We have an irregular Dutch lesson schedule this week (Thursday instead of Tuesday) so it is the perfect time for döner donderdag. Our favorite restaurant in all of Maastricht is Musti. It is the only food cart in the city and they serve delicious, delicious Turkish fast food. It almost makes up for not having any Mexican food here.
Update: we just finished our beef döner with fries and they were amazing!
My favorite sister is just finishing up a web development boot camp and is preparing for her job search. As part of her resume, she made her very own website, which also features her awesome travel photos (and I even get a cameo appearance). There you can see her web app projects and resume. I am so proud of her for this exciting new step! If you know a cool company looking for a web developer, please pass along her website or resume!
We just took a day-trip to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg with my newest coworker Zhiyi. On the drive there, we gained almost 500 meters elevation and got to see real snow! The country is tiny and has less than 600,000 people. Fortunately, one of the national languages is German (the others being French and Luxembourgish) so Hendrik came in very handy.
Luxembourg City is perhaps the most confusing city to navigate that I have ever visited. Not only does it have winding cobblestones streets, it also has a river that oxbow bends several times and sheer cliffs with buildings at the top and bottom. This means that one cannot navigate using streets or the river for orientation and nothing connects where one thinks it should because there is either a cliff or the river in the way. Additionally we had a nice layer of fog that prevented us from using the sun or landmarks to navigate. It is the only city I have been to that has a public elevator to get from the part of the city by the river to the party of the city on the cliff. Essentially, waking through Luxembourg City is a crash-course in thinking in 3-D!
Despite a lot of aimless wandering, the city felt like it was straight out of a fairytale. Luxembourg has the second highest GDP per capita in the world so you can imagine that everything was beautiful and clean. The palace and cathedral had gold gilded decorations. We even got to eat chocolate cake which somehow is not really a thing in the Netherlands.
It seems so much colder when below-freezing temperatures are reported in Celsius because of that darn negative sign. We didn’t even get to see a positive number today! At least the cold weather guarantees no rain and today also brought a gorgeous sunset over the chemical plant site! The way the light reflected off the shiny metal ammonia factory was breathtaking (not pictured) as was the frigid air.
Sunset over Chemelot!
We have our first Dutch lesson of the year tonight. Too bad ik heb alles vergeten.
Today my Dutch colleague informed me that it is Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year. On the third Monday of January, you know you have failed your New Year’s resolution, it still dark all the time, and it is usually cold and rainy. We were lucky to have sun today but in exchange we got extra cold. It was nothing like an Idaho winter but my bicycle decided it was too cold and the front brakes locked halfway through my commute. Fortunately I was rescued by a Frenchman who helped me disconnect my brakes so I could make it to work before I froze to death in the negative 4 deg C weather. Now after some YouTube and common sense, I have the brakes in working order again, at least until I have to go back out into the freezing weather tomorrow morning.
When we moved here, we thought life would be easy for Hendrik because he has a typical Dutch first name (voornaam). Indeed, we were right. No one has trouble with his name and for the first time in his life, they always get his name right when he calls to make restaurant reservations (no more reservations under Andrew… Don’t ask us how people regularly misheard that)! However we have only met one person actually named Hendrik, our next-door neighbor. It turns out that it was a popular name a few generations ago (and also a few centuries ago, see Prince-Bishop Hendrik of Liege and Duke Hendrik of Brabant) but it is out of fashion now.
More surprising is the popularity of my name among the Dutch. Nancy is actually quite a popular name in my generation (unlike in the US where I never had a single classmate named Nancy). In fact, it is so popular that two of my colleagues are married to women named Nancy. This gets particularly awkward during conversations around the coffee machine when they talk about what they did with Nancy last weekend.
We have had a supremely boring week filled with coughing and antibiotics, rain, and starting up work again for the year. Hopefully it is all uphill from here (and the days will slowly get longer).
We are on our way home to Maastricht with a ludicrous flight itinerary that involves flying to Amsterdam, then Dusseldorf, Germany and then taking a taxi back into the Netherlands. Because of illogical flight pricing, this route is actually 1000€ cheaper than taking the exact same direct flight to Amsterdam and then the train! You can imagine the look the immigrations agent gave me when I tried to explain this.
On our PDX to AMS flight, we flew over southern Washington and were lucky enough to have a clear day for spotting mountain peaks in the cascades.
From left: Mount St. Helens, Mount Adams, Mount Ranier.
It’s nice to be back in Portland after well over a year:
The city is changing very quickly. But it still has an intensely friendly vibe – very different from the more distant interactions one has in the Netherlands.
We’re shortly to return to Maastricht, for our second year as Europeans.
-Hendrik
Happy New Year! Since we are making up for the holidays we missed while we were away in Europe, we celebrated it in combination with Halloween. If you can’t tell from the photo, the theme was Firefly characters.
From left: Kaylee, Zoë, Stitch (Jayne’s arch-nemesis from Jaynestown), Captain Malcolm Reynolds, and Yo-Saff-Bridge (Mrs. Reynolds).
We had a Firefly marathon while putting together a 2000-piece puzzle, two of our favorite family traditions.
EisenOrem Adventures 