Techieness

I must apologize for the nearly-week-long absence. I had a post all ready to go on Wednesday but just as I was putting up the final touches, it was time to leave for Groningen. Just last week Karel had decided to visit his sister and a few friends who live up in that direction, and so for most of Wednesday and all of Thursday we were inundated with one very cute baby, lots of good food, and promises for pizza (Karel had promised Mini-Bekker a homemade pizza several years ago, and true to his form, MB has not forgotten). It was a good trip, but then again I suspect I would say that about any trip where I get to hold a 6-day-old baby.


I finally had an excuse to try out my Lensbaby this weekend, as of course any new baby warrants a ton of pictures. My brother bought it for me for Christmas, and my initial test with it was quite rushed, as I had neither the time nor the inclination to experiment much when it arrived (some time after Christmas, when I was in the middle of a major Angst moment). I actually used my macro to shoot the baby--why fix what ain't broke, stick with what you know, and all them clichés--but I was able to put the Lensbaby through its paces later that day and figure out exactly what it could and couldn't do.

I take a not-insubstantial amount of pride in knowing what all of the buttons on my camera do but it was still a lot of fun to actually make those adjustments, as for the most part the D90 is smarter than I am when it comes to shooting awesome. However, with a Lensbaby, because you're on full-manual, it becomes a matter of trial and error as you point, adjust, click, look, and adjust any one of the gazillion settings available to turn your picture into something not-eyeball-gouging-ugly.


My conclusion about the Lensbaby is that it's a fun piece of kit to have, but probably not something that I'd use on a regular basis. My 50 mm macro can get those awesome narrow-range-of-focus pics with much less trouble, but it doesn't do that awesome blur. But then again, I don't necessarily want a lot of blur. Furthermore, because it's not an actual lens, you need to adjust your focal length by actually moving the camera. It is unquestionably a ton of fun to play with, though, and you do make awesome pictures.

Coming soon

The widgeons have moved north, the storks have moved south, and the geese can't seem to make up their minds: "Do I stay or do I go"? In other words, the changing of the seasons is upon us. The days are getting longer, and, this past weekend, some incredibly blue skies and beautiful (if f*cking cold--I was out there for three hours, so I think my use of the f-word is appropriate) weather gave rise to the opportunity to watch some birds for the first time in over a year.

It's the best time of year, actually, to don a pair of binoculars. The foliage hasn't come in yet, but the shift in the passerines is occuring, as relentless as the tides. Songbirds are easy to identify amongst the bare branches, a strangely gratifying experience, as they are in theory easy to delineate, but in practice they all become lumped together into the "little brown birds that go 'twit'" category.


I ended up following the Hollandse-Deutsch kanaal for a short distance on my way back, and was rewarded with the sight of a pair of shelducks and a little grebe--it was so little that I thought it was a duckling at first, and only stopped because it was too early in the year for ducklings. I wish I had a better lens--I've learned that you can rent tele-lenses for €25/day, but then that begs the question of whether I really want to carry something that costs more than a month's salary around on my bike.


New things are going on, exciting things are happening. It's spring, in more ways than one. I think the Romans had the right idea, having the new year begin with the start of spring. Makes more sense than having it start in the depth of winter, anyway, before things start waking up.

Better late than never?

I've been doing a lot of night photography lately. This is mostly because I'm in the lab all day and the days are short. But also because night photography is fun--challenging as hell, but fun.



It doesn't have to be quite so challenging if you have a tripod, but my tax return has yet to come in, and besides, tripods are a pain the @$$ to lug around. So I just try to stand very, very still--and of course, the harder you try, the more you shake. But still, Maastricht is decked out for the holidays, and a lovely city in its own right acquires a touch of magic when the lights come on:




In Nijmegen, the holidays are marked by the arrival of the olliebollen carts, which also sell waffles. They are the only time of year you can reliably purchase waffles at the market, but they are a poor substitute for the heavenly fluffy denseness that is a Pinky's Waffle. On the other hand, Nijmegen does have a regular stroopwaffel maker, which my friend assures me does not exist in Maastricht.



