August 28th, 2007: Oudeschild

First, the random walls of hay have mostly all disappeared...

I finally had my camera with me this weekend when I was in Oudeschild, the small fishing village located on the east side of Texel. There is a nice fish restaurant here, which they took me to when I visited here in 2005... haven't been back since I moved to Texel, but I'm sure that eventually we'll end up there.



These are the fishing boats. There are also a few tourist boats that leave from here and take you out on the water for a few hours to catch shrimp (at the end of the day you come home with a bag of tiny shrimp). A few of my friends went out on one of these boats recently - I got to watch them cooking the shrimp. I think they probably spent a couple of hours taking the shells off...

If you look closely, there are some Texel sheep on the strip of grass between the windmill and the dock.
Note the dark cloud in the back - it seems that this sumer there are strom clouds everywhere...

Aug. 22nd, 2007: wall o' hay

I have no idea why, but random walls of hay have suddenly appeared all over the island... This one is located just outside of Den Burg and I bike past it every day...



And here is another rainbow that I saw the other night - the rainbows are the only sort of cool thing about all the storms and bad weather we've had here this summer. Presently it is nice and windy out - 35km/hr winds blowing in the exact opposite direction that I have to bike home...

Other than that, I don't have too much to report. I've been really busy in the lab lately since there are some abstract deadlines and a conference coming up...

August 8th, 2007: cheesecake!

The baked goods here are generally quite tasty - however, all of the cakes are very light and fluffy (made with lots of whipped cream). So those of us from the North American continent were thinking about nice rich and dense real cheesecake and how we wanted one (there's something similar to cheesecake here but it is way too light and fluffy). After about two weeks of rounding up the various ingredients (finding vanilla on Texel was challenging for some reason and it was eventually found in Den Helder), having to find suitable cookies to substitute for graham crackers (there's nothing like them here), having to make/find measuring cups and spoons, and much discussion over if a cheesecake could bake properly in a small microwave/convection oven (since neither one of us has a real oven), we decided to attempt it...

There was a lot of math involved in this baking project with the various conversions between cups, ounces, grams, Celsius and Fahrenheit. The largest pack of cream cheese we could find here was only 200 grams (no large tubs of the stuff available here). In case you were wondering, 40 ounces of cream cheese were required to make two cheesecakes and 28.3495 grams equals 1 ounce...

My apartment is so small and the outlets are in such stupid places that we had to sit on the stairs to use the mixer...
And yup, since I don't have a table (and the coffee table was completely full of other stuff) the only place for the cookie dough was on the floor.
We could only fit 4 cookies in the "oven" at once, so baking was a SLOW process! And there was a minor conversion mistake with the cookies, which resulted in too little butter... they were still good since they had chocolate in them - but not as good as usual.

We were really excited when the first cheesecake came out of the "oven" looking normal after an hour. As we were baking, my neighbors kept appearing in my apartment...
The final products! Go us!

We brought the cheesecakes into work (since we definitely didn't need to eat 2 of them ourselves) and therefore we were pretty popular around the office today.
When we originally started talking about making cheesecake, everyone seemed to think that it was made out of a hard aged cheese or something... Some people were sort of skeptical about trying the cheesecake but in the end everyone liked it. Although I'm excited that the baking experiment was successful, it did take us from ~6pm until 1:30am to get all of this stuff baked, so we probably won't be doing this again anytime in the near future...

August 3rd, 2007: summer on Texel...

Yeah, so apparently summer on Texel means having to always carry a full set of rain gear with you and having to check the radar before biking home for the day... Last week my friend Angela and I were trying to leave the lab to meet up with some people at the bar. We were checking the radar and saw a bit of a break in the clouds and thought we could make it to Den Burg. Well, it didn't rain for most of the ride but about 2 minutes away from town it this torrential downpour started...
And of course we got completely soaked. We could see the owner of the bar looking at us like "please don't come in here" as we were walking in with water dripping off of us.
At the bar....
I like this photo since from left to right we are from Scotland, USA, Russia, Indonesia, Canada and The Netherlands.
This weekend we are FINALLY supposed to have two sunny days in a row here on Texel - I can't wait! It really hasn't felt like summer yet here since it seems to rain just about every day or every other day - plus it's always really windy here...