paying attention??

Just checking to see who's still paying attention. I've received some complaints when I stopped the morning posts.

Happy New Year!

Resolutions:
Back on the health wagon (yup, that means crown and diet coke instead of crown & coke)
carrying lunch to work
memorizing 20 phone numbers (this is probably the toughest one on this list)
one llu class per quarter
testing out a new investment strategy...i've already made $4. on it! Now that's what i call the fast track.

that's all i have so far.

Wishing Well

This was me wishing for a speedy return home!

Best Under Pressure

I’ve come up with a new packing strategy. Throw away as much as possible. I’ve accumulated quite a stack of magazines…they will be tossed. All of the tiny travel size items, they are getting tossed. Hopefully nothing important falls into the line of fire. I worked on the packing again this morning and I think I can make it work.

I bought some tulip bulbs that have the seal of approval for entry into the states. I hope that wasn’t a scam, otherwise Joni will be waiting for me at the airport Cell Phone lot for quite a while. Joni, if I’m walking with a limp when I get out of the airport, Customs probably got a hold of me.

I’m back in the office by myself today. The others headed back to London for the Christmas party. I hope my secret santa recipient appreciates the furry handcuffs from Amsterdam!

OK, back to work for me. I’m on a roll today wrapping everything up!

I’ll leave you with more things I miss:
Crown Royal
My awesome friends
Wednesday nights with my friends
Thursday nights with my friends
Friday nights with my friends…you get the picture.
My new Madonna CD
Luke and those other Hammers

Almost Home Vrije

I finally found the cause of my morning headaches I’ve been having.  The coffee machine at the hotel is in dutch and it turns out that the word ‘Vrije’ means free.  As in – caffeine free coffee.

It’s really quite simple if I would have just taken the time to sound it out.  The ‘V’ is a hard F sound and phonetically it sounds exactly like free if I had paid any  attention.  I had started wondering if my caffeine addiction was so bad now that I needed two cups of coffee before it would go away.  Turns out the second cup was really the first one that had caffeine in it here at the office.

We are laughing quite a bit in the office.  The new girl has to use her electronic translator quite a bit to keep up with our conversations.  The funniest exchanges are between Liu and Corrie.  Corrie refers to everything as a Wee Bit of something…”it’s a wee bit of a problem”  or “the numbers are a wee bit off”  Liu asks her after every sentence “what’s a weebit number?”  or “what kind of a problem is a weebit problem?”  Francis and I spend a lot of time holding our laughs in.  They talk in circles constantly.

I’ve carried my camera to the office with me today so that I can get some pics of everyone I’m talking about.  I made an attempt at starting to pack this morning…it’s going to be quite the challenge.  Everyone cross your fingers that they are not working on the train tracks this Saturday so that I can ride a direct train to the airport.  I had a hard time with my bags on the way down here with all of the connections I had to make between trains and busses.

Here’s a list of things I’m tired of/miss:
Frizzy hair
No Cokes
Not Cooking – I really miss cooking!
No Shopping
No xmas cards being mailed to me
Not Driving
My ipod (I forgot it in New York – tragic)
My magazine subscriptions
Ice in my drinks

Here is a list of things I will miss when I’m gone:
Long, laid back dinners
“Go Go” the bird
The cheeses – yum!
Windmills
My new friends
Practicing Dutch words at lunchtime
Good beers
The architecture
The canals
Walking conveniently instead of driving (I know, I contradict myself)

United Nations

Sungard has the united nations working here at the client currently.  There’s me (very obviously American), the Scottish girl, the Chinese Girl, and Francis who is Nigerian but now calls Geneva, Switzerland home.

Francis is very cool, he was here with me a few days last week as well.  He is about to hang up his work cap and head off to Barcelona to get his MBA degree.  He’s very interesting to talk to.

The Scot just got back from a project in Singapore.  She was only home in London for 12 hours prior to having to catch a flight to this project.  They were working from 7am to 2am each day in Singapore…she really needs a break.

The Chinese girl is attached to me like glue.  I cannot understand it.  Twice now while walking she has interlocked her arm into mine.  I have not witnessed her doing this to the Scottish girl…I find it very uncomfortable and quite strange.  Twice now I’ve walked straight toward a pole so that she has to let go.  Now I keep my arms tight down to my side while walking so that she does not have the opportunity to interlock arms at all.

