How to have More Fun at Art Museums.

I really like going to art museums. A whole lot. Maybe it's because my dad's an art professor so I have learned a lot about art history from him. Maybe it's because I like beautiful things. And I like to learn. But along the way I've figured out a lot of things that help make trips to a museum more fun, so here are ten suggestions for having a great time.

1. Bring a friend.
Some people will feel differently about this. I have a bunch of friends who really enjoy going to restaurants and movies alone. I am not usually one of these people. However, I would much rather go alone than with a big group or with people who don't want to be there, and I do enjoy re-visiting museums solo. In London I would often stop in the National Gallery to visit a painting I'd made friends with there. But a bunch of the activities I'll suggest later are better with a friend.

2. Do some prep work. 
This is especially important if you don't really enjoy going to museums or don't feel like you know very much about art. Sometimes just looking up some famous pieces of art on the museum website and learning a bit about them before you go will make you feel lots better. Five pieces, I'd say. In different genres or eras, so that when you find them it will be like a present. Or if you don't have time for this, you could plan your visit so you can join a tour or use an audio guide. These will also help you so you don't feel like you're floundering.

3. When you get the museum map, find a place to sit down and write all over it. 
This is something I have only done once, but it was so excellent, I plan on making it part of my museum-ing routine. This past weekend Owen and I arrived at the Rijksmuseum about noon. We were thinking we would look around the museum for about an hour and then find lunch, but the line for the coatroom was SO LONG that we made a new plan and went to eat first, bringing along our museum maps so we could make a plan while we waited for our burgers. We then circled all the rooms that we wanted to visit and then made a route for ourselves (with dotted lines, treasure-map style). It was great! Usually, I'm fumbling with a map and trying to make decisions with my museum buddy along the way, and it's tiring and sometimes frustrating. This made things a lot easier, and meant that we didn't feel like we needed to visit every room.

4. Don't make the security guards nervous.
Never touch the art unless specifically requested to do so by the signage, but it's also a good idea not to get close enough that the security guards are watching you. If you're trying to point out something in the painting, you can use the shadow of your hand to point. If you want to lean in to see the details, keep your hands well away. However, when touching is allowed, go for it! The British Museum is particularly fantastic about this. They have these little "touching history" kiosks, where an attendant will let you hold coins and pieces of pottery that are CRAZY OLD, and will tell you all about them. I held a coin with Cleopatra's face on it. Yep. That Cleopatra. Amazing.

5. Take care of your body.
When there are seats available, sit in them, even if you're not desperate yet. Snack breaks or at least water breaks are a must. Our bodies aren't usually used to that much standing, so it can be surprisingly exhausting to spend some hours at a museum. If you're about to go into a ticketed exhibit, use the bathroom first.

6. If you're not liking a room or a gallery, don't try to force yourself to like it.
I sometimes feel duty-bound to enjoy art. It's okay if you don't like everything. If you're bored by the state portraits, or the weird music that goes with the contemporary exhibit is freaking you out, go to another part of the museum. Don't sweat it.

7. In rooms full of portraits: compare them. 
Which of the subjects looks friendliest? Least approachable? Who is the happiest with his clothes? Who is least happy to be sitting for a portrait? Are any of the portraits making eye contact with each other? Which ones would be friends with each other? What nicknames did this lady get called?

8. Treat big paintings full of characters like a comic books with blank speech bubbles.
Abigail, Owen and I encountered this gem in the Philadelphia Art Museum. There are so many little stories going on it's fantastic to make up dialogue for all the groups of people. The cupid in the bottom left never really learned to fly, the two over on the right hand edge half way up the painting look like the man is telling the lady, "you get in that water!" "but Dad! it's so nice sunbathing here with my friend." And Europa! She doesn't look particularly ravished, but she does seem happier about the flowers than the wind-god spitting at her. Don't worry too hard, though there's a cupid on the right hand side aiming at him.

