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...
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.
I just returned from a conference in England - so here is the first of the pictures from that trip. These pictures are all from Bristol - went there the night before the conference began to meet up with a few friends there.
This suspension bridge is the main tourist attraction in Bristol. 
There was a half marathon in Bristol the morning I was there - this is the view of the race from the bridge.
With my friends Angela and Johan on the bridge.
Another view of the marathon and the town of Bristol.
Look Oceana - it's your restaurant!
First, the random walls of hay have mostly all disappeared...
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...
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...
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... 
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...