She also walks at exactly the same speed as me.  I’ve been running some tests and when I slow down, she slows down…when I speed back up, she speeds back up.  I just can’t shake her.   She also walks right next to me.  I start veering out to the right, next thing I know she’s right next to me again hitting my arms.  So weird.  I do not like it.  A girl needs her personal space, you know?

The work days are getting much longer here, but the end is coming up very quickly.

Smarty Pants

Two new girls from Sungard joined the project yesterday.  I’ve met one of them a few times.  Her name is Corrie and she is Scottish.  Her accent is great.  The other girl is brand new to Sungard.  She is a young girl from China.  She’s working on her masters in some sort of quantitative finance field that makes my head hurt.  She’s here shadowing to learn the product Corrie works with.

She sat next to me yesterday evening and asked me to explain what I had been doing for the day.  I gave her the quick synopsis showing her how I was tying out numbers.  After a bit more explanation on my part she asked some question that sounded like “OH, do they independently determine the blah, blah, blah, blah, techno quantitative blah of the blah?”  To which I answered “Oh, and if you click this button…it creates a copy!  Isn’t that cool!?!”  I have no idea what kind of question she asked me, and the fact that the question before that one was “can you tell me what reconciliation means?”  well, I was thrown for a bit of a loop (or a Wee bit of a loop, as the Scottish girl would say).  Cute girl, but she’s a bit too smart for her own good in my opinion.  I think I’ll take her out drinking tonight.  Ha, just kidding.

I was a Wee bit of a bad host last night.  We ended up working too late, our computers were trying to explode.  They start popping up legal warnings after 6pm that you are breaking the law by working that late.  Well we tried leaving at 7pm and we couldn’t get out of the gates.  We had to stand outside in the cold for about 15 minutes.  The gate then magically opened on its own…I’m not sure why still, but I didn’t stick around to try and figure it out.  Today I’ve requested longer access hours on my security key.

After the gate incident I took them to a restaurant that I hadn’t been to yet.  I found a chicken dish on the menu!  I was so excited.  So I told them that I was planning to order the chicken meal!  It was then that little Liu pointed out that it was on the children’s menu.  See, way too smart for her own good.  Why is the only chicken dish in town only available on the children’s menu?  WHY?  I have seen chickens here, I know there are plenty of them.  Why can’t I get a chicken breast for dinner?!?

As you can probably tell from my lack of complaints this week, it has warmed up a Wee bit.  I was able to make up two new outfits this week so far!  It is a good week.  I didn’t have to select from sweaters number 1-5 to decide what to wear the last two days.  It’s great.

My favorite Beer

This is my favorite beer...Brugge Tripel. I treated myself to a pint glass souvie when I went to Brugge. Grady asked me about Bavaria beer...so i decided to set out and do some research on it. I agree Grady, a very tasty beer. The funny thing is that Jenn sent me off with photocopies of her travel journal for the countries i'd be visiting. She also mentioned Bavaria beer in her journal. Peter and my other friends here (both of them) say it is one of their favorites as well. So you've chosen a great beer to like Grady...but try Brugge Tripel if you haven't yet!

Tour de Belgium

Peter picked me up from the hotel Sunday morning at 9am. It’s the first time that I didn’t even have to walk to the car that would be driving me somewhere. Quite the treat. He had packed snacks and drinks and more of the gross drop candies. I gave them one more shot, and I think they tasted worse than the first time I tried them. I’ll be sure to put some in each of your stockings.

We took off through the 4 mile tunnel and headed to Brugge. I found another lighthouse on the way…Peter graciously stopped for that…but I decided not to bother him with yet another windmill picture. I also made him stop so I could get photos of perhaps the largest horse (could have been part elephant, I’m still not sure) I’ve ever seen. Something close to a Clydesdale (sp?).

We made it into Brugge after asking an old man out wandering which direction to go…then we used my handy compass. It’s so easy to get around in these countries…they have signs point in the direction of every little town. I’m really not sure why we stopped to ask for directions.

