19/11/2002 Utrecht, Holland (Phill)
Just a quick note, too many emails to respond to today and I'm meeting Fieke in 15 minutes. I did make it to Utrecht which is about 30 mins south of Amsterdam (convenient, eh?). Yesterday was actually a big Dutch holiday calledd Saint Nicholas day. Basically it's the christian part of christmas with less commercialism. I think they substituted racism instead though! It's quite wierd but I got to spend the ceelebration with Fieke and her 5 female roommates. It was very tough :)
No really it's the trraditional day when St nick arrived by boat to Holland from Spain. What they all do is make a present for a roommate and eat traditional Dutch food. We ate this potato-cabbage-sausage contraption. I'm not positive about the ingredients becuase I truely didn't recognize them! But in the end it was dececntly good. Then came the presents, so the way it works is you secretly add the presents to a pile without saying who bought what for who. Then you roll a dice and the person who rolls six gets to pick or give a present. When you get your present it's home made and generally something to do with you. One of the roommates got a model of a really messy room with a pig in it, another a jumbo jet maded out of cardboard and foil. Really I was very impressed with all the effort, I imagined giving my friends a can of beer rolledd in toilet-paper (what kind of statement is that!).
Anyway, that's only a small part of it, oncee you get your model thing, you actually have to break it open to find the hidden real presents. It's all small stuff, candles, socks, things like that, but it's the celebration of the opening that makes it cool. After all the presents were open they started singing all these Dutch songs (the wine helped I think).
It was really unique and definately a cool experience. Granted since lots of Dutch was spoken I couldn't understand 100% of what was going on, but I pretty much followed. And they were all very nice and spoke english whenever I looked too confused. It's amazing how well the Dutch speak english.
I did do some touristy things yesterday but since it's miserable and wet I went and saw a movie for half the day! Tomorrow, Fieke and I are heading either up to Amsterdam or off to meet her parents. Tonight is volleyball (she's playing, not me) and thursday is a party. I think Saturday is a rave. it's hard to keep track of it all. Needless to say I'm having a great time!
Posted by Admin at November 19, 2002 05:23 AM