9. Play I Spy.
A similar idea to the previous game, this one works best with giant still lifes and with street scenes where people's facial expressions are less prominent, but there's a lot of stuff to look at. This Avercamp painting is a great one for this sort of thing. I spy a bird dive-bombing. I spy a couple where the girl's not that excited about her date. I spy someone with a GIANT yellow feather in is hat. It's a lot of fun.

10. Bring crayons.
This is my favorite way of visiting art museums. I stole this idea from an awesome mom taking her two little kids through the modern section of the Met. They were really into it, and I was jealous. Pick a room that's mostly empty or an unpopular time of day, and set yourself up with a little box of crayons. I'm partial to the 24 color box, as it's small and light and gives you a decent variety. You need to have a lot of time because trying to copy a work of art is not easy. I've had a lots of people mistake me for an art student, and some people offer suggestions, but the kids get the most excited of all. One time in the Richmond art museum I was copying a giant Monet onto a little folded-over 8 1/2 by 11, and a mom and two kids came upon me. The kids were so excited to see someone copying the picture and they were in total awe when their mom asked "is she using fancy art materials?" and they just chirped back, "She's using crayons!" and they walked off making plans to bring their own next time. I had been a little anxious that time because the map for the museum said that no one was allowed to bring in paints and easels. When a security guard wandered by I was all about to make excuses and apologize, only to find he was just stopping in to ask if I wanted a little folding chair.

I hope you visit museums, and I hope you have a great time.

Holidays in Cambridge and Leiden

It has been a long time since we’ve posted anything but it will be an understatement to say that we've been busy. There have been adventures with a mouse caught in our new extractor fan over the stove, a stomach bug on Christmas Day, the experience of moving via bike, removing the rust stains from our former landlady’s floor only to remove the finish on the floor as well, spending a night on the frigid tile floor in an airport and making a Christmas tree out of cardboard, and a lot of walking cold and wet attempting to transfer utilities and accomplish errands in a country that treats holiday vacations with the utmost of seriousness. From this description you could think that we are not all that happy, or that our time has been more trial than joy. If so, you would be mistaken. To tell the stories, I will employ a fictional grandchild, Ted.

OWEN: Our first Christmas after we were married, we had just moved by bike.

CLARA: That’s right, oh goodness. You were a saint trekking back and forth.

TED: No way! Grandma, they had cars back then.

CLARA: Yes, and at that point our only car was back in the U.S.

OWEN: Yes, in old country. But the Dutch love their bikes, and we still had the use of our landlady’s at the time.

TED: So you moved, like, a couch, on the back of a bike?

OWEN: We didn’t have a couch yet.  Or any large furniture.  So it was a lot of trips, some of them on foot, but it was doable.

We went to the thrift store, did a lot of searching on Marktplaats (the Dutch version of Craig’s list) and ikea.nl to find furnishing for our apartment, so before long we had a used fridge, a used washing machine (which we installed ourselves complete with cutting and reconnecting wires and it doesn’t leak and hasn’t electrocuted us, but washes our clothes beautifully), a used bookshelf, a used couch, and after a well-researched trip to Ikea we emerged victorious, and the pile of boxes came to our new doorstep that night. Many of our new friends have been so kind and helpful, we don’t know how we could have got the fridge home without some of our friends and their car. People say that constructing Ikea furniture with a significant other is a real test of a relationship, but if that is the case, Owen and I have nothing to fear. We have had a blast putting everything together, the crowning achievement being the STORA bed (lofted to make the most use of our little studio), which was quite the challenge and is now pretty impressive. Constructing the furniture has brought back memories of getting legos for Christmas. Except in the end we get furniture! It’s really starting to feel like home.

No sooner had we had three nights in our apartment than we got on a plane and flew off to England to be with one of my college friends for Christmas!

CLARA: Oh that was just such an adventure.

TED: For you guys, “adventure” is code for “things going terribly wrong.”

CLARA: We went to England to visit a lovely friend of mine from college. She was studying at Cambridge. And she set us up so nicely in a flat all to ourselves, just around the corner from her place. It was really lovely. Except that your grandpa got a stomach bug.

