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Latest Elfstedentocht news: it's sort of looking more and more like it might happen this year. The organising body have had a meeting, and done a press conference, and are going to have another one on Wednesday. People were wandering round on the frozen surface of Prinsengracht tonight when I was cycling home. The ice isn't about to go away; it's - ( Read more... )

I started some Dutch lessons last week. They originally put me in the complete beginners' class, since the assessment for levels was mostly done over the phone and I clammed up at anything beyond 'ik kom uit Engeland', but after two two-hour lessons of that, it was clear (and best of all, clear to me) that I wasn't in the right place. I do know ( Read more... )

I haven't been playing regularly in a band since something like 2008. Until this afternoon, I hadn't even sat down behind a drumkit since March 2010. There didn't seem to be much point when there was always something else I was supposed to be doing, when it cost money I didn't have, when it would be stupid to join a band when the plan was to leave ( Read more... )

I've had a cold for two and a half weeks now. In the first week I sounded like I'd managed to develop a decades-old 60-a-day habit overnight. In the second week I stopped croaking but started sneezing everywhere. By of the end of the second week I'd gone back to croaking, especially after spending Friday evening in a biercafe/restaurant in ( Read more... )

I could tell the conversation had gone from childbirth, hospitals and home births to buckets, but not why, and what all the hand gestures were for. It turns out that for home birth in the Netherlands, you're supposed to have two buckets. But since no-one really knows what for, speculation included making it easier to whirl the baby round like a new ( Read more... )

One of the expected results of trying to brew beer is that already we know more about beer, not in a theoretical, have talked about it at a beer festival kind of way but in a practical, how would we go about making this kind of way. Also having lived in the Netherlands for even a short time, we've tried a broader range of beer styles, because all ( Read more... )

We're on our way to a beer festival in Belgium. By train, and without passports or border controls or needing different money or anything, because you can do that round here. We had to select a different bit of the ticket machine menu to get destinations in other countries, which was very nearly momentarily confusing. Also the Kitkat Chunky I just ( Read more... )

As is traditional on many LJ posts these days, let me begin by explaining why I haven't posted in ages and how the mechanics of modern life tend to prevent this ( Read more... )

This is the third morning of my commute, and for the first time I'll actually be able to comment on it. On the first morning I got to the station with plenty of time but the Fyra was cancelled, and then I'd forgotten the bike lock and had to sit in the noisy end bit of a carriage with my bike, and then yesterday I got the Fyra and a nice comfy ( Read more... )