Living Life Rather Than Writing About It

My dear friend Sha was recently in Europe and as such we got to hang out, a lot. She commented on how many of her friends who have blogs haven't been posting recently and it seems as though many of us are living our lives rather than writing about them. And that's certainly what I've been doing!

I went and met up with the aforementioned Sha in Venice. It went something like this:

Sha: I'm going to Venice for the weekend, want to join me?
Me: (hesitates about 5 minutes) Ok.

So, I got a day off of work, put some of my air miles to good use and went to Venice for the weekend.

Venice is everything you imagine it to be and everywhere. So often when I travel I end up in the "real" part of a city, where people actually live and where it stops looking like the post cards. But this never happened in Venice. It really is that picturesque, everywhere. At least when you're on the islands of Venice anyway.

It's all narrow canals with gondoliers:


Hordes of tourists:


I, of course, hated the hordes of tourists, but somehow managed. Of course, I had Italian coffee, pizza for breakfast and wine for dinner to sooth me. Rarely do I immediately think of returning to a place, but I'm already planning a return trip for April break with my parents.

Then there was prom and graduation. Both really nice events, though somehow they were planned over a four day weekend!?!

Prom was on a boat:


There was beer and wine. And it was really fun. The boat made it great as it was only our students and teachers.

Here I am with the Assistant Head of the Upper School:


Graduation was interesting. There were singing/band acts in the middle.


And when each student's name was read there was about 20 seconds of a song of their choosing played. It ranged from heavy metal to show tunes to the Beatles. But in the end, that part was mostly awkward as the student just stood on stage in the middle with everyone staring at them. There were only 2 or 3 that did some sort of dance. Hopefully that will change in the up coming years.

Then suddenly the school year was over. I went with the grade 10 class to Wallabi World (why is a Dutch amusement park named after an Australian animal?!)


And then it was really over. And now it's summer holidays. I've been to Muenster, Germany. It is a small town that was completely destroyed in WWII and completely rebuilt to look like it used to. It's full of older people and because of that yarn stores. I was in heaven.

Here's Joz at our first cafe. Note the cliental, I'm not kidding when I say the town is mostly older people.


I went with my friend Joz and her 2.5 month old bebe L:


The baby fell asleep in my arms 3 times. That feeling of rocking a baby to sleep, having them sleep in your arms, it's incredible. Not so incredible that I want it (for now anyways) but it was pretty awesome. As was the chance to take funny pictures of her like this:


We got to go to the great farmers' market and got rained on quite a bit:

but that left more time for playing Quiddler in cafes.

When it wasn't raining we went to the (free!) botanical gardens:


Now I'm back in Amsterdam. Laura and I went to hear (free, again!) opera in Vondelpark:


And I built a ladder for my cat to climb more easily in and out the roof window. I haven't seen her use it yet though. But she's been super cute:


And that's the life I've been living. I'm off to California tomorrow to continue with the living.

Queen's Day

It was "Queen's Day" here, which is a huge national celebration of the Queen's birthday. Think Mardi Gras, except that everyone was wearing orange, there were no beads and the day began with a mass yard sale, which ended at noon when the drinking began. It was an experience, but I don't really need to repeat it. I'm also really glad I stayed in Ouderkerk rather than going to Amsterdam.

This photo was taken just after noon about 5 houses up from me. As you can see, not so crowded yet:


This one was about 14:00 across the river. Lots of orange, everywhere.


I stopped taking pictures after that, because I don't really need loads of photos of people drinking outside. The highlight was spending a day outside as it was (as you can see) gorgeous.

I enjoyed today, the day after queen's day better. I rode my bike to Uithoorn along the Amstel River (about 10 km) and had a lovely brunch. The return trip was all up-wind, so took a bit longer, but the only people out today are those who are serious about their biking. So hardly any cars or other traffic. Lovely.

Keukenhof

There's this flower garden. It's pretty touristy. But was also awesome. And had so many different types of tulips. And other flowers. It was awesome. These are just a few... I took 80 some. Boring, I know, but some of the photos are pretty good. So go have a look...







And there were other flowers too:

March?!

Just heard about the shooting in Alphin a/d Rijn. I'm guessing (hoping) that I'll know no one involved as I don't even know where that is. Terrible though. I can't imagine how scared people were during those 10 to 20 minutes.

Um, guess I never found the time to post in March. To say that I've been busy would be the understatement of the century. But busy in a good way. Joy! was here to visit from California immediately followed by my sister and cousin. So on top of working, and taking online classes towards my masters I've also been having a lot of fun with friends and family. Just returned from a weekend on the island of Terschelling in fact. I'm going to start posting some pictures and will try to write a longer update on Tuesday on the plane headed to Indianapolis (I'm going to the NCTM national conference, which is super geeky and AWESOME, for me).

