Dutch Pumpkins, School Visits, And Visiting Haarlem

Well, my dear readers, it's been a fair while!

There are so many things to talk about, as usual, we will begin with a systematic discussion of each one. I have a small bag of candy. Perhaps it will last the entirety of my post...I'll let you know when I'm done.

First of all, Mary and I had a delightful time, last week, making our own pumpkin puree. It's not hard, but it was fairly time-consuming. However, when you are done cleaning, carving, baking, peeling, cutting and pureeing your own pumpkin - you feel like a total champ. Like, I could have, I dunno, won one of those carnival games where you hit the gophers really quickly, that's how pumped I was.

The innards. And some tasty bread-things Mary brought with her.

After slicing the pumpkin up, we baked all the slices for about 45 minutes.

Ah, so tasteh and peeleh. You bake them so that the skin peels off easily.

Skins! Pumpkin-about-to-be-pureed!

Hooray! It kind of looks like baby urp at this point, but, well, I will tell you, it made killer pumpkin bread. KILLER.

Once our pumpkin was pureed, we decided to make pumpkin bread, with something along the lines of a cup of butter, from scratch as well. So, okay, number one item, pumpkin puree, done. By hand. By champs. Number two most important item for pumpkin bread - the spices. We had a really interesting time finding the spices. I get frustrated a lot, when I go to the baking aisle in the grocery store, and there just isn't the abundance of choices, products, and things that are supposed to be in the baking aisle. On this particular pumpkin-bread-baking occasion, we went to three different grocery stores searching - in vain - for baking powder. None. Nada. Oh, yes, they have it here. It's called bakpoeder. But alas. No one seemed to realize how serious and urgent it was that we get our hands on some. Finally, in a back alleyway, we came upon a little middle-eastern shop that, way in the back, had a rack of spices, and, lo and behold, baking powder!

Ah, yes, the infamous bakpoeder. Which, coincidentally, sounds like, "baak-poo-der." Which is not something I would want to put in my food, but, there you go...

Mary also bought whole sticks of cinnamon, and some whole cloves from the same store. Because we had these large spices on hand, and because we are mildly into being really awesome at everything,  we decided to grind our own spices with a mortar and pestle. Hey, it was actually really fun, okay?

Pounding some spices. Look at how fast my hand was moving!

Mary, likewise with the spice-pounding. 

Look at how well we ground the spices! Are you not impressed with our prodigious skill!?

Mixing up some magic. Or pumpkin bread...

The batter.

The bread. And boy, was it good.

This bread was amazing. It was so, so, so good. Hot, fresh from the oven, and really spicy, unique tasting. It was amazing, actually, the difference when you make it with all fresh ingredients like this.

As my lab-mates can attest, I brought this on the Monday after Mary and I made it, and it was a huge hit. They were all shocked that pumpkin could taste sweet. They said the bread reminded them of gingerbread - I suppose it is a bit like gingerbread, yeah? Eventually I'll get around to making a pumpkin pie for the lab, and we'll really shock some people's socks off.

Last week at the lab was excellent, as usual. I finished Spongers, more or less, and it now has levels, and pretty pictures, and well, I'm terribly proud of it, even though I didn't create it from scratch or anything.

Thursday was a rough day. I found out, Thursday morning, that one of my really good friends from home (Chardon), Jacob, had been in a horrible car accident, and that he had been life-flighted to the trauma hospital in Cleveland. He was a mess. He had a completely shattered left hip, eleven broken ribs, a skull fracture, and a tear in his aorta. Basically, we should all be thanking God for the miracle of Jake still being alive. Since last Thursday, Jake has gotten a lot better (once again, thank God), and is out of the ICU. He's got a long road to recovery though.

On Thursday morning, I didn't know most of what I just shared with you. All I knew was Jake had been in an accident, that it was really bad, and that he was in critical condition in the hospital. As you can imagine, Thursday didn't turn out to be a great day. I went, Thursday morning, to another thesis defense of one of the graduate students in the lab, because I really wanted to be there for him, but after which I promptly turned around and went back home to call anyone and everyone who might have news. It ended up being okay, and I got the information I was looking for - Jake was seriously injured, but it wasn't life-threatening anymore, which was the most important thing.

You know, people can be so amazingly helpful, and brave, when such awful things happen. Jake's parents were offered a ride by their neighbor, who owns a private plane, to fly them to Cleveland, so that they got there, I'm sure, MUCH faster than they would have if they had had to buy tickets, etc. Jake's girlfriend, Emily, one of the sweetest and most down-to-earth people I know, has not left his side, and I know from what Jake's mom has said, has been an absolute bastion of strength for Jacob and his family over the past week. When people do things like that - it's remarkable. And wonderful. Thank God people can be so resilient. It gives me faith in humanity!

Well! Thursday was rough. But as you can see, my week got much better, especially with continued good news from the hospital. On Friday, I had a really wonderful experience, that I'm truly sorry I don't have any pictures of - on Friday, I went on my first school visit!!