OWEN: The night before Christmas. Or the morning of, depending how you count.

TED: Yuck! So you didn’t do anything on Christmas just sat around in someone ELSE’s empty apartment?

CLARA: Well. We took care of each other. And we relaxed, and watched a movie. And Erin, my friend, was such a dear. I had Christmas Breakfast with her, and Owen—Your grandpa—slept, and we skyped with our families. It was actually really lovely.

OWEN: But the rest of the week was also lovely.

CLARA: Yes! We started out taking the Stansted Express into London! Words cannot express what a joy it was to be back in England: you could see that it was England just by looking out the window.  There’s something so lovely about the rolling landscape and the blue painted trim...

OWEN: And the English language everywhere.

CLARA: Yes! It was so odd to be back in a place where English was the primary language!

OWEN: It didn’t stop our Dutch-learning brains from working in “translate” mode, though. I kept trying to put together Dutch sentences in my mind before I said anything, and your grandmother even said “Bedankt” when the conductor handed her back her ticket.

OWEN: We walked around the city and got lunch at a pub on the South Bank.

CLARA: It wasn’t the pub we were aiming for, that one was closed, but it was so lovely.  All decorated for Christmas, it was cheery and warm and balm to our souls on a wet windy day.

OWEN: Fortified with lunch, your grandmother showed me Shakespeare’s window in Southwark Cathedral, and visited her friends at the Tate Modern.

TED: I thought your friends were in Cambridge?

CLARA: No, dear, he means the paintings I had known there when I had studied in London.  We met my real friend at King’s Cross station and took the train together into Cambridge.

OWEN: Do you remember the Indian take-out?

CLARA: So delicious!

Other adventures in our week with Erin involved a Boxing day barrel race in Grantchester, long, happy conversations, board games, picture telephone (adapted for three players), visiting Churchill college (where Owen studied in Cambridge) and taking pictures with all the sculptures. Also Erin introduced us to some magnificent British comedy, and I will never look at Chummy from Call the Midwife the same way again.

After leaving England we returned to a new apartment still full of unconstructed furniture, without curtains on its giant storefront windows, and a great many problems still to fix, but we have been working happily and faithfully and it is nice to be able to see the progress.

New Years was amazing in Leiden. We went to a really lovely Oud and Nieuw party, and had a really great time getting to know some of the people from our own church and friends of friends. When we got down to midnight we all chanted together counting backwards (in Dutch of course) and the whole group toasted with champagne and then formed a couple of circles so everyone could go around and wish every other person a happy new year, complete with kisses to the cheeks. Perhaps they knew we didn’t know? But they provided the cue “three kisses” in case we got confused. No hugs though, as “Hugging is much more intimate.” But the reason that new year's here is amazing is the fireworks. It may be a little old brick city, but EVERYONE buys and sets off fireworks. It’s only legal for the one day so starting at 10 am there were bangs going off, but at midnight? There is no official city display, and there doesn’t need to be, because everywhere you look there are intoxicated Dutch setting off colorful explosives. We walked back soon after the hour hit and there were rockets shooting up on every side, glittering over the canals, illuminating the old city. Random strangers shook our hands and wished us a healthy, happy, or lucky new year.

We wish you one as well.

Thanksgiving in Leiden

As many long-time readers of this blog will know, striving for gratitude has been pretty important in my life. Last year, my housemates and I had a "wall of thankfulness," a wall covered with post-its noting things for which we were thankful. It was right next to our kitchen table, so as we ate together, or cooked, or just sat in the kitchen, we had a constant reminder of all we were and had been grateful for. 

This year, Owen and I took an idea my cousin Carly mentioned about a tree of thankfulness, and we adhered a paper cut-out of a tree to the large window we have in our entranceway. 

