What baguette?!

saw this in edinburgh, scotland, when we were there in july. we were looking for a restaurant, but this was just a sad, sad alley... i hoped to eat in the pub close to where we parked our car. but... while wandering around the kitchen had closed and we needed to find something else. we had italian food. not the best. but not the worst either. i guess i was just hoping for the fish and chips....

anyways... this saturday there is some festival in our neigborhood. it was last year as well, but then we missed it (as we miss most things... somehow i was better at keeping track of all that was going on when we lived in boston!). this year.... i have been asked to bake 10 breads! as you might know, i like to bake bread. in the past few months, i have occassionally baked bread for strangers (there is a dutch food website where you can post your food and/or leftovers, and then people in your neighborhood can come pick it up paying the cost of the ingredients/to make it). and so now, someone asked me to bke 10 breads for this event. im stil, not sure how im going to do it in my tiny oven... but i do know some of the doughs i will have to start now for them to be ready as baked breads on saturday.... so now its time for the kitchen and then for bed.... :)

anyone who is around amsterdam, this is the event! there should be lots of food and what-not!

Tuesday cemeteries...

i cannot remember when was the last time i posted a picture of a cemetery or grave.... even though we still goto cemeteries every now and then... i just collect all those pictures and then never do anything with them. so perhaps, perhaps now that there is some sort of regularity in life again due to work and what-not, i should also start posting cemetery-pictures on tuesday. this was somewhere along the road in scotland. during our 5 days we mainly had marvellous weather, but here it was raining. it resulted in beautiful clouds covering the mountains. and it fitted the mood of this cemetery. behind me was a little church, and graves were all around. most were from the early 1900s (although some more recent ones as well), but the texts on most of them were not very well readable.

Far away...

this was in scotland too. i was faster taking pictures and got back in the car again (on the wrong side!!! hahahaha).

since monday, tim lives in groningen, a 2 hour drive from amsterdam. he started a new job as a doctor in the hospital in groningen (the biggest hospital of the netherlands). so, over the past weeks we furnished a place there. mostly with stuff we found in secondhand shops (often its so much nicer than ikea, and much much cheaper!), combined with some stuff that didnt fit in the apartment in amsterdam, and even quite some stuff we found on the streets in our neighborhood (every wednesday night you can put out "the big trash". quite often people put some really nice stuff out that they dont want anymore. more often than not, it doesnt stay on the street very long.... as we grab it, or more often, because others do so. there are even people driving around on wednesday evening, just to pick up anything that might be usuable...). anyways, i think the place is really nice now....

and me? im still in amsterdam.... in the weekends tim either should come back here, or i go there (its really far!! it feels like a foreign country almost! i know i know, for americans this distance is nothing, but for dutch you need to cross half the country!). not the ideal situation, and unlike anything we planned, but well.... sometimes you cannot choose.....

As expected...

this is sort of how i expected scotland to be. with a lonely castle at the water front..... lots of clouds and even more rain.... pretty, no??!!

never mind the parking lot and the huge number of tourists stopping for this castle as well... :) unlike us, most also walked over to the castle and had a look inside. we only had a look from this distance and drove on....

i want to tell you about all the changes that occurred the past few months. but today i am too tired... perhaps tomorrow! :)

Self portrait

in case you forgot how we look after my long absence... here a recent self portrait. just last week we went away for a few days to scotland. we flew on wednesday evening, arrived in edinburgh, started thursday in the gym of the hotel (if you had asked me to do such a thing 5 years ago, i would have laughed very hard), then the mcdonalds for breakfast (i never had breakfast in mc donalds and it was the first thing we encountered while we were very hungry), and the off to the scottish highlands in a rental car! quite the experience to drive on the other (the wrong!!) side of the road! im glad i didnt have to drive, not sure i would have taken all the turns the right way.....

but it was beautiful!! absolutely amazing. so much green.... and we were lucky, as nearly all days were extremely sunny and even hot! (only one day of quite a lot of rain). we more or less randomly drove around scotland and on sunday evening we arrived in edinburgh again. monday we finally saw that city and while it was bright and sunny there, the netherlands had terrible rain. streets and houses got flooded and our plane was delayed.... luckily our house was still dry.

good to see some of you found me already again! we are about to leave for the weekend and are staying in a place without internet.... but monday i certainly will be back! (perhaps sooner, lets see)