Brugge is beautiful. Definitely the best city I’ve been to. The canal bridges are lined with ivy. I can’t say enough about the architecture…so amazing. The buildings are outstanding. The city square (markt) was turned into an ice skating rink…so pretty. Sinter Klaus came this weekend here. He comes on December 5th (but I guess they celebrate the nearest Saturday from what I can gather…it must help the last minute shoppers out since nothing would be open any other day).

I ate a Belgium waffle with hot caramel, tried one of their hot dogs, then I had pancakes. I felt like a kid at a carnival. It started raining while we were there so we got in the car and decided to head off east in Belgium. The next stop was Gent (pronounced Hint). It was another quaint town, but a little bit larger than Brugge (or more commercial is maybe the right word). We didn’t spend a whole lot of time there, it was still raining pretty good. Then we shot off to Antwerp. We walked all around the city…through the diamond market. It’s world famous for the diamond industry there.

We ate at an Egyptian place for dinner. The shwarma was very good. After that we headed back for Middelburg. I was shocked that the drive back only took us an hour. It seemed like we had traveled so far away. I was back at my hotel by 7pm after a day of visiting 3 cities in a different country! It was awesome.

Pay attention on Trains

My Friday wasn’t one of the best days I’ve had so far, so I basically went straight to the hotel from work and stayed inside the room the whole night.  I set the alarm for an early wake up to head to off to Amsterdam.  The trip was a 3 hour train ride, that I tried my hardest to turn into a longer ride.  I had one change I needed to make and the combination of being in a bit of a daze from Friday and having my head buried in a Sudoku puzzle made me miss the stop I needed to get off at.  It also made me miss the announcement (or not understand what they were saying in Dutch) that the train was terminating at that stop as well.  The train took off a little bit further and then came to a dead stop…it was only then that I realized I was the only person on the train.  I caught the conductor as he was about to get out and you can imagine the surprise on his face when he ran into me in the car.

He helped me crawl out of an emergency exit door and walked me across some tracks to get back to the platform.  The crawl up to the platform was not my most graceful moment at all.  I then had to run clear to the other end of the platform to catch the other train that had already arrived.  But other than that hiccup…the trip there was successful.

I got to spend about 5 hours in the city of Amsterdam.   Thanks to everyone who gave suggestions for the time I had there.  Unfortunately I did not get to visit the Anne Frank house, but I did wander all through the city and visited the Rijks and the Van Gogh museums.  I had wanted to visit the Heineken brewery as well, but I didn’t make it.  It started raining pretty bad once I left the Van Gogh museum so I grabbed a bite to eat and then did a little more wandering on the way back to the train station.  I did the obligatory walk through the red light district and stopped in a lot of different stores.  You guys were right, I was able to find the gag gift with no problem at all.

My train ride home lasted well over 4 hours.  They were working on the tracks so I had to divert across several different trains and some bus rides tossed in there.  I was pretty beat when I made it back to Middelburg.

L.A.M.B.

Can someone please let Gwen know that I found her next replacements for Love, Angel, Music, and Baby...

They are in Brugge, Belgium. Tell her not to worry her pretty little face. These girls have the wicked style she's looking for, just take a look at those fur-lined coats, for gripe's sake!

It's a Girl!!!

It's a bouncing baby girl!! YAY!

But we all knew that after her slip up on Jay Leno. Now, I couldn't quite make out the message that Ben left me on my cell phone (the international one)...but I think he said her name is Violet. That's not confirmed though until I can get a hold of Mrs. Affleck herself.

Well, it looks like I'm locked out of my work email account today. That will be about a 7 hour wait before i can get IT to let me back in. Looks like this will be a pretty productive morning!

You know, i've been coming to work at 8am every day here. It turns out, I thoroughly enjoy coming in at this time...and i especially love sitting down at a table every morning to eat breakfast prior to leaving for work. Who knows, maybe my early work mornings are now going to be a thing of the past. I would sign up for walking to work once i get back home, but I think that's a bit of a stretch...i cannot commit to that.

Still Cold

Add raging winds to my list of weather complaints for my morning walk in today. Today I put on 3 pair of socks to help defrost my feet. I also have a camisole, a long sleeve shirt, and a sweater over that. I think we’re almost defrosted now. We’ll see what tomorrow’s weather slaps at me this time. I think tonight I am going to buy a pair of thermal pants to wear under my work pants. It is the official shopping night, you know!