I cut and painted a whole bunch of leaves, and as we were thankful for things, we wrote them on leaves and stuck them to the tree. While we have many things we are thankful for, one day in particular marks the growth of an unusually high number of leaves of thankfulness. I will not tell the whole, long, brutal story of sending ourselves a shipment of our belongings, but please believe me when I say it was wretched, and took months and countless hours of emails, phone calls (some of which were in Dutch!), paperwork, and it ended up being much more expensive than we expected. It was basically a nightmare. But like a nightmare, it ended! And on November 21st, we got all eight undamaged boxes and four small folding chairs: our one cubic meter of household goods for which we are so so so grateful.

It still seems like a miracle.

The colored tissue paper made it feel even more like presents!

We are reunited with our books!

Hooray for organic sugar!  Especially the brown and powdered!

My Dad's painting!

And warm clothes and more books and a hammock and a turkish rug

And so many wonderful kitchen things! (And maple syrup!)

So. Happy.

Another really lovely thing which left us intensely thankful was having our Thanksgiving celebrations. The week of Thanksgiving, I had a joyful visit with my sister in Sweden, and late on Thanksgiving Day I returned to be with Owen. On Saturday, many of our new friends from our Bible study got together for a real Thanksgiving feast.

Here I am attaching the green bean casserole to Owen's bike.

And here's my bike loaded up with bike bags for the first time.

It was a feast. 

And full of good company.

We don't feel like strangers here anymore.

Because we celebrated Thanksgiving on Saturday, it fell as the last day before advent, the last day of the liturgical year.  As we begin Advent, it is wonderful to look back with Thanksgiving, and look forward with hope. There's much we do not know about what is coming in the next weeks or months, but we rejoice in a God who has poured out his faithfulness and love into our uncertain lives. Our cup overflows. 

Be present, O merciful God, and protect us through the hours of this night, so that we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life may rest in your eternal changelessness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

WINDMILL DAY!

Owen and I have been in The Netherlands for a long time now. Almost three months. There has been entirely too little of us geeking out about how cool the Dutch are on this blog. Let's change that now. With windmills. This past Saturday we visited not one but two windmills. 

This picture of De Put was taken on a different day than other photos appearing in this post.

Our plan was to visit "the big one" up in the North of the city center, The Valk which is a windmill eight stories tall and open to the public as a museum. 

The mill is so tall because it was located in the city and had to be higher than the surrounding buildings to have free access to the wind. So the bottom levels of the mill were the millers' home.

including this adorable kitchen

Other floors told the story of the history of milling, the history of windmills, how the windmill shaped Dutch economics and society and even the landscape. There were lots of cool little models and things, and a short documentary film available in four different languages, including English of course.

When we got up to the fifth floor, there's a balcony? Porch? not sure what to call it, that goes all around the windmill, so we could go out and admire the city and the windmill and look at it all with fresh eyes based on what we were learning. One of the things I learned was that the Dutch brought the windmill idea back from the crusades but had to alter them to fit the Dutch weather. In Turkey (I think it was Turkey?) the winds almost always blow the same way so they could have the windmills fixed in a certain direction. In The Netherlands, the winds blow from lots of different directions, unsteadily, unpredictably, so they needed a way to turn the mill to face the wind. Sometimes they built little box mills around a stationary center post so the whole box of the mill can be turned around that center point(De Put is one of these mills). And sometimes they made bigger mills (like De Valk) out of a stone or brick tower, with a turnable cap up top, so it too could shift directions to face into the wind. 

This is the giant wheel they'd use to turn the direction of the cap of the windmill. 

Our beautiful Leiden. Can you see the other windmill??

you can see the sail rolled up and wrapped around the white beam here.

Another thing we learned: Windmills needed to be able to adjust the amount of wind they were handling at a given time, so rather than making solid wooden arms, they are latticed, and then, when in use, covered with sails. Finally, many ladder/stairs later we got to the top of the mill where all the gears would turn. De Valk is still functional, but only runs on special occasions. 

this is for you, Dan and Amanda.

It's just really cool.

