Rotterdam: Semana Santa 2011 Part 2

ROTTERDAM

Impressions: A short (less than a day) visit, but more than enough time to see most of the city. Rotterdam is a major port city and is known for its modern architecture, but really isn't a tourist city, no matter what a guide book or tourism office might tell you. My hostel was in the cube houses, one of the main tourist points in the city, and a couple of bridges, the library, and the train station (other architectural tourist stops) were all a quick walk away, so there was plenty of time to spend hours at meals, sleep, wander around parks and ports, etc. A day was more than enough time, but it was a nice stop. Also, I always think it's nice to see a non-capital city as well as the capital to have a bit of a better impression of a place.


Cube houses in Rotterdam where I slept for the night
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_house

Food: Since I only spent about 20 hours (including sleeping) in the city, I didn't try too many different types of food. Actually, I just had 2 meals. Dinner at a cheap but delicious Italian restaurant with a Singaporean girl from my hostel: Salmon and spinach pizza with white wine. Breakfast: Free from the hostel, but delicious and filling. Probably the best hostel breakfast I've ever had. Fresh bread, cheese, cold cuts, yogurt, cereals, a cappuccino machine, toast with butter and chocolate sprinkles (apparently a Dutch thing....also something I ate when I was little.)

People:Met a girl from Singapore who's living in London as soon as I got to my hostel, and since we were both traveling alone and were hungry, we went out for pizza and wine. Spent the evening in the restaurant talking about traveling and new places and food and people and life. The rest of the people there seemed to be students and were celebrating the end of their volleyball season. Very jolly, very dutch, very friendly. In the morning, I ended up wandering around to see some parks in the city with a Russian sailor that I met who was also staying at my hostel. He was there for a nautical career fair and likes to quote Russian sayings in very broken English and has an unnaturally large neck. Good company though for a morning. We took pictures of tulips together in the park before I left to catch my train. Didn't see the Maritime Museum. I probably wouldn't have gone anyway, but he wasn't interested in seeing it at all since, according to him, "His life is a maritime museum."


Tulips in a park


Another photo from a walk in the park

Amsterdam: Semana Santa 2011 Part 1

AMSTERDAM

Impressions: Perfect weather, beautiful canals, well designed museums, rich history, charming tall houses, friendly people, houseboats, bikes EVERYWHERE

Food: Indonesian chicken sandwich, Heineken,coffee on a beautiful street by the canals (see picture above), pancakes for dinner, Tasty Asia Asian Fusion restaurant with Andy (friend from camp last summer in France who came down to visit), ham and gouda grilled cheese (toastie), hot dog with lots of toppings ... cheese, relish, curry sauce, ketchup, mustard, crunchy fried onions, etc., stroopwafels (VERY tasty cookies with thin, buttery, waffle.like cookies with syrup in the middle), salty black licorice (apparently an acquired taste)

People: Met up with Andy (US) and Taz (France), two friends from the camp I worked at last summer in France the second day. On the third day, after seeing her response to my Facebook status about being in Holland, I met up with my friend Lotte for a coffee and to wander around town before catching a train down to Rotterdam that evening. She worked as a visiting Dutch professor at Indiana University 3 years ago for a semester. We met while I was studying there, and I hadn´t seen her since. A nice surprise to meet up with her again!


Renting bikes with Andy and his harmonica


By a canal with Lotte while wandering around town

Other: Rented bikes and rode along the canals for hours, Van Gogh museum, Anne Frank house, flower market, Koning written all over the place (bridges, plazas, restaurants,) anti-nuclear energy rally with a performance by a Dutch Morrocan hip hop artist


Picture of my rental bike by Koning bridge ... right before I ate an ¨American hot dog¨ while sitting by the canal


Flower Market

How to have an adventure during Semana Santa

1. Buy plane tickets: From Madrid to Amsterdam, then from Brussels (Charleroi) to Sevilla

2. Look up luggage size and weight restrictions for RyanAir and EasyJet to avoid the hefty oversize luggage fees that budget airlines are known for

3. Buy a new RuRuKaDi brand carry-on suitcase at the Chinese store. Never heard of the brand before? Me neither. :) (The airport misplaced my old one for about 4 days when I first arrived to Madrid and brought it back to me with a missing wheel. Plus since US dimensions are slightly different than Europe measurements, and the budget airlines here are EXTREMELY picky about the size and weight, it was probably time for me to get one anyhow.) 55 cm x 45 cm x 20 cm, maximum weight of 10 kg (Thank you, RyanAir.)