I decided yesterday that I’m a much better employee in a taller building than this one. I only took in about 50% of what was said in a 2 hour meeting yesterday due to all of the boats passing by outside the window as well as the bikes and trains. The boats and trains kept sounding their horns…I clearly have a case of A.D.D. I really just wanted to be outside with my camera to grab pictures of the sailboats sailing in front of the windmill.

Who sails a boat in this kind of weather anyway? I also have seen rowing teams rowing through the canal outside of my hotel in the middle of the night…don’t they know that it’s dark and it’s freezing outside? I think I’d row my coach straight over into the water for that type of a practice.

Last night I went to the grocery market on the way home from the office. I was so excited to find a jar or fiery salsa made by Pringles! They do not have anything like tortilla chips, so I picked up a can of Pringles labeled Pringles Dippers. Turns out, the salsa was horrible (very sweet) and the chips where Thai Green Curry flavored…that’s a horrible combo for anyone who is considering trying it.

Here is a picture of the inside of de Mug. Voted best café in the Netherlands. We spend a lot of time here…at least two week nights per week.

Wednesday Night Trivia...here i come!

Useless Information I’ve learned:

• The Dutch are collectively known as being the nation with the tallest people. This is attributed to all of the milk and cheese that is consumed. I concur that there are a lot of towering people here…and there is a lot of cheese and milk being consumed.

• Almost every Dutch person is a swimmer. There are supposedly pools everywhere and this is their favorite sport. I’ve yet to see any of these pools, or people claiming to be swimmers…but then again, it is winter time.

• For a beer to be called a Tripel after the name means that the beer is at least 8% alcohol by volume, there are supposedly only 7 in the world (I doubt this counts microbrews). For the term Dubbel after the name, it has to be at least 6% alcohol by volume.

That’s all stuff that I’ve learned so far this week. I’m anxious to get back to the states and play trivia on Wednesday nights. I’m certain they will ask us a question about the Dutch people or beer.

I’ve sorted out my plans for this coming weekend, and I’m quite excited about them. My friend Peter has offered to drive me to Brugge, Belgium on Sunday so that frees up my Saturday to jump up to Amsterdam and check things out there. I have now found myself with only this weekend left to do exploring and I was worried that I’d have to stay overnight in Brugge in order to see it. This works out great though and I’m really looking forward to the weekend. I drank a Brugge Tripel last night in celebration of the plan!

The next weekend (dec 9th weekend) I will be back in London for my company holiday party…it’s sounding like a really good time. I need ideas for a secret santa gag gift for that, so if anyone has any ideas….throw them my way please.

After that, I’ll be home! Just in time for the 2 part rager graduation celebration and the beloved ornament exchange parties! I do love the holiday season.

On another note, I am not sure that I can add anymore layers of clothing to my person in order to stand the walk to work in the mornings. It just keeps getting more and more cold (and rainy). Yesterday we finally discovered that the heater does not work in the office I’m in, only after they walked in to find me shivering and blowing warm air into my ice blocks, um…I mean hands. I had just accepted that this is how things are, and never thought to question whether the heater was working. They’ve now brought in a space heater and I sit alone in the office with no windows with the door shut (in hopes that this will help the room heat up quicker).

Back to Zeeland!

I’m wide awake today! What a cold walk into the office. I checked back into the hotel last night and my new room is awesome! My bathroom is huge compared to the last…I have a counter around the sink, a bath tub (with a very dangerous slope), a heater inside the bathroom that works and doubles as a towel warmer and iron, and I have a short little sink that I can wash my feet in (that, or it’s something that a man uses to go to the bathroom…luckily my feet get clean enough in the shower).

My room has two night stands, a little entry hall with a true closet and it’s on the back side of the hotel, so it’s super quiet. The quiet, along with the heater and the jet lag made me sleep like a baby last night for 8 full hours! Today will be a good day.

I hope everyone had a great thanksgiving! I hated missing the annual Wednesday night out before the big holiday. I hear it was up to par with all of the previous years. Good job team. We went to the Macy’s thanksgiving parade and viewed all of the store front windows. For anyone who’s never seen what all the stores do for xmas…it’s so amazing. Saks has to rope off the windows for the crowds to be herded through…and Bergdorf’s windows were insane! So nice, and so much money put into the windows.