This one-or-the-other, the give-and-take, the back-and-forth (in my case, literally), has really started to erode the boundaries that have thus far defined who I am. As I start to get more comfortable here, really learning the language and getting along, and traversing the distance between Protestant Holland and Catholic Limburg every week (there really is a difference), it sometimes feels like my pieces of my identity are being scattered in the wake. On the one hand, it's silly: I know who and what I am. On the other hand, it's kind of weird--because none of the words that I used to use (American, Asian, Democrat) apply any more.

Indecency

We don't have a whole lot of money. Between my student loans and his insurance policies, we're basically living paycheck-to-paycheck, though we each have a healthy savings account and both of us contribute to our joint account. Needless to say, we don't eat out very often—you can count the number of times we get take-out in a year on one hand.



But we do love good food. So every week, we empty our wallets of whatever notes (Christmas money) and spare change (eating out) is left. At the end of the year, or whenever the jar gets too heavy, whichever comes first, we haul the coins to the bank, and get them counted. It adds up: in this case, to a trip to Kaatje aan de Sluijs, a little restaurant in Blokzijl, which is a little village in the middle of nowhere. Friends of ours had invited us along to help them celebrate their tenth anniversary, and good food and a luxe hotel for not-too-extravagant prices are not to be passed up. Blokzijl's claim to fame is that it used to be a seaside town, until the Dutch filled in their corner of the North Sea in the 1930s. Now, it sits behind a dike that was undoubtedly more impressive in the days when it actually held back the sea, but still squarely in the middle of nowhere, with endless polderlands stretching beyond it in all directions.



Nevertheless the village itself is a lovely little place, though hardly exciting by any definition of the word. There's an antique clock shop on the main street, and some nice little pubs, and of course a church (Baptist, interestingly). The little village still has the narrow streets of pre-car days, and there are no curtains in the windows, in keeping with the (now disappearing) Dutch tradition of making sure your neighbors are as virtuous as you are. You can sail on the river that runs through the village, though at this moment you might want to get ice insurance before you do.



At Kaatje aan de Sluis, you have the option of a four-course dinner menu; I assume that the restaurant also has an a la carte menu, but for whatever reason it wasn't available on the day that we went. We were greeted at the door by a grinning, almost bouncy, maitre'd, seated, and almost before we had a chance to get our bearings, a member of the wait staff came along and asked us what we'd like to have for a drink. A few minutes later, the first amuses arrived.



The dishes were served relatively quickly: at the Chateau Neercanne, for instance, it averaged out to one dish an hour (and yes, we were actually there for almost six hours). It was still 23.00 by the time we left, but it ended up being an almost-seven-course meal, including coffee, a pre-dessert, and lots of wine-snobbery, where the sommelier presents you with a bottle of wine, cradled in a towel (for whites), and gives you the genetic lineage of the grapes that went into it, and pours out a small measure of wine for the wine-master. In our case, that was the wife of our friend, and the wines that the staff had chosen really were very good, with a sweet nose but a complex taste. And that's about the extent of my wine knowledge.

As for the food itself: well, pictures are worth a thousand words, right? Suffice it to say that the words, “Oh my God,” came out of my mouth more than once—and that was just about the olive oil to dip the bread in.



From top to bottom, the dishes are: foie gras , served with carmelized shallots and an orange-flavored cookie; the snoek (with cauliflower puree and potato square); wild duck served with sarsaparilla root, leek, red beet, and lentils); and dessert, a parfait of oranges, sweet-corn custard, almonds, and dragon-flavored ice cream, served alongside candied popcorn.









After such a gastronomic undertaking, we decided that a little coffee wouldn't be a bad idea. But that was with the assumption that coffee was just coffee. We're relatively new to fine dining, but we're learning: coffee is never “just coffee”.



