Nov. 28th, 2007: Sinterklaas!

Instead of Santa Claus, the Dutch have Sinterklaas. And instead of having reindeer and elves, Sinterklass has "Zwarte Piet" as his helper - which seems entirely WRONG to me, but he's definitely a popular character over here. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinterklaas

During the past week I've seen numerous people around town and in the bar dressed up as Zwarte Piet, which is rather frightening - especially since Zwarte Piet always seems to be wearing red lipstick, for some unknown reason...

At work, one person in our group will apparently be chosen as the recipient of the Sinterklaas gift. I guess the gift is usually something that pokes fun at a person (but only in a good/positive way) and the gift is given with a poem, which the recipient has to read out loud. Last year the recipient of the department gift got a pair of suspenders since he tends to wear his pants too low and his "Deer Isle Smile" (aka, plumbers crack) was showing. He got a full page poem describing how his pants were very fashionable but too low and that old Sint was seeing more than he wanted to. And they gave him a box of chocolates along with the suspenders to help him get fatter so his pants would stay up better. I'm sort of frightened to see who will get the gift at work this year - apparently they tend to give it to foreigners... I seriously hope it is not me...

October 31, 2007: Happy Halloween!!!

Here are a few pictures of some severed finger cookies that I made for a Halloween party we had at work today, which was interesting since Halloween is not celebrated over here. The severed fingers were served with a bowl of "blood sauce" and the fingernails are made from almonds...


And here's the result of a pumpkin carving party I had the other night. I could only find a few orange pumpkins. I'm actually not entirely sure if the green ones are actually pumpkins or melons - they sort of smelled sweet like a melon and were pretty soft like a melon but also smelled sort of like pumpkin at the same time. They worked OK for carving though...

October 27th, 2007: Alkmaar

Here are some photos of Alkmaar - a smallish city that is located 40 minutes south of Den Helder by train. I went here last weekend to look for a pair of boots - it's a nice city. There is a cheese market that happens here on Fridays and also a cheese museum (I didn't see either but I'm sure it is a potential activity for anyone who comes to visit).

I've been put in charge of planning a Halloween lunch at work - it is turning out to be a rather time consuming task since Halloween isn't celebrated here and finding orange and black things to decorate with is a bit challenging. I've also had a hard time finding orange pumpkins... there are plenty of pumpkins around here but most of the larger ones are green with white specks and stripes. I also have to convince all of my Dutch friends to dress up in a costume and wear it to work on Wed...

October 18th, 2007: The "High Mountain" of Texel

Since I first arrived on Texel, I have heard about the "high mountain". I thought that it was a joke, but no, there is actually a small bump on Texel that is called the "High Mountain". Over the summer various people tried to point out the high mountain to me, but I could never tell where it was. So this past weekend a group of us set out to find and "climb" the high mountain, which is 15m high!!! (Let's just say that I was barely aware that we were biking uphill.) This is the top of the high mountain...

And this is the view from the high mountain.
The above picture is from the dunes near Den Hoorn. We biked here after climbing the high mountain. I actually think that the dunes over here are higher than the high mountain...

This old WWII bunker is located in the dunes by Den Hoorn. There is a nice view from the top.

October 6th, 2007: Oktoberfest!

I went to Oktoberfest in Munich for a few days last week. These first few pictures are from Cologne - we (my friend Jess and I) stopped and spent the night there on the way to Munich. This is the Dom cathedral in Cologne.


We climbed up one of the towers of the cathedral and this is the view of Cologne from above.
A view of the Rhine River.
After Cologne we traveled to Munich and met up with Jess' friend Erin (who it turns out was in my class at SU - but we didn't know each other then). After checking into a hostel we headed to the festival and sampled an enormous beer.

There were tons of guys wearing lederhosen and ladies wearing dirndls...
This group was dancing on the table...
I bought a dirndl in Munich thinking it could be used for many Halloween parties in the future.


A German "salad".
View from somewhere in downtown Munich.

October 5th, 1007: England (3)

After the conference a group of us went to Stonehedge. It was sort of disappointing since there was this huge crowd of people (and many tour buses) in the middle of this field - and the highway is located right near Stonehedge. But it was still sort of neat...



We were all sort of tired after the conference - and it was nice to enjoy the sun (since we rarely see it on Texel).


A cathedral in Exeter...

September 25th, 2007: England (2)

A few more photos from the conference in Torquay. These pictures were taken the night of the conference banquet, which was held at the Powderham Castle. We had a nice dinner and then a live band started playing and everyone started dancing - it is always amusing to watch several hundred organic geochemists attempting to dance. Francien, Angela and I thought it was funny that all 3 of us ended up wearing almost the same outfit to the banquet, so we took this photo.
At our dinner table...

View from the dancefloor...
This is the Powderham Castle, where the banquet was held. We got a short tour of the castle before the meal. The castle was located about 40 minutes outside of Torquay.
And this is what Torquay looks like. It is sort of a strange town - it's definitely a tourist town so it was sort of a strange setting for a conference.