Tapas in Barcelona

Yesterday Bree and I spent the day roaming the city shopping with our mutual friend Pat. Pat used to live in Barcelona and her husband still does. We spent the day shopping and then sharing some wine. When Bree and I would have thrown in the towel and headed back to our lovely B&B for a nap, Pat wouldn't let us. Instead plying us with coffee and water so that we could forge ahead.

And in the end, we went to Quimet & Quimet where we met up with Pat's husband for some tapas. It was a tiny place that in passing you would think was a liquor store. And it did have loads of wines, a few beers and whiskeys. But there behind the counter, you spy some lovely foods. Incredibly fresh, we tried many and they were almost all incredible. All the while standing up surrounded by locals and a few other tourists.

Here's Bree, Pat and her husband:


And here's some of the food (click to go to Flickr for notes with descriptions of each item):


My favorites were the razor neck clams, the fava beans, the beef and the white asparagus (which I forgot to photograph).

London

Remember I said we were going to London for the boy's birthday. Well we did and had a great trip. We ate some really good food and walked a ton! It was lovely to walk along the Thames, they've really developed it into a nice pedestrian area.

So here we are in front of Buckingham Palace:

That's me holding my two new pairs of boots (I think I'm addicted to boots)

And here we are wearing bibs as we at yummy noodle soup at Pho Cafe in Soho:



And now on a bridge crossing the Thames with Big Ben just barely in the background:


At one point in the trip I mentioned that I wanted to return to see Wicked and he told me he'd never heard of it. So I say, "It's the story of the Wicked Witch of the West." Blank look. "You know, from the Wizard of Oz." "That's American, I've never seen/heard of it." "Dorothy? Toto? The yellow brick road? Munchkins? Flying monkeys?" Obviously there is some serious cultural sharing that I need to do. Maybe he'll enjoy it the most if I play it along with The Wall though...

Andorra Schmandorra

And Ian think's Luxembourg sucks. Andorra is not worth the visit people. Sure it's a beautiful drive to get there:





And you get to stop in cute little towns like Le Seu d'Urgell to have lunch:


But then your in Andorra and it's like your in a 1980's Panama City with mountains instead of the beach. It was packed full of people, many of them Russian, people still smoke inside there, we walked down the main strip for about 20 minutes before finding a restaurant (pizza and pasta) that didn't look terrifying. And by terrifying I mean plastic pictures of food out front and only men inside smoking and drinking beer.

I'm traveling with Bree and we only went for one night. Mostly because we'd never been there and it's a "plus 1" for countries we've visited. But in the end, totally not worth it. Especially since we didn't get a passport stamp out of it!

Babette

Meet Babette:


I've started a cat share! I used to love my farm share in California and still miss it, but this experience exceeds that by a long shot.

I work with a great woman, Monica who has a great cat and has had her for 10 years. However, 3 years ago, Monica had a baby. And the cat doesn't like the baby/toddler so much. I'm sure, much like me, the cat finds him too sticky (note: it's not that I find Monica's son especially sticky, I tend to find all children under the age of 10 to be sticky).

So, now Babette is living with me part time (Monica is taking her back when I go on holidays (well, holidays longer than a weekend)). She's much more dog like than cat like in that she always wants to be petted and by your side. Except when she wants to go out - oh wait, that's like a dog too. I know the way she's different... when outside she loves to be up on the roof!

Anyway, she's great! And when I've got my camera back here at home, I'll show you how cute she is too!

Traveling fool

Holy moly, I've been doing a lot of travel since returning from Australia (as if that weren't travel enough!).

Went to the beach


It was much colder than it looks. See how bundled we are (in things I've knit for us):


Went down to Den Haag (you might know it as The Hague) to chaperon THIMUN. This is an MUN (Model United Nations) conference with over 3,000 student delegates. It might be renamed, MMM (meat-market-mun). You've never seen so many geeky teenagers finding love.

That was Wed - Friday and then immediately headed down to Utrecht. I've been there before, but this time was to have dinner with Amy, who I went to Munich with, and we decided to turn it into a weekend. Which included lunch with my landlord. He's a pretty awesome guy. It was lovely.

Last weekend I was in Brussels with our junior math team (one of my teams took 11th place out of 65 teams!). I like Brussels, but by the end wasn't feeling well. No surprise with how much travel I've been doing. Thankfully, I seem mostly recovered. Which is good because this weekend it's off to London for the boy (pictured above)'s birthday.

So I'll try to return here at some place to post more, but it really requires me to be home more.

First day of teaching in 2011

Before leaving for the year, the staff was reminded to turn off our computers, projectors, printers, etc. I, of course, already do this daily. However, someone in staff also followed up on this and unplugged all our projectors from the projector itself, where it hangs suspended from the ceiling. Upon plugging it back in, I had to readjust the alignment and recalibrate my SMART board so that the mouse would click where I touched rather than an inch below. But all that is fairly standard. However, my colleague's projector couldn't find a source. Even after consulting with me (during which time I made sure everything was plugged in, connected and turned on), still no dice.