I went to a school called Lyceum Shcravenlant in a city called Schiedam, which is outside of Amsterdam. These school visits are really neat - the Fulbright asked for our bios, which they then gave out to high school teachers all over the Netherlands. Teachers could then invite whichever Fulbright student they thought fit, according to what was in their bio. I've gotten a lot of invitations, as I think I have mentioned previously. Anyway, Lyceum Schravenlant was my first! Several trains later, I arrived in the lovely city of Schiedam. I went to go visit an English class taught by a woman named Ineke. Ineke was so wonderfully welcoming, and sweet. She even gave me boxes of tea as a gift! I've tried them all (naturally), and they are all really excellent. She and I ate lunch in the teacher's lounge (there was cake - we need more cake in the teacher's lounges of America...) and afterward we went to her 6th form class (I think 6th form must be something like sophomore or junior year of high school for us - they looked around that age, anyway...). Her class was awesome. I just LOVE talking to students in a big group like that. Really, I love teaching, I think is what it comes down to. After they got over their initial shyness, they asked some really good questions. A lot of them I expected, but were still interesting - they wanted to know if everyone in America owns a gun, if there's a lot of crime in America (like there is in CSI), they wanted to know what high school was like, and whether we really have cliques - this was something really interesting - they all seemed to agree that "cliques" in the American sense don't exist as much in Holland. Given what I've been told previously about the egalitarian nature of the Dutch, this seems to fit. They also didn't think that the Dutch had as much of an obsession with dieting, and being skinny as Americans, which was also interesting. I informed them that I am firmly on the border of the geek-nerd clique, by the way. So proud.

All-in-all, the visit was wonderful. Revitalizing, some might say. It was a beautiful fall day, too. God was just in his hour last Friday. My next school visit is to Groningen (in the far north of Holland) this upcoming Monday. I love it! It's such a perfect way to see all of Holland, get a break from work (not that I don't love my work, but still), and be able to do what I really love - teach!

Friday night, my friend Clement invited me to go with him to a "bockbierfestival." I'm not entirely sure what a "bock" is, but it's a little lighter than a stout and a little darker than a pale ale (technically a bock belongs to the lager family, I just looked it up). HA! I'm so beer savvy. In any case, it was quite fun. You had to buy a special glass for 3 euro, and then coins, also each for 3 euro. The coins could be used to fill your glass. I tried a porter, a "herfst" or fall bock, a wilde bock (that one was weird, slightly reminiscent of dirt and spicy things...), and a really mild bock whose name I cannot remember. I only spent 12 euro, but I got one of my drinks for free...on accident, I think I just sort of walked away and the counter person couldn't find me in the giant, raging crowd of people...In any case, by the end of the night, I had received three extra glasses, I'm not entirely sure how - I know two came from some older Dutch men who were like, "To the prettiest girl at the festival!" and one might have come from someone standing nearby who just didn't feel like returning hers... - Well, I had four by the end of the night! And you could turn the glasses back in for your 3 euro back. So, yes. I ended up not spending a dime, because I got 12 euro back. Hehe.

Clement. And someone who looks a wee bit like Anne Hathaway. It was packed, by the way. As one friend said, "It was like a crazy experiment to see how many people they could fit into such a small space..."

So, Friday was great. Saturday, I went to the lab in the morning to try out Spongers in the scanner - it worked fine - and afterward, I made my way to Haarlem to go have dinner with my friends Lizanne, Sara, and Lara, who all work in my lab. I'm going to have to start making up adjectives for how much I enjoyed the things I did this weekend - the visit to Lizanne's was absolutely splendiferous. ;)

Lizanne invited us all so that we could see her really nifty house (it's very narrow, one room on each floor - we are all really curious about what it used to be, because it has been there for a while, well over 80 years, I would say...). In the process of getting to her house from the train station, Lizanne, Sara and I took a walk around the city:

A Cheese Shop!

This store was so neat - they have all completely, 100% homemade body products, from deodorant, to face creams. So cool! Some Christmas gifts might be coming from here.

The beautiful, giant church in Haarlem.

A beautiful scene. Perfect capturing of Holland.

A leaning building.

"Thoughts from a bench in Holland"

When we finally got back to Lizanne's (we tried having me ride on the back of Lizanne's bike, but, well, I haven't mastered this skill yet), we ate some bread with a variety of jams, butters, creams, and sprinkles (The Dutch love their bread toppings), all of which were delicious. Sara (who is from Italy) and I especially loved a creamy peanut-butter like substance called Speculoos, which is a type of cookie - the spread is basically cookies mashed into butter - like if someone made a peanut butter from mashed Nutter Butters. Oh, it was good. Lizanne showed us all these pictures of her time abroad in Thailand - it was really impressive. She went to Thailand for a year when she was only 16! It was also really neat to look at her pictures and recognize some of the places she went as places that Jonathan also went when he lived in Thailand over the summer. We had falafel for dinner - it was really tasty. Sara and I got back to Utrecht around 1, which was quite late. Sunday, therefore, was spent cleaning the house and chilling out a bit. No homework...it's like a completely bizarre, amazing glance into what adult-life will be like!

The rest of this week has passed in relative peace. I'm running terribly low on funds, and yet I have a trip to the south of Holland to go see the water works this Saturday, and a fall party on Sunday! Let's hope I can make it into next week, when I get paid again! For now, this is everything! I will put up some more pictures, etc, later, when I have time. Oh, and to all my family and friends in Ohio, please don't get eaten by a wild animal. That is all!