Our Christmas

We took advantage of the fact there was no where we could go, and slept in. After a lazy morning, we left the hostel, prepared to wander around the city, which we assumed we would have to ourselves. As soon as we entered the streets, we realised we were missing the party! There were people (mostly families) everywhere, and all headed to the town square.

Krakow has what's considered the largest town square in Europe, and is the host to a huge Christmas market. We assumed that like last night, the market would be closed, and again we were wrong. It seemed to be the thing to do! Everyone was drinking mulled wine, bartering for goods, riding in horse-drawn carriages and listening to the accordian quartet play "Flight of the Bumblebee " every four songs. By now, we've probably heard "Flight of the Bumblebee" forty times. It was quite a nice treat for us, as we didn't have the Christmas to ourselves like expected. Later on in the day we overheard some carolers.

We headed to the old Jewish city, which we assumed would be open today, and wanded amoungst the 500 year old cemetary, and through the streets "Schindler's List" was filmed on. This city is stunning. Sometimes it's impossible to tell what year it is, and I mean this in a good way.

We have had a very memorable Christmas, and hope all of you do, too. Now we're going to drink some vodka. . . after all, we are in Poland.

Krazy for Krakow

It's 8:30pm on Christmas Eve and we're currently sitting in the lounge of our (surprisingly nice) hostel in Krakow. You might want to know why we are sitting in the hostel at such an early hour on Christmas Eve, but truth be told, Krakow is not the most metropolitan place we've ever been and the city completely shut down around 5:00pm. That's ok with us though, as the historic city's charm that we came for is present at every corner.

So far I've been dragging Grace from Christmas market to Christmas market. It works out well as she gets to browse through the handmade Christmas ornaments and I get to eat. And I am glad to say that there is as much to eat as there is to look at, which makes me a very happy traveller.

The food is very hearty, consisting mainly of meat (duck, pork or sausage), stewed cabbage, and potatoes. For this reason it is a perfect remedy from the chilly weather and one of the reasons why I think travelling to this part of the world at Christmas was such a great choice. And if the food doesn't warm you up, there is a never ending supply of hot mulled wine to be consumed, which makes me an even happier traveller. Oh, and then there's my new favourite drink, hot rum, or Grog as it is called in Czech culture.

Enough about food. We arrived in Krakow early this morning after an overnight train from Prague where we spent the first three full days of our trip. Prague is even more beautiful than it is made out to be, and at Christmas time the entire old center is packed with christmas markets. As well, for a city that is commonly said to be frustratingly over-touristed, the cooler weather seemed to keep a majority of visitors away and at times we felt like we had the whole city to ourselves.

The weather has also been better than expected, with temperatures hovering around zero and no snow (though, I secretely wished to see Prague covered in it).

In two days we're off to Budapest then to Vienna for the remaining three days of our trip. One of my classmates has booked a flight to meet us in Vienna for New-Years which will be a nice treat.

Hopefully everyone at home is enjoying themselves. It's certainly a different Christmas for us, but one that we hope to hold on to for years to come.

Merry Christmas!

And we're off

Tomorrow night, we will be in Prague. After that, we will be in Kraków, Budapest and Vienna. We might be able to to post over our holiday, but maybe not. If not, we'll see you in the new year.

Merry Christmas.

Twenty-First Century Christmas

The sky is clear and blue, the sun is shining, and it's 3° outside. Yes, it's Christmastime in The Hague. The prospect of snow isn't a reality, as everyone knows it rarely snows in Holland anymore, due to global warming – at least this is what we've been told. At first Ross and I were somewhat surprised that the general public acknowledges global warming so frankly. After all, in North America "climate change" is something that people are aware is likely happening, but the topic is always followed by examples of unusual weather patterns in the past. Not in Holland, people. Al Gore has won a Nobel Peace Prize, and we're having a Globally-Warmed Christmas.

This doesn't mean White Christmases are a thing of the past. There are still efforts to re-create the effect, however most of this is made of plastic. I've seen many Christmas Trees with cotton, or stuffing on their branches that almost looks like real snow if you're standing on the other side of the street and squinting.