I dragged my parents to times square on Friday to see the A&M/Texas game at the ESPN zone. We had a great time and met a lot of other Texans there. What a good game…I’m so glad we put up a decent fight!

Here’s a pic of the parade (coming soon, just realized i haven't downloaded the pics yet)…

I heart NY!

Well I’m off to my American Holiday weekend!  I must admit I’m pretty excited.  I really want to be able to walk into stores at any old time I please (before 9pm on most days and 6pm on Sundays of course…).

Does anyone know the rules on bringing cheese back into the states?  What about flower bulbs?  Those are the things that most interest me here.

I saw the funniest thing in a magazine (I can only look at pictures here, I have no idea what the article says).  It was a golf club, but instead of a regular club head on the club (I think that’s what they are called) it was a wooden clog!  Ha.  They were using a wooden clog golf club to hit rounds of Gouda cheese.  Hysterical.  I wish I could make out from the article where this place was.

I’m having a good time making up the words for the signs that are around me.  Every now and then I see packs of cigarettes that I’m certain are warning me that if I smoke, I will have “random black toe”…now that’s scary!  Hell, I’m even making up words for the signs that I’m pretty certain are promoting the new Harry Potter book…those say “Saturday night live does a much better job at playing our characters…”

I watched a movie the other night, but besides that I have only watched the tv two other times.  I can get the BBC news station in my hotel room.  Speaking of…I just found out this morning that I will be getting a larger room when I go back on Monday!  Woo Hoo.  I asked for the honeymoon suite (it has a bath tub) but they didn’t buy it.

I do not seem to be getting WiFi service in the airport, so you guys will prolly be disappointed when you don’t have a blog at the normal time…my apologies.  I had a 2 ½ hr train ride that took off at 7:00 this morning.  Off to NYC!!
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!!  Gobble, Gobble.

Observations

You might be Dutch if:

1. You confuse the “Bald Eagle” with the term “Spread Eagle”


2. You consider it “American” to eat with your fork in your right hand when you are actually right-handed.


3. Your lunch consists of milk and a stack of bread with slices of cheese in between, and you eat it by cutting it into squares with your knife and fork.


4. You break every 10 minutes for coffee, every 30 minutes for a smoke, every hour for a half-hour long conversation (regardless if the other person has time).


5. Cheese, it’s what’s for breakfast, dinner, lunch, and snack time.

You might be an American in the Netherlands if:

1. You thought you ordered a pasta dish, but instead you got something that translates to “baby cow with small bones still in it”


2. You receive suspicious glances when drinking a coke before 3pm (they think I have a problem).


3. You cannot find a chicken dish on a menu to save your life.


4. Your cheese intake has tripled.


5. Each morning when you wake up, your legs are still marching in place from all of the walking.

10% alcohol by volume

Who's the tourist in this pic?? This is a very strong Belgium beer. One was enough for me.

Town Hall

8th Wonder of the World

I slept in on Sunday…I almost missed the last call for breakfast at the hotel. I made it down there at 10:15 and breakfast is over at 10:30. I straightened my room a bit and showered, then I figured out how to work my new power adaptor that I had picked up on Saturday.

I sat downstairs in the dining area of the hotel for a while. I’m addicted to Sudoku puzzles (Japanese logic puzzles) and I’ve been working those like crazy. I’m getting to where I can fly through the ‘light and easy’ ones finally, so I’ll get to jump up to Moderate soon. I have my strategy working in my favor now.

Nellie and Ludwig picked me up at the hotel at about 1:30pm. We headed out in the direction of the town of Veere (it’s to the north of middelburg in the map below). From there we headed to a really spectacular sight…the entire area of Zeeland flooded in 1953. The entire area is below sea level and there were large numbers of villages that were washed completely away (much like our current tsunami and hurricane disasters).

In fact, a team of engineers from here contacted the US to offer their expertise to help New Orleans repair their levee problems a few years back. We’re said to have politely declined the offer for help. The flood gates that they have built here are truly incredible. Ludwig made the comment of it being the 8th wonder of the world while we were on our way there, I bit my tongue and decided not to mention the astrodome, man was that a good decision. This puts the poor astrodome to shame (and it’s still use). These flood gates cut off the entire north sea…it’s massive and stretches between island after island. Words cannot really do it justice.