After we finished our trip through De Valk, we went to the little windmill, De Put. When we were up in De Valk we could see De Put in motion, which was very exciting. When we got there however, it had stopped moving, but was open to the public so we went on inside. Because De Put is so regularly used, it had big bags of grain lying around, and you can buy some freshly milled flour as a souvenir.

We were all happy just looking at the views from the peep holes and admiring it's beautiful wooden gears when this happened. The workers were turning the wheel down below to turn the whole mill. I don't mean the windmill arms started turning, I mean the whole box mill we were standing in turned so that the mill faced into the wind and the arms could turn. You can see the video Owen took here:

Apparently all I can say about it is, "so cool," but that is how it felt. Happy Thursday everyone!

Shower... where?

Hello Friends!

This is just a quick post showing an amusing piece of our lives right now. We are looking for an apartment of our own now, as we need to be out of our current place a month from today, and so we have been to visit two places already this week (quite nice, both of them) and are excited about setting up a home.

Now, it goes without saying that an apartment in The Netherlands, particularly in the city will be either very small or very expensive or both. So we've been looking at apartments with as small as 25m square surface area, and many in the 35-40m arena. And we're pretty excited about the sparse intentional life-style it will promote. However, we are unused to some of the very creative solutions for fitting the most use out of these small spaces. For example, most Dutch apartments have the toilet all by itself in a little closet. So where does the shower go? The washing machine (if the apartment has one) is typically either in a shower room or the kitchen. And... if there is no shower room where does the shower go?

Sometimes the shower is in the kitchen too.

In this one, you can see that the left picture was taken from inside the shower pictured right 

This was an otherwise fancy apartment! Lots of light! Several decent sized rooms!

This last one doesn't even have fuzzy glass! What would you do if you had guests?!

Another post concerning an adventure with windmills coming soon.

Misadventures of the Trailing Spouse: More Bike tales, Calculus, Dutch and Foul Smelling crockpots.

I am learning new some skills. This means that there's a lot of things that I'm doing all the time that I'm not good at yet.

Example #1. Biking.
Now, for everyone who read my first story about biking, I should say I have made a lot of progress. I am no longer frightened of biking, and enjoy the freedom of being able to zip around town, particularly now that we have suitable raingear and I don't get drenched if I bike in the rain. That said, however, I'm still not a fast or confident biker and this past week or so I've had three bike crashes. In the first one, a bus came up behind me and was honking (probably not at me) and I got scared so I started biking even closer to the curb, and when I looked back to see if Owen was still with me, I swerved into the curb and ended up catching myself beautifully on the concrete. Scraped knuckles, some small bruises, but all my stage combat work has taught me to fall well, and my instincts kicked in nicely. I was mostly just rattled (as busses are usually extremely courteous towards bikes) and once I got home and had a good, "I'm glad I'm alive" cry, everything was fine.

Bike crash number two was rattling because it was so soon after the first crash. There were a lot of slippery wet leaves in the bike path, and I must have just lost my grip or something because next thing I knew the leaves and I were becoming very well acquainted. Again. No injury worth speaking of, just had a good, "why is this happening to me?" cry and got back on my bike the next day.