Yesterday I was riding my bike down a popular shopping street, and suddenly it started snowing!


It was coming from this machine on a lamppost.


It was a kind of foam, but it didn't disintegrate. It was very popular with everyone on the street, who took photos in the snow, and tried to play in it. The snowball fights were as successful as throwing a handful of feathers at someone. Whatever the snow was made of, I'm certain must be terrible for the environment, and possibly one of the reasons there will not be real snow this year.

In a different part of town, a public skating rink is set up. I read about it on the city's website, and marked in in my calendar as something Ross & I should do. I was expecting a big open rink, kind of like the one at Olympic Plaza in Calgary, or the one in Central Park you see in movies. We saw the rink yesterday, and it's basically a frozen-over kiddie pool.


As we stood there watching five kids barely move, Ross noticed something strange about the ice – it wasn't ice. It was white plastic. This means there was no chill, no shine, no ice-smell, no sounds of blades scraping, no snow-plow stops, and kids could comfortably do things like this:


I since removed this activity from my calendar.

Inside our home, this is as Christmas-y as it gets. Since we're going away in a few days, we don't have a tree. It's been kind of fun getting all our presents and cards in the mail. We're opening them later tonight over Skype with our families.


Merry Twenty-First Century Christmas, everyone.

Sometimes it's nice to have breakfast for dinner

I decided I wanted to make pannekoeken for dinner. For those of you that have never been to De Dutch Pannekoek House (play the music), a pannekoek is kind of like a crêpe in that it is much larger and thinner than the pancakes we know. They are topped with savory or sweet toppings, like ham and cheese, or nutella. They are also served with stroop which is a thick, sweet, molasses-like syrup.

On my way home from work I picked up the necessary ingredients (pannekoek mix, eggs, cheese, ham) and headed home to start panne-cookin'. When I was one block from my house, my groceries (that were hanging off my handlebars) got caught in the front spokes of my bicycle, and abruptly stopped! I was luckily going slow enough that I didn't fly over the handlebars.

I looked down to see what's happened, just as a puff of pannekoek mix settled. There was egg yolk dripping through the bag – which now had a collection of holes in it – onto the sidewalk. I decided it was probably safest to walk the rest of the way home.

Here's the damage:


My bicycle wheel destroyed this carton of eggs. I don't even know where the part of the carton that was torn off went. You might think five eggs were broken, but it was actually only three. Eggs here come in sixes and tens – not a dozen. (Small fridges, remember?)


It also ripped into this box of pannekoek mix. Luckily the mix was in a bag inside this box. Unluckily the pressure of my bicycle spokes caused both ends of said bag to burst open.


But not everything was destroyed. Luckily the Kerstboom-shaped cheese I bought survived relatively unharmed. (This was the only item I really cared about anyways.)

Despite all the adversity, I still managed to whip this up:


Holiday Pannekoek.

PS: I learned to not do that again.

Even underwear is confusing

Ross & I are going to be spending the Christmas holidays in Eastern Europe. That's correct, we have chosen to go to the coldest part of the continent during the coldest time, just as we chose to go to Spain in August. We live for extremes, people.

For this holiday, we needed to get some long underwear. Wherever we travel, we always spend lots of time on foot, so we figured we had better bundle up. We went to Holland's equivalent of Wal-Mart, Hema. Hema isn't exactly like Wal-Mart in that it only sells the store brand. For example, you can't buy Maybelline make-up at Hema, you can only buy the Hema brand. Hema also seems to be classier than Wal-Mart, kind of like a mix between Wal-Mart and The Bay. Anyway, we went there today to buy our long underwear.

Not surprisingly, this proved to be twice as complicated as it should have been. We found the Hema-brand long underwear divided into three categories: Men's, women's and children's. They were packaged in sealed boxes, and we scoured the box for a size. After we couldn't find anything, we decided it must be one size fits all and bought a ladies top and bottom and a men's top and bottom as well. Almost immediately after paying for these, Ross noticed in tiny letters on the back of his box (in the barcode) that his top was a XL and his bottoms were an L. Anyone of you that has ever seen Ross knows this is a bit excessive.