3. Book hostels in Amsterdam and Brussels (Thank you, hostelworld.com)

4. Realize that booking hostels 2 weeks in advance is actually too late for such a popular vacation time and decide to add an extra city into the plan after realizing there´s no place in the entire city of Amsterdam to stay for the planned third night...


5. Look up other cities well connected to both Amsterdam and Brussels by train

6. Book hostel in Rotterdam

7. Read something online and in the Let´s Go Western Europe (on a budget) book from 2008 about Rotterdam to see if there´s anything to do or see there

8. Spend an hour or so getting excited reading about the architecture, history of immigration, importance of the port, and student life in Rotterdam (Thank you, google.com and wikipedia.com)

9. Decide maybe missing the 3rd day in Amsterdam isn´t so bad after all

10. 2 days before... Look up weather forecast for Amsterdam, Brussels, and Sevilla for this coming week. Realize that packing for 12 days in a carry on suitcase for places that may be as cold as 2ºC and as warm as 30ºC might be tricky

11. Buy train ticket from Rotterdam to Brussels. Hope for the best and wait to buy the Amsterdam to Rotterdam ticket until I get there since the website only accepts credit cards from Dutch banks

12. 1 day before... Look up ways to get from Avenida de America to the Barajas airport in Madrid to arrive at 5:00 am for a flight at 6:50 am

13. Realize there is no night bus to the airport and come to terms with spending 3 hours tonight in the airport before check-in opens. This is all part of the adventure, right??

14. Spend an hour and a half in the metro frantically writing down sites to see, typical foods, etc. in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brussels, and Liege and reading up on the basic history, art, architecture, politics, and literature of each place

15. Copy down reservation numbers, dates, addresses, phone numbers, price, and directions both walking and by metro from the airport to the train station to the hostel to the train station to the second hostel to a different train station to the third hostel on a green sheet of paper (harder to misplace when it´s green)

16. Fill up travel size shampoo, soap, etc. bottles

17. Pack and hope to fit everything in for the 12 day trip into the 55 cm x 45 cm x 20 cm suitcase.... So far so good....

18. Walk to the locutorio to print out boarding passes and tickets for 2 flights, 1 train from Rotterdam to Brussels, and 1 bus from Sevilla to Madrid

19. Plan for later today... Try to take a nap for a few hrs before catching the last bus of the night to the airport at 2 am, take along the rest of perishable fruits, bread, etc. from the fridge for snacks for the night and breakfast, find a way to kill time or rest a little bit at the airport until the flight to Amsterdam!


We´ll see! For better or for worse, an adventure awaits :)

Show and Tell: Wheat Sourdough Bagels!

Around this time last year, I found myself sitting on my friend Stuart´s terrace in the sun with a beer and 3 or 4 other British and American friends chatting about bagels. We missed them. I like Spanish food but have not come across a single bagel shop, a lone bagel in a bakery somewhere, or even a tasteless frozen bagel since arriving.

Last summer, one of my top "American things to do while home before leaving for 9 more months" was having a toasted asiago cheese bagel with smoked gouda artichoke schmear from Bloomington Bagel Company. It was like heaven.

The beauty of a bagel lies in its versatility. For breakfast with butter or cream cheese or jam or peanut butter or.... For lunch or a mid-day snack, combining any flavor of bagel you can imagine with whatever cream cheese you fancy that day. Or for a heartier meal, slather on hummus and veggies, or anything else in the world for a bagel sandwich. Pretzel bagels, bagel pizzas, bagel chips, unsliced, sliced, toasted or not, sweet, salty, savory, sitting down with friends and a glass of iced tea or on the go on the way to class or work, any hour of the day or night with anything on it you can imagine.

Brilliant.

And even though I probably think about, dream about, and crave bagels at least 3 or 4 times a week, this weekend was the first time it dawned on me to try to make them myself. Expecting a disaster, I was pleasantly surprised with how they turned out. Here's the photo evidence and a few details on how to make them.