The third time I crashed my bike was on the way home from church and was the scariest by far. Owen and I were biking home from church and we had just zipped through an intersection on a yellow light, and found ourselves going a good bit faster than the bike ambling along in front of us. All of the sudden he swerved and then slowed down even more, so instead of trying to pass on the left (like a sensible, sane, person) I instead caught a glimpse of the giant signpost, and knew I was done for. You know in Calvin and Hobbes, when Calvin tries to practice catching or batting a baseball? The ball grows fangs and chases him. I feel this way about posts. I see a post, (which to anyone else would just be a normal unremarkable post) and I see it grow teeth and snarl, "Ima get you." My brain has time to think, "Post, what are you talking about, I'm here in the bike lane you're over there, and oh no!" Something happens, and the post gets me. This happened to me when I was little too, and I think the best explanation is one I learned in a skiing lesson. "If you're looking at it, you'll go to it." So advice to all of you who don't bike much, or might possibly be less experienced than I am: don't look at the things you don't want to run into. If you think "I'm gonna run into that." Look at something else! Preferably something far away! This crash needless to say was messier. Owen looked back just in time to see and hear my head hit the road, I got a giant bruise on my arm, the bruises around my knees were a veritable bouquet, and one of my fingers and toes still hurts five days later. It was also very public, as the older man I nearly ran into stopped and made me sit on the sidewalk for five minutes, kissed the top of my head, and told us in Dutch if I wasn't okay we could call the ambulance, and it would be okay, we would not need to pay for it! A couple other people stopped and everyone was asking me if I was okay, and I was trying hard to stop crying so they would believe me. In the end, I sat for a bit and biked the rest of the way home, but it wasn't fun, and now I'm confronted with the whole, new task of finding a general practitioner, so that I can go to a doctor, whenever that becomes necessary. I'm also beginning to seriously doubt the wisdom of a whole country biking without helmets.

Example #2. Speaking/Reading/Understanding Dutch.
It will be a great joy to be able to speak Dutch, but it is pretty tough when you're starting out. The use of the English language is one of the things I have spent a huge amount of my life studying and practicing, and my ability to communicate is an ability I treasure, so floundering in Dutch class, not knowing what to say when asked a question, or just exasperation at not being able to express myself is a hard thing. It's sad to pass bookstores and feel like a diabetic kid in a candy shop. I'm learning, I'm working on it pretty much every day, but it's hard. I also have a lot of tasks to do like, calling about the customs paperwork for our shipment, and let's just say calling government offices is never fun, even in your mothertongue. It's wretched when you have to write down the "Speekt u Engels? Mijn Nederlands is neit goed..." so that you don't freak out and forget when you have a person speaking rapid Dutch on the other end of the phone.

Example #3. Calculus.
Owen's teaching calculus twice a week, and I get to sit in on his classes which is really exciting and interesting. Also humiliating. Somewhere I had got the idea that if I worked hard and paid attention, I would not just get the math, I would excel! I had not thought I would be decidedly below average in my speed in picking up concepts, or struggling over the notation. For the second class, I had not had time to review the notes from the previous class (something I thought of as being helpful perhaps, but not necessary,) and I was the only one in the class to fail the first quiz. Lesson learned, I studied hard for the next class, and got a perfect score on my first homework (without even getting help from the teacher!) but it was still humiliating. Since then I've learned that most of these students have already taken calculus (why they're taking Intro to Calculus, I'm not sure) and that has made me feel a lot better about everything. But still. Not something I have any of the skills to breeze by in. Just have to put in a lot of hard work.

Example #4. Slowcooker shenanigans
Owen brought home a slowcooker (very rare in the Netherlands) from an Asian grocery store. The lady running the cash register had to make sure he knew "this is not a rice cooker" "Oh, yes, I know. It's for cooking things at a low heat for a long period of time." "Good." I thought, "Hurray! Something I know how to use and do!" However I spent my whole morning looking for a new apartment (we have to be out of this one in about a month) and didn't get the food into the crock pot til after lunch. But I thought, "that's okay. 8 hours on low won't work at this point, but 4 hours on high will still have this food done in time." So I carefully washed the slowcooker, and put together the meal and turned it on high. And the house slowly began to fill with the scent of.... burning plastic. I was horrified and worried, "Is this normal? Do we have a defective machine?" but found reassurance on the internet that this is indeed normal, and should only happen the first time or two as the encasing around the wiring breaks down. The house smelled so bad that I opened the windows and still had a terrible headache, so I thought. "It's a crockpot. Full of liquid. The chicken in there is frozen. It will be fine if I give it a stir and then go to the library." So that is what I did. It made me feel a lot better to not be breathing in any more burning plastic fumes, and I got some work done, ready to come home and find that the crock pot had burned everything around the base, and that only two hours later, the chicken was totally shreddable. Ladies and gentlemen, beware the vigorous Asian crockpot. I was able to salvage the meal (which did not taste at all like plastic or even burnt stuff, and was actually pretty great) but I think it will take some work to identify the cooking patterns of this particular crockpot, and it may be awhile before I have the confidence to put it on the "auto" setting.