So, back to the section we went and tried to find something more appropriate. I had a S top and an L bottom, when I think an M would have been best for both. After looking through all the boxes, it became obvious that Ms do not exsist. In Men's sizes, nothing other than Ls or XLs exsist. We concluded all the underwear was unisex, and the smallest size was labeled as "children's", the two biggest were "Men's" and the middle two were "Women's". The fact they went to the trouble of differentiating by gender made it twice as complicated as it should have been. Why didn't they just label it as "Adult, S, M, L & XL"? We exchanged our purchases, and both ended up getting "Women's" Ls for both top and bottom.

When we got home, we thought we should test out their warmth, and realized we accidentally bought three tops, and only one bottom. Will the adventure ever end?

A cause for celebration

For the first time since the end of July, I have worked a full work-week.

I now work my regular job on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and my new job on Thursday and Friday. I really feel it is quite an accomplishment to be working full-time in my field, in a country that speaks another language. Finding work was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. Everyone can expect the job hunt to be time-consuming and a kick to your pride, but the extra step of translating every piece of info I could find was a huge necessity that I didn't account for.

Job#2 is with a small group of people and run by a husband and wife team from a studio in their home. The husband is the founder of a very well-known and successful graphic design studio, and the wife is an established interior designer. Their intentions with this new (yet to be named) studio is to bring together the two disciplines and offer a service that doesn't just create commercial spaces, but also provides all the graphic material that accompanies it. For example, a new store opened today that the studio designed both the identity and the interior simultaneously. A very good idea!

I'm quite excited because I've wanted to try some environmental design but didn't know how to get into the field. Well, here I am, and I still don't know how I got here.

Working in Holland is not as easy as I thought it would be. I'm not talking about my qualifications, I mean just being at work is harder than expected. In Job #1, it's just the owner and I and – when she's not on the phone, or no one is visiting – English is the language spoken in the studio. Even then, sometimes it's really challenging to express ourselves and have one another understand. In addition, all the projects I have worked on are in Dutch. One of the first thing we were taught at school is to read the text before you design with it. Well, I read it, but understanding it is a whole separate task. I can't take anything for granted; every minor detail takes an effort to understand. (One day when my boss was in a meeting, I spent easily ten minutes trying to figure out how to send an email, and discovered it only after translating all the menu choices.)

At Job #2, there six or seven people and obviously they all speak Dutch. It's quite isolating to be the only one that doesn't speak a language because I am left out of every conversation that is occurring from large, important discussions, to asking if anyone wants some coffee. (FYI: Usually I can understand the later, but it takes me a few seconds to comprehend and by the time I turn around to answer, the asker has scurried off to the kitchen.) Obviously, I don't get any of the jokes.

I don't mean to sound as though this is traumatic or depressing. Obviously it gets kind of lonely, and I'm frustrated at myself for my lack of contribution. It's a new experience for me, and I don't think it's a bad one. I don't expect everyone to speak English just because I'm around.

On a brighter note, my comprehension is definitely improving. Now I can usually understand what people are talking about, although the specifics are lost. I've learned that Dutch-speaking people, just like English-speaking people, also have plenty of meaningless conversations. This might not sound like breaking news, but for the last 3 and a half months, I have listened to every conversation around me so carefully that each deserved to be quite profound. Well, it turns out all this time people were talking about rush hour, their cat, and stupid movies.

How nice it is to hear this! I'm sure this might not sound like anything too exciting, but I haven't overheard (and understood) someone else's conversation in all this time. As a result, I haven't joined in on a conversation, either. It's a small thing, but it wasn't until I couldn't that I realized how important it is.

I'm not joining in, yet. I usually just sit there and listen, and listen, and don't speak unless I'm spoken too. I feel bad interrupting a conversation to speak English. (Think about it, I have no verbal cues to know when is a good time to change topics.) I am looking forward to that day when I can actually contribute something worthwhile. I imagine my audience will be as surprised as I will.

