I made a menu of Dutch foods for us to try. They’re sort of home food staples, not anything too elaborate or traditional. This is the first thing we tried: hagelslag, which literally means hailstorm. It’s bread and butter topped with real chocolate sprinkles.
I’m so excited to hang out with my friends for new stories.
🔖 Read WE’VE LOST THE PLOT by Megan Garber (The Atlantic). “Our constant need for entertainment has blurred the line between fiction and reality—on television, in American politics, and in our everyday lives.”
Chilling. What now?
Finished reading: Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo 📚
I love it so much. I left the hardcover at home but bought the ebook to read while I’m traveling, which meant I could highlight without feeling weird about it and I highlighted a ton of stuff.
🔖📺🎮 Read Television Is Better Without Video Games and Video Games Are Better Without Gameplay (Ian Bogost, The Atlantic).
Maybe Ian Bogost should stop playing video games.
My kid made a Kirby and the Forgotten Land fanzine, I am dead from cute.
📺🖖🏻 When I watch TNG or Picard, Data is Data, but anyone else Brent Spiner plays is Brent Spiner doing an awesome job. But Data is, viscerally for me, Not A Character Brent Spiner Plays, but instead A Guy (an android guy but still).
📺 Watched Ares.
Brilliant dark academia horror with all the hallmarks: secret society, dangerously powerful young people, gorgeous fashion, a lower class newcomer, with the spirit of LEGENDBORN or ACE OF SPADES critiquing the aesthetic’s Eurocentrism.
Our second week in the Netherlands has been quiet so far. Exactly a week after we got here, I came down with a cough that has developed into a pretty standard respiratory virus. The COVID self-test was negative. This wasn’t a surprise because the rate of infection here is vanishingly small. Aalsmeer has about 32,000 inhabitants. One of them has tested positive this week.
Meanwhile in Amsterdam, 13 out of about 903,000 people reported positive tests last week.
For the purposes of comparison, that’s 1.2 cases per 100,000 people over 7 days. At home, there were 153 new cases per 100,000 people last week.
I know ground water numbers are more reliable but I struggle to interpret them, so this is what I use to determine risk.
So, it’s probably not COVID given the low incidence of COVID here and the negative test.
I’ve still felt pretty crappy, so I’ve been sleeping a ton. ME, M, and I ventured out to the Grote Poel (the large pool) of the Westeindeplassen. The humidity outside really helps my breathing but I have to be careful not to overexert myself.
Today both ME & M are feeling poorly.
In the meantime, W has been into the city a couple times and loved exploring. I’m looking forward to getting the whole family there next week once we’re all back on our feet. It always takes at least an hour to get there from the village.
(When we booked the house, there was a bus that went directly to the airport train station but they changed the routes right before we came so it doesn’t run anymore. This adds one or two transfers to every trip.)
I guess people really want to know about what food you get when you travel. We mostly buy groceries and prepare our own food, so we haven’t tried anything extra Dutch besides stroopwaffels. Those are delicious.
The eggs here are super fresh and excellent. They have all the produce you might expect. They have a mix of Dutch brands and other brands. Froot Loops are Unicorn Froot Loops. We eat a lot of Nature Valley granola bars. There is, of course, immense variety in the cheese available.
That’s the latest here. I hope to be more adventurous soon!
Duolingo really emphasizes the importance of learning the Dutch word “krant,” which means newspaper. I was confused at first because it seems like a specialized term now that print news doesn’t have such a big market share but one of these comes to our house each Thursday, so?