I'm a vegetarian, which makes things a little awkward when foie gras and wild duck are the only items on the menu. Fortunately, our friends and my boyfriend were ravenous—they'd skipped their meals that day, too—so they were more than happy to relieve me of both of the items. I found myself trying some of them (both the foie gras and the duck) out of propriety, but after not having any meat for several years, the taste of them both were a bit much for me. However, I am assured by the three others at the table that, if you eat meat, you will love it.

The hotel we stayed in was “attached” to the restaurant, in the sense that if you ask for “dinner and a room” the Kaatje Hotel is where you will stay. It was just a short walk from the restaurant, the better, perhaps, to avoid drunken customers running amok on the streets of Blokzijl the night before church. The hotel room was nice enough—the bathrooms are stocked with thick fluffy towels and thicker, fluffier bathrobes. We had a stunning view of the river from our room. The only really annoying part was figuring out which light switches turned on what lights, and how the shower worked. The breakfast the next morning was very Dutch: a collection of breads, cheeses, sausage/ham slices. In a nod to healthy eating, yogurt and fruit were also available, but suffice it to say that there are more compelling reasons than breakfast to visit Blokzijl.



Overall it was a great night: good food, great company, excellent hotel. My boyfriend handled the money, so I'll have to take his word for the costs: €200 for our two dinners, and €190 for the night (the tab included breakfast and pre-dinner drinks). It's definitely one of those places that makes doing your own dishes 364 days of the year worthwhile. Kaatje aan de Sluijs is a member of the Gastronomique Alliance, a sort of restaurant guild for finer diners, so if you're not up to traveling to the middle of the nowhere for food, there's probably another Alliance member closer by.

Low Country, High Society

Two weeks ago, I decided to go to Paris. Sir Edmund Hillary should really be referenced in a more noble context, but in this case, our reasoning was the same: because it's there. I've been living, in some sense of the word, in Maastricht for almost a year, and to not have been to Paris when it's literally a hop, skip, and jump away would have been criminal.

So with great excitement, I booked my Thalys tickets--for the wrong date, it turned out, which had great ramifications for my time in Paris--and my hotel (for the correct date) and showed up, expecting to see something like a bigger, more elegant version of Maastricht. What I got, though, was something dramatically different--something very, very beige:


I couldn't help but be disappointed a little: yes, there were the sidewalk cafès, and tiny little back-alley gems, tiny boulangeries selling all kinds of marvelous delicacies--but the preponderence of beige gave the city the air of a long, enormous yawn. Had everything been Parthenon-white, it might have given the city a sense of Neo-Classical timelessness, and I'm tempted to put the blame on the multitude of scooters and the massive smog. However, the city has almost no graffiti, which means that they do clean the buildings--and therefore, that it was meant to be...well, beige.


Because I ended up having to buy an entirely new set of tickets, I was broke-ass poor when I got to Paris, a fact that I didn't really appreciate until I went to the Jardins des Tuileries and took a look at the prices for eating at one of those little cafès there. I mean, I knew I wouldn't be able to go to Versailles as I'd planned, and while I'm not a penny-pincher in a way that would be approved of in my adopted country, it was quite a surprise to see just how much a bottle of water costs. Parisians like to say that the French paradox is responsible for their fantastic health statistics--I vote for "not being able to afford more than three meals a week" as a more likely cause.

Fortunately, there are several things in Paris that were free, and the art scattered through the Jardin meant that I could still experience some of the culture:

Also free to enter was the Notre Dame cathedral (if anybody knows the alt-code for that little symbol above the "e", please let me know). I've read The Hunchback of Notre Dame, so it was quite an experience to be able to see the incredible church that inspired it.