The Dates Have Been Marked.

If ever life over here gets tiring, lonesome, drab, etc. I have something to look forward to with great anticipation.

The series of dates I referred to above are May 2 - 18, and, as many of you may know, these days mark the first time ever that the World Championships in Hockey will be taking place in Canada.

Why is this so important? Well, as some of you may also know, I have become quite a hockey fan in the past couple of years and since I cannot watch any games over here, I have made it a routine to check my NHL hockey scores before moving forward with any other aspect of my day.

Unfortunately, this morning routine usually causes the day to get off to a bad start as my team – the Calgary Flames – are, well, not doing so well (as I'm sure any of you Canucks fans most certainly know).

But alas! Just when I was beginning to lose faith in the sport as a whole, I found myself in the middle of a conversation with an Austrian and a Slovakian about the greatest country in international hockey. At first I was delighted to be able to talk sports with someone and not have it be football (though this is also very interesting). However, the more the conversation unraveled, the less apparent their reverence towards Canadian hockey became.

This was not something I would let go. Their reluctance to admit the true dominance Canada has on hockey became an issue of Canadian pride. And this I had to defend.

Luckily the issue was resolved (it was always friendly, of course) and we are now invited to the house of a Slovak national to watch the World Championships take place in Halifax and Quebec City. The only problem will be getting through the remaining 148 days until the first puck drops.

In the mean time here's some riveting tid-bits on Canadian hockey:

1) Canada has 552, 040 registered hockey players. Compare that with Russia who only has 77,000

2) Canada has over 3,000 indoor arenas. Compare that with Russia who has only 142. I wonder how many 'ponds' we have?

3) We rank first in total overall medal count (44) in the World Championships, and have won the highest number of gold medals (24).

4) Women's team won gold in all but one (where they won silver) World Championship tournament between 1990 and 2007.

5) 50.2% of players currently playing in the NHL are Canadian. The next highest representation is from the States with only 17.7%. From there it drops off dramatically.

5) 2006 was a shameful Olympics for Canada, yes, but 2002 was great!

Pakjesavond

It's December 5th, meaning that tomorrow is none other that Sinterklaas' birthday (it's the reason he comes all the way from Spain, you know.) Tonight is the traditional night for exchanging gifts delivered by Sinterklaas and the Zwart Peiten. The way children let Sinterklaas know they would like some gifts is to sing Sinter-songs loudly up the chimney. Ross & I don't know any, so I don't think he's coming to our house tonight.

But he did the other day! From the time he arrives in late November until December 6th, he can leave little treats in your shoes for you to find when you wake up in the morning. And on Saturday morning Ross & I found chocolate letters in our shoes!


Chocolate letters are a Sinterklaas tradition. Usually you receive the first initial of your name, like I did.


So far, Pakjesavond is quite balmy. I'm only mentioning this because I know you're all freezing, but it's currently +12°C, and it's 9pm! Who needs presents when you've got beautiful weather?

ribbon b

This is a first attempt at using the ribbon program I wrote (remember those colourful squiggles from a few days ago?) to create actual letters. You can start to see where I'm taking this. Ultimately I'd like to have alternates for each letter that connect with other letters to form continuous ribbon strings, but that is likely a very long time away.

Grace Speaks Dutch?

No, no I sure don't. But I am committed to studying.

I found this site, Laura Speaks Dutch that full of themed, five-minute-ish podcasts I can download to learn Dutch. Originally it was created by a man to teach his girlfriend the language. Isn't that nice? What's even nicer is that it's useful for anyone. His pronunciation is very clear, and he repeats words often so you don't have to keep stopping and starting it.

Me, I've downloaded some lessons and practice while Ross is writing calligraphy. Doesn't our house sound like so much fun?

M is for My Monogram

It's still a bit flimsy in some areas, but it's getting there. I also made a version that strings together to form a series of repeating shapes. The string version could be used to make things like traditional printers borders.