Perfect Dutch Days

Some days I just wake up happy. Today was one of those days. My friends Michael and Becca are out of town this weekend, and I totally took that opportunity to crash at their house last night on their nice big comfy bed. They live right in the middle of amsterdam which means that after I went out for a very late dinner last night with my Snakes In The Grass teammates, I only had to bike a block and a half to their house instead of the normal 40 minute trek I would usually make.

So I went to sleep by midnight and woke up about 8:15 this morning slightly disoriented but very comfortable. and warm. after a lazy in bed lie-in of crosswording, I took a bath in their gigantic two-person bath. AMAZING! and then i had cereal. which i rediscover about every 6 months-1 year and remember why it is so delicious (i think there is a previous blog spot on this blog about the beauty of rediscovering cereal. if there isn't, i definitely wrote one in my head).

by 11, i headed over to my friend kate's for a quick look on her computer for ingredients for a recipe i'm cooking on monday night. then i headed to the "biological" outdoor market to pick up kate's favorite bread in the whole world. i stopped at a cheese stand, tried a bunch of cheese, and ended up getting a lekker mustard/walnut cheese. yummmy.

then i went to the normal (not eco-friendly, cheaper) outdoor market to get the ingredients I needed for my dinner on monday night. then, i realized i had left the list of ingredients at kate's house. so i called her, and she couldn't find it anywhere. jammer! so i picked up about 4 of the ingredients i could remember, biked back to kate's and proceeded to eat an absurd amount of bread and cheese while drinking tea and talking about our life plans (kate might be the only person i know who can match me with statements like, "dude - this is my next plan for my life...." and then, after a 20 minute description, admit that she has only thought of this new plan yesterday). We chatted and hung out for a while until i had to run to meet my friend tess for coffee. so i transferred all of my groceries to a disposable bag, rushed down kate's 3 flights of stairs, said goodbye to kate's roommate who was working on his bike outside, and then realized i had left my groceries upstairs. so i flew back up the 3 flights of stairs, and, on my way back down, i found the grocery list that had apparently fallen out of my pocket on the stairs (wheewww - good thing i forgot my groceries).

i quickly biked over to bakkerswinkel, which has amazing coffee and scones. tess and i ended up chatting for about 2 hours about life. then i realized i needed to head out to make it back home for a dinner party with babs and philippe (parents of the family i work for/live with) and saskia and rob (our darling neighbors who are now no longer our neighbors). so tess and i stood up, and i realized i had lost my grocery bag. no idea where i had left it, but i assumed it was somewhere in the street when i was locking my bike. Double jammer! so we paid and said goodbye, and then, behind the counter, i spotted my grocery bag! YAH!!!

so i hurried home against some unprecedented strong winds just in time to offer a little help in the kitchen before saskia and rob showed up. 5 hours and 4 courses later, i cleaned up the kitchen, totally over stuffed. i think i have eaten so much today that my body hates me! but i have to say, i am pretty impressed with how well i managed to follow the conversation all evening. 5 hours of "real grownup" (as opposed to my friends who just pretend to be grownup) conversation in very normal dutch means that I am now totally wiped. i can follow the conversation well enough, but i end up having trouble if i let my mind stray - it's really hard for me to enter a conversation mid-point and figure out what is going on. so, serious concentration ALL evening.

but all in all, a super good day. the cherry on the top is that yesterday evening i made my first ever no-hands right turn on my bike! whoo whoo! i was so stoked. it's way more difficult than it looks, but i can now officially sortof steer my bike no-handed. i feel so dutch.