Weekend Update

For those of you who did not know (which are probably most of you), Saturday was Queen's Day in Holland. Our Dutch roommate Karina has been talking about Queen's Day for weeks. Apparently, it is quite crazy in Holland that day. She was pretty bummed not to be spending Queen's Day at home this year, so some friends from ultimate frisbee decided to have a party Saturday night in honor of Queen's Day and Karina. Saturday afternoon, Karina and I made a Dutch dessert called Vlaai (pronounced "fly" and an awful lot like pie). Well, it didn't turn out like the traditional Dutch dessert, but it did turn out as something. It was like a pie, but the crust was more pastry/bread like than a flaky pie crust (the crust actually had yeast in it and it was supposed to rise, so I put it outside, but it was an abnormally cool day here so it didn't rise very much). We filled it with raspberries and strawberries (which are very hard to come by here - there's only one store here that sells them). Here's how it looked:

We had dinner at our friend Daniel's house. It was a lot of fun, very international. We had falafel (which I hadn't had since I was in Israel when I was 14), couscous, garlic bread, chipote (kind of a tortilla-type bread thing that is everywhere here), chai masala (spiced tea with milk...yum), and vlaai.

Sunday afternoon, Nate, Karina, and I walked down our road a few minutes to watch the last half of the Manchester United vs Arsenal game with some locals. I wish I could have taken more pictures so you could get an accurate idea of our setting. However, some people are funny about pictures here. Kids love getting pictures taken (except for that one boy that Nate made cry), but many adults do not like pictures. Essentially, we watched the game in a stand alone room - made of plywood (?) beams to hold up the aluminum sheet which was the roof. Then, along the walls (aka - between the beams in order to make it feel like the room had walls), were burlap sacks and pieces of cardboard. There were 30 or so local guys (no girls other than Karina and me) watching the game on this small tv. Here's the picture I secretly took. Not the best...

Despite my lack of interest in sports (except of course for Duke basketball), this was very fun. The local guys were very vocal and into the game. Sadly for Nate, Man U lost.

The other big news of the weekend is that Nate and I finally had some GI trouble. I'll spare you the details, but we are doing much better today. I think it might have been the ground beef that I bought the other day. We made sloppy joes with it Friday night. Saturday, Patei (our other roommate - not sure if I've talked about him yet), Nate and I had some upset stomachs. Apparently, Karina has a GI tract of steel - she ate everything we ate but didn't get sick.