January 28th, 2008: Winter on Texel

Winter on Texel is very dark, windy and rainy - although the temperatures are generally mild. Actually, it seems to be windy here all of the time - usually the bike ride to/from work is horrible in at least one direction... Last week we had one very nice and sunny day (and pretty much everyone left work early to try do something outside).
As you can tell from the shadow, I was taking pictures while biking. My Dutch friends can do amazing things while riding a bike - for example, most of my friends can take off their backpack, then take off a jacket, put the jacket away in the backpack and then put the backpack on again, all while riding with no hands... I'm slowly learning to do more things while riding a bike but I'm not sure I'll ever be able to take off a jacket...

Winter on Texel is sort of strange since the grass is still green! I guess that since it's so moist and the temperatures are relatively mild that the grass is able to grow year round. I think it is strange to see trees without leaves with fields of green grass though.
As you can tall from these pictures, it has been raining a lot...
I should try and attempt to take some pictures of a more typical winter day on Texel - but usually I'm biking both to and from work in the dark (yes, the sun rises after I get to the office) and when it is rainy I don't want to take out my camera...

January 14th, 2008: Pictures from my winter break

Chopping down the Christmas with a very dull axe...

Lots of snow in Maine!

An owl at the birdfeeder.
Snowshoeing in northern Minnesota

January 13th, 2008: Re: Sinterklaas

This picture is for all of you who didn't believe me about there being chocolate covered Zwarte Pieten in The Netherlands! Here are 3 Zwarte Piets with Sinterklaas. We used to have more but some of them were consumed...

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.