We visited a tower that is the absolute only thing remaining of an entire city. The town was never rebuilt and now it is a nature preserve that surrounds it. I believe the town was called Koudekerke, and the tower is now an information center (very tight quarters) that you can climb to the top of.

We stopped at a restaurant on the water there and had a drink and some bitterballen. It’s like the croquettes I had at lunch one day (that taste like an entire chicken fried steak with gravy wrapped into a fried package) except these were in the shape of a ball, rather than a stick.

After visiting the huge flood gates (we hopped to the two islands north of Walcheren – Noord-Beveland, and the other one just north of there) we headed back to Flissingen. We went on the boardwalk there…it’s really funny because they are building these high-rise condos on the boardwalk and it is starting to resemble South Beach Miami. We saw a beautiful sunset and had a drink at a bar on the water. They have this piece of art called the wind organ…it is a grouping of bamboo reeds with holes in it that plays music when the wind rushes through it, it’s very cool. The photo is the sun setting off behind the wind organ.

They dropped me off at the hotel at about 4pm. I stayed down at the bar area and met the owner of the hotel. He’s a very nice guy and he put a DVD in for my to watch on the big screen in the back seating area of the reception area. I watched Unleashed. It’s not a movie I would have picked to see on my own…but it wasn’t a bad movie at all.

After that I worked a bit in my room and then headed off to bed. Ready for week #2!

Rocky Start

I met up with my co-worker named Peter Saturday morning for breakfast. We set up to meet at their big bookstore called Drvnkery…which I pronounce Drunkery…and they pronounce Dry-ker-eye. But it’s quite common for me to botch these words up this bad. I do find it funny that this whole time I thought it was a huge bar that is never open, rather than a bookstore.

We tried to have breakfast there, but we soon found out that they do not serve until 11:30am. So we had a drink and wandered off to the next eatery. The same thing happened at this place, so we had another drink. What kind of town doesn’t serve breakfast until 11:30 on Saturdays? That’s brunch. Peter kept apologizing and explaining that he’s never out at 10am on a Saturday morning, that must be why he never realized this.

We went to the tourist center to get the Walking guide to Art in Middelburg. They explained that it is being reprinted and is only a tour on the third Sunday of your mom’s birthday month or something cooky like that. So we just grabbed a general map and shot off on a walking tour of our own.
We went to the large Church (which has the clock tower that I use as a point of reference for everywhere I walk)…it was closed. This tour was off to a great start! I lowered my expectations and we strolled along the city for quite a while just fine! We did a lot of window shopping in different galleries we stumbled on. Peter grew up in the eastern part of Holland so his knowledge of the city was a little shaky, to say the least. I thoroughly enjoyed the buildings, and the harbor, and the people wandering around out on foot, bike, or moped.

We jumped back to breakfast spot number 2 and had a light lunch before heading off to the car to see the rest of the countryside. We were able to eat outside, as the sun was shining and it was a beautiful day.

We headed out in the car in the direction of the north-west coastline…we headed to Domburg. Just before Domburg we spotted a castle and decided to stop and check it out. It was a huge nature preserve (walking trails, wildlife, and a route all the way to the beach). We read the history of the castle and then headed off down the trails to the beach. The beaches are very pretty here and this is one of the largest tourists town for German’s to flock to in the summers. As we drove on from the castle you found vacation home after vacation home. There is a good combination of vacation bungalow’s as well as huge Manors that are very wealthy families’ country homes.

If you look at the map below, we shot from middelburg to Domburg and then followed the coastline down to Vlissingen. There were a ton of beautiful windmills, lighthouses, beaches…I even saw old German bunkers left over from WWII.
From Vlissingen we went back to Middelburg and I did a little work at the hotel. I met back up with Peter at a Jazz Café for dinner that night. This was the very first place that had the menu translated in English! I was a happy girl. I’ve yet to find any sort of grilled chicken (or any sort of chicken, for that matter) dish. We ate at 7 instead of 8 and I was home at a great hour again.