Europe

The Dutch are big on advance planning. Your typical Dutch man or woman is indoctrinated into the tradition of “the agenda” at a very early age. Six or seven I think. They usually plan everything weeks in advance. I have a few people at work who I’ve tried to get Read more…

So I’m in a car on my way to play frisbee in Groningen, which is in the north easternmost corner of the country. We stop after an hour at a gas station to fill up and get some snacks from the convenience store. Now we all can be thankful for Read more…

I am addicted. There is somthing in these damn “Oven Roasted Chicken and Thyme” potato chips that is more potent than crack cocaine (not that I would really know, but I can imagine). I can’t stop eating them. They are so TASTY. They’re like an entire meal condensed into a Read more…

Here’s an annoying difference between Europe and the States: dry cleaning costs a fortune here. Which is strange, because you’d think that since the average business dress code is more formal here than in the US, that more people would have dry cleaning to do and therefore the prices would Read more…

So I’m on UFO 2. The second of four frisbee teams that Utrecht fields. We actually play under the name UFO 3 due to a naming mishap at the Nederland Frisbee Bond, the bureaucratic organization that organizes frisbee in the Netherlands (you simply cannot escape the bureaucracy in this country). Read more…

My company has a large office in Heidelberg, Germany, which I have been to probably six or seven times. Heidelberg is one of those quaint little European towns with cobblestone streets in the old part of town, nice gothic cathedrals, and a castle which overlooks the town from up on Read more…

If you read my last post about moving, I talked about how beautiful the day was when I came back from dropping Ann off at the airport. Here’s some proof. Dordrecht’s Scheffer’s plein (1.8MB .asf file)

There’s good news about poker night, and there’s bad news. The good news is that we have finally migrated to “no limit”, and we have moved into that phase of gambling degeneracy. We have moved into the phase where the adrenaline shoots into your veins as you calmly look across Read more…

I take back what I said about it never snowing in the Netherlands. I take it back because I am sitting on a train instead of a plane. My flight from Frankfurt back to Amsterdam was cancelled because of a snowstorm that was working its way across “the Continent”. I Read more…

The last time I saw Nieves was almost four years ago. She came for the US wedding of our friends Ken and Sole, which was in the summer of 2001. Nieves was one of the au pair crop that Ken and I, and various other Princeton locals hit on. I Read more…