More Photos

Here's a few more that wouldn't fit on the last post!

The Great Cranberry Quest

Over the last two days, Johan showed me all around the town, and I took a bunch of pictures (although somewhat awkwardly - Rijssen isn't exactly as full of tourists as Amsterdam!). I even got to see the one and only windmill today, although I promise there were no lattes for sale inside. :) The town is beautiful, and we had perfect, gorgeous sunny weather for it: 18ºC! Yesterday, I also had a brief moment of bravery. We needed to hurry back to the house to start dinner, but we still needed one ingredient for the next day's lunch. So, Johan went back to the house, and I ventured to the store on my own to buy cranberries. I found them and checked out, even using one of the tiny handful of Dutch words I know (dankjewel!) to thank the cashier. Success!

Finally, today, we had a wonderful picnic in the park. I made my favorite sandwich (proving my "Sandwich Artisan Extraordinaire" title that I had claimed on Facebook) and we took the sandwiches to the local park and watched the ducks and other birds playing (or perhaps getting a bit frisky!) in the pond. Then we walked slowly through the park, enjoying the view, the sunshine, and of course one another's company. Here's a sample of the views from today!

What the duck?

On Monday, I got to meet the coworkers, who asked all sorts of questions about Seattle, and tried to convince me to follow their duck on twitter. Apparently a duck was laying eggs outside the office, and they wanted to set up a camera for a live stream, and create a twitter account for the duck. They even wanted my input on what to name the duck! Hah! I got as far as "Quackmire" before realizing that if the duck was laying eggs, it had to be a girl...

Later on, I finally got my first moment of the "you do WHAT??" variety of culture shock. I'm rather surprised it took this long, and even more surprised that it was something so random. We were washing dishes one night, and we had just filled a small tub with hot, soapy water, and begun the chore. Soon, the tub was full, and we turned off the hot water. "So, uh, where do you rinse them?" I asked. I was informed that rinsing was unnecessary, as long as most of the bubbles were off, and then drying them with a towel would suffice. I was rather flabbergasted, and proceeded to rinse the bubbles as best as I could with the soapy water.

"Are you crazy?" I asked. "Eww!! How can you not rinse your dishes?" I was again reassured that they were clean. Later on, I failed to get all the potato residue off a masher, and was told that for all my freaking out about the soap, I didn't even get the dish all the way clean.

"Well, I would have seen it if it wasn't COVERED IN SOAP!" I retorted. We "argued" about the soap until all the dishes were put away, and to this moment, I'm a little weirded out by it, but, well... all of my food has tasted fine thus far, and I haven't gotten sick yet, so... well, if it's normal here... still trying to wrap my head around it!

Hunger Games and Food Babies

Our four month anniversary was lovely. I woke up to a delightful breakfast in bed (AWW!!! ARE YOU SERIOUS!?) and then we enjoyed some hot coffee, and took a train into town for dinner and a movie. We saw The Hunger Games, even though I hadn't read the book. I will now! It was really good! After all the hype about Twilight (which I personally don't care for) I was skeptical about The Hunger Games. But as it seems, our generation got this one right. I very much enjoyed the movie (I laughed, I cried...) and will soon start the book. Turns out this book was one of my presents, so I may even start it on the plane!

Following the movie, we went to a Greek restaurant called Aphrodite (appropriate, ja?) and ordered blindly off the menu. Neither of us know much Greek, and I hardly know any Dutch, so we literally picked random items and hoped for the best. And the best we got! The food was plentiful and delicious, and we left with substantial food babies.

The next morning, it was my turn to provide breakfast, this time by cooking Johan and his sister real American pancakes! We had a little challenge with the scale (it kept turning off in the middle of weighing things!) but they turned out fine, and everybody enjoyed them. Even Chelsea got a little miniature one!

Ramadiebambambamie

On Friday morning, we packed up our suitcases and said farewell to the North Sea, and then hauled our heavy suitcases and other baggage through a series of trains, ultimately arriving in the town of Rijssen - at long last, I could see the town where all the day-to-day activities take place! It was thrilling to finally see the street whose name I had written so often on envelopes, the couch and the walls that were always in the background of our Skype dates, the stairs that I never imagined were so steep, the fluffy dog Chelsea that I had long ago dubbed "the pet dragon" for her impressive volume of snoring. We both just kept looking at each other and exclaiming, "I'm here!" "You're here!" Amazing.

I've also been listening closely to the DJs on the Dutch radio stations (and the Siri-like voice on the trains) and picking up a few words, namely "raar" (or more realistically, "RRRRAAAARRR!" with all the R's rolled dramatically) which means "weird." Definitely a good one to keep in mind! I also saw on a tweet or something, "Ramadiebambambamie," which means... well, nothing. But due to the adj+noun=onelongword format in Dutch, they do have some awfully long words, so I had to ask... but we're still laughing about Ramadiebambambamie.