Paris is an easy city to navigate, even for the directionally handicapped. There are enough monuments and famous buildings scattered throughout the city that walking in any particular direction will amost guarantee a direct hit to something recognizable. On the other hand, walking in Paris requires nerves of steel and balls of titanium--cars don't always yield to pedestrians, and furthermore the ambiguity of traffic lights coupled with the oddly-angled intersections, complete lack of lane markings, and the speed demons that fly down the narrowest of streets gives you that adrenaline rush that the city itself fails to provide. The UnDutchables waxes eloquent on the many shortcomings of Dutch drivers, but compared to Parisian ones, Dutch drivers are the model of propriety. Dutch cyclists, on the other hand, are every bit the jerk that French drivers are, but a bike is far less lethal than a car.

Parisians are supposed to be chic and sophisticated, but they also have a sense of fun that's often missing in the nette Low Countries. For instance, the random carousel, of which there were two on my long, slow meander throughout the city. There are probably more.

And in the spirit of self-expression and contained vandalism, there is the "Bridge of Locks", actually called the Ponts des Arts, where you can attach a lock to the bridge as a sort of Kilroy-was-here signature of your trip to Paris. Many of these locks have writing on it: "so-and-so loves so-and-so", presumably meaning that their love will last as long as the lock does...I wonder what happens when the lock-cutters come at night...

If you want to see more Parisian photos, follow the link to my Photobucket.

And thus concludes this grand round of procrastination from doing my outlining for NaNoWriMo...

A Tour of the Forest Floor

In the rest of the world they have Great Walls and huge redwoods and enormous elephants. In the rest of the world there are pet cats that can eat small dogs and small dogs that fight with giant rats.

Here in the Netherlands, though, there are fungi. (Birds, too, but that's a later post--as in, "after I've saved up two months' salary and have taught myself how to shoot with a zoom lens longer than I am tall") In good years--i.e., years with cool damp summers that rot blackberries on the vine--you can get an impressive array of fungal growths on the forest, not the least of which include the kleverig koralzwammetje ("sticky coral fungus", or calocera viscosa).



These little lovelies sprout up mostly in the autumn, but even the big ones--as in, bigger than your head--can be surprisingly difficult to see if you're not looking for them. It might surprise you that something as vividly colored as the paarse pronkridder ("purple gaudy knight"--don't ask--Calocybe ionides) is actually extremely difficult to spot in a sea of brown decaying leaves.



Nevertheless, they are very common, and if you take the time to look, you will find them, and just about any fungus I've posted here. Including the infamous puntig kaalkopje, better known by its English name "Magic Mushrooms". These little suckers are only about one inch tall, so you've really got to look for them, but according to our friends who are well-versed in this matter, they are quite literally as common as weeds. And no, we did not smoke the one I've photographed. First of all, it was only one, and secondly, well, it was only one.



My boyfriend claims to be able to smell fungi in the air, so whenever we decide to go on a photo-jaunt through the Heumenbos nearby, I take him and my camera. He'll tell me, "I smell fungi," and I'll ready my camera. Actually they're not that hard to smell--I can whiff them, too. But only if there's a substantial lot of rot nearby. Rotting trees and humus is always a safe bet for interesting specimens, such as these parelstuifzwammen ("pearl-studded fungus", Lycoperdon perlatum).



But sometimes all you really have to do is look. We almost stepped on these vroege bekerzwam ("early cup-fungus", Peziza vesiculosa)just before my boyfriend grabbed me and pointed.



And of course, we have the infamous Amanitas muscaria, the real "Magic mushroom", in my opinion--people used to steep them in milk and set it out for the flies, as a fly-killer (the pretty red ones are always the deadly ones). I suppose they stopped using this when lawsuits came into existence and people could get sued for poisoning cats and small children as well. It's said that the Vikings used to take them (probably not neat) before combat because it induced some kind of psychedelic rage and made them impermeable to pain. Mostly they're known for killing people who don't know any better. These days you can buy the likeness of Amanitas in the Blokker, as a mushroom-bank, or as a tchotchka. I suppose it's a good thing people aren't more aware of nature--it's kind of like having a Jeffry Dahmer action figure on display in a kindergarten.



So that's what I've been up to these past couple weekends. See if you can see these for yourself!