This has all sounded pretty sad. So let me end with this. My last year at Mary Baldwin I started weight training. Just a couple times a week, at first, and not for long at all. I had a class at the gym from 8-9:30, so it just made sense to stay for another half hour before heading back to the dorm and showering. When I started it was terrible. I hated it. I was in pain, and as one of my friends grimly told me "your muscles are actually ripping so they can grow back stronger." I had never felt so weak or pathetic, and the worst part was that when I started it didn't start going uphill. It went downhill first, for a good while before going uphill. But as I did it, I started to like it. Between Thursday and Tuesday I would miss the crazy happy exhileration, and I would find myself trying to figure out if I could go another day. By the time the spring semester rolled around I didn't have a class at the gym but I went anyways, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday the whole semester. Can I just say how fantastic it felt to lift or press or pull twice or three times as much as when I had started? By late spring I would see girls come in and I would have to try not to smile at their surprise when they used machines after me and found they needed to take off a lot of the weight before they could make a rep. So here's hoping that in six months, or eight months or by the time we leave this country, I will be happy with my past self for all the hard work when the work was hard.

Also! In all my free time when I'm not learning Dutch, calculus or battling asian slowcookers, I now write a weekly column for the Shakespeare Standard, you can see my articles here: http://www.theshakespearestandard.com/author/clara/

Foods making us happy in Leiden

One of the things that we were not expecting to be so wonderful here is the food.  Our Dutch friends helpfully warned us before we left that clothes and electronics would be much more expensive in the Netherlands than in the US, but they also said that food would be cheaper.  What they didn't tell us is that the food would be delicious.  Here are two of the star ingredients we are so delighted to be eating:

Potatoes

We had heard that potatoes are a staple of the Dutch diet.  One of Van Gogh's peasant paintings is called "The Potato Eaters"; we saw it on our trip to the Van Gogh Museum:

The Potato Eaters

Even now, french fries with mayonnaise are standard fare alongside Dutch cuisine, even if that cuisine is pancakes.  But now we know why the Dutch eat so many potatoes: Dutch potatoes are amazing.  (Something about the soft, wet soil and the mild winters, I'm guessing.)  We've been eating potatoes chopped in soups, sliced and baked with vegetables, and about once a week mashed as the topping of shepherd's pie:

Yes, Clara and I ate half of the pie so you could have a cut-away view.  Not because it was so delicious we forgot to photograph it first.

Apples

Okay, it's true: we're not yet in the habit of photographing our food before we eat it.  As further proof, here's a picture of the same dish as above, now not-containing roman apple cake:

We've made this cake several times and each time forgotten to take a picture for you.  When we post the gluten-free recipe, we'll include a photograph then.  But to give you an idea of how delicious this cake is, we fed it to a friend who afterward told us he had never before enjoyed a baked apple dessert.  Yet here is this friend, all smiles!

Some of you may recognize a game of backwards-IZZI being played.

Another way our lives are improved by the apple products here is the applesauce.  Since I'm allergic to the sulfites used to bleach most non-organic sugar, we do a lot of shopping at health-food stores, at one of which Clara found this gem of a product for 1 euro per jar:

Ingredients: apples.

It tastes like apple pie.  Sweet and tart with a beautifully thick texture... we have it on pancakes, mixed into rice pudding, or by itself as dessert.  Yum!

Delivery Burgers

Now you can order online!

Just kidding!  We got this advertisement for delivery burgers in our mail.  We're not using them in our cooking (for multiple reasons), but it is one of the foods making us happy here in Leiden.

Have you ever traveled (or moved somewhere) and been blown away by the food? Tell us in the comments!