Step One: Make dough and roll into balls
I made up the recipe for the dough after looking at a couple bagel-making tips online. Here's the basic idea: Combine active yeast, a little warm water, a bit of salt and sugar for the taste, about a cup of sourdough starter, and a LOT of wheat flour and a little white flour. Knead it all together for a very long time. Keep adding more flour until the dough is very thick (aka thicker than normal bread dough.) Keep kneading until it passes the "windowpane test", or until your hands are so tired that you don't feel like continuing. Separate into equal sized balls, the size that seems appropriate for the bagel size you want. Cover lightly with olive oil so they won't stick to the plate, and let rise for 1 hour.




Step Two: Make bagel shape out of dough
Roll out into fat snakes (Play-Doh style) until about as long as 2 hands are wide. Form into circles around your thumb. Pinch the two ends together and roll together a bit until they look normal and are well stuck. Put them back on the plate and let rise another hour. Picture with my hand so you get an idea of the size of my bagels.



Step Three: What makes the difference between a holey roll and a bagel
Bring a pot of water to boil. Put the bagels in a few at a time so that they're not crowded. Leave them in 10 to 15 seconds on one side, then flip over and leave the other side in the water for 10 to 15 seconds. Take out, let the water drip off for a couple of seconds, and put them on a greased baking sheet.

Then bake until they are cooked through. Will depend on the oven. For mine, a crappy oven probably from the 50s that has no way of setting the temperature and only heats from the top, this means putting them on the lowest rack in the oven at what I estimate to be somewhere between 300 and 400 degrees F for 15 minutes, then flipping with a spatula and baking the other side for 15 minutes more.

Step Four: Eat it.
Let cool for a few minutes so you don't burn yourself. Then slice or don't, toast or don't, and put whatever you want on it. SO tasty! (Especially after 6 months without eating one.) They taste much better the day you bake them than the next day, but are still relatively soft the second day. I wouldn't wait until the third day, though I ate all of my bagels before the end of day two, so I'm not sure.





Maybe I'll write a cookbook. "Kitchen inventions for people who don't mind estimating (a lot)."

Or not.

Dear roommates, coworkers, ladies at the gym, etc.... Even though you don´t read this:

Here´s a clip from an article on webmd about "5 health habits it's okay to skip"

"4. Staying indoors when it's cold outside.

Going out in the cold won't actually give you a cold -- unless you're camping out in a blizzard for days at a time. (Ditto for going outside with wet hair.) "This is an old wives' tale that probably originated because we do tend to get more colds during the winter months," says Katz. "But the problem is the air inside, which becomes more germ-laden when we aren't opening windows and letting fresh air in." One caveat: If you're cold enough to be shivering, go in and warm up. Shivering is a sign that your body is stressed because your core temperature has dropped, which can make you more vulnerable to viruses."

http://women.webmd.com/features/5-healthy-habits-its-okay-to-skip?page=2

Granted quoting webmd isn't the same as a referencing a medical journal, but still....

People's weird ideas about health start becoming annoying when they use them to nag you about what to do. I've had my window open today because it's 78 degrees and sunny. A beautiful day. And since I've been sick, it can't hurt to air out my room. My roommates were worried about me because apparently I should only keep my window open for 15 minutes to air out my room because if I leave it open longer, the air will make me sicker. What? (Not to even get into the fact that the air outside is the same temperature or warmer than the air in our apartment...so this isn't even consistent with cold air theory that people usually bring up...)

Also, evidently walking barefoot or in socks on a tile floor makes you sick.

Not wearing a scarf when it's 78 degrees out and you have a cough will give you pneumonia.

And let's not even start with what happens if you don't blow dry your hair..... (I don't have a blow dryer in Spain. Waste of time and space.)


Bacteria and viruses make you sick. Being with small children with bacteria and viruses every day can make you sick. Being cold can lower your immunity but in itself won't make you sick. 78 degrees is not cold. If you have bronchitis, antibiotics, liquids, and rest can help you feel better. Leaving your window open and not wearing a scarf when it's 78 degrees will not make you worse.

This is what I think.

*Steps off soapbox**

Thank you.



Random forum about some Germans' ideas about sickness and moving air: http://www.toytowngermany.com/lofi/index.php/t115648.html

Picture of a small child: