept going out so we turned off everything except for one small light and the grills and ate mostly by candlelight. It was pretty cool.

Aside from the raw meats they had made salad and fries and boiled potatoes and some other things that didn't interest me like cabbage and such. And they had bread. I always like bread. I just ate a lot of meat. You know what, I don't buy meat. If I want to eat a big meal of meats that I can cook myself on the spot, then leave me be and let me eat. So… beef, chicken, these skewers (which I first thought were chicken but when I cooked one and tried it, the texture was more like pork so basically I have no idea what those were), little sausages, and some kind of breaded meat patties that were probably like Dutch kroketten or something similar. I really have no idea. I just know that I ate way too much. And in the end, Tessa's aunt and I took care of cooking the rest of the beef that was left over so that it could go in the fridge, and when we stacked it all on the tray after it was cooked I kept sneaking pieces of that. It was all pretty good. Horribly indulgent. But good.

Then, of course, ice cream for dessert. Ice cream and pudding and lots of whipped cream because whipped cream is good.

Tessa's grandmother sat next to me at dinner and she doesn't speak any English. She kept asking me all of these questions, the first one being (roughly) can you understand much of what people are saying? She is a very nice lady.

I was not expecting gifts, because I just wanted to go for the company and the experience. But Tessa's parents brought me some really delicious chocolate from Belgium, and Tessa bought me some really smelly bath set.

All in all, it was really nice and I'm very thankful that they allowed me to join them for Christmas.

It was also really nice to realize how much I could really understand of everything they were saying over the last two days. It makes me feel kind of really proud. Now if only I wasn't too chicken to ever respond to anyone in Dutch… I have to do some studying for my Dutch exam the second week of January anyway, maybe I'll learn a little something and stop being so chicken. Also, going to the movies so often really helps me too. Every movie has Dutch subtitles. Yet another opportunity to learn. I'll get there some day.

Okay, I lied. There was a lot to tell.

Update: Saturday 15 Dec

I wish I had an oven. Really, I do. I want homemade Christmas cookies. Or fudge. Or both. And other baked things. Like potatoes. And pasta things. And… Well you probably get the point.

Yesterday, Sara needed to use up her eggs before she left for Italy for Christmas next week, so she came into the kitchen just as I finished making my dinner and she started cooking. She made these little fried dough balls covered in sugar, she said it was a recipe from her grandmother. She asked if I had anything to put in the middle of them and I told her all I have is bananas so she mashed up one of my bananas and put it in the dough… Man, those things were delicious. They made my tummy feel awful for the rest of the night, so I probably will never eat them again, but they were still pretty good. There are some left over but like I said, I’m not touching them. It was probably the whole “deep-fried" part that was the tummy problem…

One more week of classes. And then Christmas break. I can’t wait. I’m tired. I don’t get enough sleep. I go to bed early and then lay in bed trying to sleep for hours. Before I left the US I got some Tylenol PM and only this week I’ve been taking those every night because I had this horrible cold and I’d wake up in the morning with a headache and feeling exhausted still, and it was impossible to get through the day... and those pills completely got rid of that problem. But there aren’t very many of them… So I can’t keep taking them every night.

I don’t really have much to say. I just haven’t posted in 10 days and it made me feel bad. I can’t wait for Christmas, but it doesn’t really feel like Christmas anyway because I’m not willing to go spend money on Christmas decorations, and I’ll be virtually alone during Christmas break except on Christmas day, and the 4 days that I go to the UK with Jenn. Tessa invited me to spend Christmas with her family, and for that I am very thankful.

That’s about it I guess. It’s snowed twice in the last couple weeks, really wet snow that didn’t stay. I want real snow. That super fluffy stuff. Maybe we’ll get some eventually… Oh well!

Update: Wednesday 5 Dec

Seeing a movie in the Netherlands is very different. I've been going a lot lately, I should know.

Ever since Jenn and I got these Unlimited cards for the local theater chain, we've been trying to make at least one movie a week, to make the card more than worth the money we spend on it.

I think I posted here before about how in the movie theaters in the Netherlands they have assigned seating. Jenn and I can buy our movie tickets from machines at the entrance to the cinema by scanning the barcode on the card, and it pulls up a map of the theater so you can pick your seats. That's nice. We've learned we don't like sitting at the very top row... Not big fans of the front rows either. We're getting rather picky.

We bought our unlimited cards a few days before I left for the States, probably the 14th or 15th of November. So for that month we only paid 10 euros for the remainder of the month. Even with me gone for 7 days, we managed to go to five movies.

Two of them were 3D. In the Netherlands, they make you pay one or two euros for the 3D glasses. I get them free with my unlimited card, thankfully. Those 3D glasses make me disoriented. Everything gets blurry and I have to take the glasses off to keep my eyes from crossing. I can't focus on things on the screen. Unless, of course, they are holding still. Then the screen spins off to look at something else in the movie and I go cross-eyed again. I don't like it. It also makes me feel very sleepy, even when I'm not tired. It messes with my brain and I wish all the good movies didn't have to come out in 3D. The Hobbit is out on the 12th and it's in 3D. Why?! Oh well, I must go.

Also, it took me a while to realize but of course they don't have those green screens that tell the movie rating. Why would they? It's an American thing. You're just so used to seeing it though...

They also don't have previews that are attached to movies. You know how when you go to a movie when it first comes out, or go to it 5 months later in the cheap theater, or buy it as a DVD, it always has the same previews no matter what? Not the case for the Netherlands. It makes sense that it wouldn't be, half the previews they play are for Dutch movies, and even the American movies have different release dates here (it's usually earlier, yay). They change the previews depending on what movies are coming out soon. That said, usually in the US they give each movie previews for movies with genres related to the movie it is attached to. Also can see why they do that, attract the viewers to movies that are similar to their interests based on what movies they are already seeing.

And those previews for Dutch movies? I wouldn't mind going to see one. I would have no one to go with though. No one wants to see movies in Dutch. Such a sad story for me. I guess I don't have enough control of Dutch to go see a movie in Dutch anyway, but still. I want to. I always get distracted by the Dutch subtitles on English movies. I have to force myself not to watch the subtitles, because I miss important information.

P.S. Almost forgot. When my teacher said I "make my own sentences" that's just what she means. I put the sentences together myself rather than copying and memorizing something I read on the internet, or Google translate.

Update: Monday 3 Dec

I'm getting mixed signals from something my French teacher said today. I can't decide whether or not to be offended. Every Monday we have to give a sort of presentation in French, no more than two or three minutes long. I usually don't say much because somehow I always get cowed into doing the topics that no one wants, because I wait 'til everyone else takes their pick before I choose. There's a reason no one wants those topics though... They are impossible to research.

So today I talked my full two minutes and for feedback, my teacher said that it's good that I make my own sentences, that I really have the French base down well.

Wait. So does no one else make their own sentences? I find that hard to believe. So are you saying this because you are shocked that I actually know how to make my own sentences? Do you think I am really bad at French or something, just because I don't talk much? I realize that if I don't say anything, she has nothing off of which to base her opinions on how well I can speak. But... what?

Oh come on. I'm good at French. Most of my classmates hate our class, that was a well-known fact to me. Last week it came out that they hate it because they find it too difficult. Well gee, and here I was finding it too simple. Things I learned six years ago.

She did, however, say that my grammar was perfect. I'm a bit confused... I guess it doesn't matter though. Apparently we are graded simply on whether or not we show up to class. Miss more than three classes out of twelve and you fail.

Today, I bought an advent calendar for one euro, it's purple and has Tinkerbell's face on it. I don't care if it's childish, sometimes I like to be a child. And I wanted to eat all the chocolate at once but Jenn told me I couldn't. She's no fun.

This week is Sinterklaas, the Dutch holiday celebrating Santa Claus. The Santa Claus that is popular in North America originated from Sinterklaas.

To celebrate, my class is doing a sort of secret-Santa type thing, Dutch style. Everyone has to write a short (2-line-ish) poem for their person, and buy a small gift (5-euros-ish) and on Thursday during our project meeting we're going to do our little exchange.

I don't know what to write. I don't want it to be too personal, or be too impersonal. I hate things like this, I hate people reading my writing too. Well, I hate writing things that are meant for just one person, that everyone is going to see (because of course we'll have to read the poem we receive out loud to the class). I am so not looking forward to this.