Her (both of our's really) plan was to use a PowerPoint from last year to introduce quadratics. Remember, this is the Monday morning after a 3 week break. So it was either leave her hanging to wing class sans technology or bring her class into my room and squish the students all together. We went with the latter and it was actually a great lesson.

However, it really made me realize how dependent upon technology in the classroom we are becoming. I had my first formal observation in the weeks before break and one of the comments I got was on how well I used my SMART board. While I don't feel as though I'm doing anything revolutionary, it is hard for me to imagine teaching without it. It's easy to save all my lessons as pdf files and then post them online for students to access (the perfect solution to "what'd I miss?") While teaching it's easy to go back and say, "Remember this? We talked about it <10 minutes ago>, , ." Beyond that, I find my lessons are much better prepared because I can create an outline in advance that gets filled in as class progresses.

Today I had students looking at a "Deal with the Devil" type problem where the devil offers you $1000 today, but at the end of the day he takes $100 commission leaving you with $900. Tomorrow though, he'll double your money (giving you $1800) but will also double his commission and remove that at the end of the day. And the question was, would you take this deal for a month? By day 8 the numbers start to get big. And I would immediately turn to a spreadsheet to help with the calculations. But this class I was working with all groaned and said that they "hated" it. And then told me that they would just type the numbers in rather than having the spreadsheet make the calculations. These students are 16/17 years old! I'd assumed that they'd be comfortable with entering formulas by the time they got to me. But I guess not. And I guess it's up to me to turn their hate into love.

By the way, at the end of day 10 you're left with zero dollars. So remember, it never pays to make deals with the devil.

Cleaning

I hate cleaning. It's just not how I want to spend my time. However, I want a clean house. I've taken care of it myself since I moved in in August, but my one and only 2011 goal is to find a house keeper, preferably to come once every two weeks primarily to dust and to do my floors (I hate, hate, hate vacuuming and mopping). My neighbor's were having their window's washed and I jumped on the man to have him come do mine (to my credit, I don't own a ladder so I couldn't do the tops myself ever) and he's now coming every six weeks.

I'm taking applications now if any of my 5 readers would like the position. ;)

Winter Holidays 2010

I left a really snowy Amsterdam

and was one of a very few flights to get out of Schipol, but I got out because I was headed to Asia. There were so many people stranded that weekend though. While I was there, they shut down all the transfer desks, telling people to check the monitors and if their flight was leaving to go to the gate, otherwise they were to call or check the internet. Friendly, right?

First stop, Kuala Lumpur and the Sheraton Imperial. It was fancy pants, and you all know how much I love fancy pants hotels. Here's the view from my window:


Then I headed off to Brisbane to meet up with my Moscow friend Lydia. She's living inland from there in a town called Toowoomba (emphasis on the "woom"). It's set up in the hills and for summer, it was a bit cool.


We also toured a bit and I got to see some chickens with furry feet:


And we also went to look at Christmas lights:


In the second photo, those are Lydia's clothes I'm wearing. Turns out that when leaving Amsterdam it was too icy to unload the luggage and hence there was no space to load any new luggage. Yet somehow it was not icy enough to take off... I got my bag 4 days into the trip.

And just in time for us to head off to Rainbow Beach where you find the Carlo Sandblow. Named after one of Captain James Cooks's ship mates. It's a huge expanse of sand that is spreading. It's also part of the Great Cooloola Walk, which is a 5 day, 90 km walk that would be awesome to do sometime.



We spent the 2 sunny days on the beach:


Turns out it's very common to drive your 4wd on the beach, park and sit by it all day. While I prefer my beaches without cars, we did it one day and it sure was nice to have a bit of shade. Australian sun is hot!

I spent a lot of time knitting (perfect rainy vacation activity) and hanging out with this little guy, the grandson of some of Lydia's fiance's friends:


I made two skull snowflake hats:


Once the rain stopped, I was actually glad we had the rain. Because when it wasn't raining, it was hot and humid. I've said it before, but I'm a terrible southerner as I hate the heat. But, on the nicer days though, we were out and about. And I got to see some wildlife in the wild:

A cockatoo:


A dingo (sorry it's blurry, it's taken from the car) (also, don't joke about them taking babies, apparently it's still a touchy subject and there are still people who don't believe the story!)


A wild turkey:


And best yet, a koala just hanging out in a tree in Noosa:


I'd like to spend more time in Noosa, hiking and on the rocky beaches, but it was crowded, so I'm glad most time was spent at Rainbow.


Returning, I had an overnight flight back to KL. Landed at 6 am and departed at midnight for another overnight to Amsterdam. However, the layover at KLIA was not bad at all. For just 60 USD, I was able to get a hotel room for 9 hours with access to a sauna and steam room. To lay down flat and sleep for 7 hours, it was totally worth it. They also have a street food restaurant that's cheap (for airport food) and an affordable spa where I spent an hour having a facial. Plus upon checking in, I was able to pay a totally reasonable amount to upgrade to business class. For a 13 hour flight, that was the best decision I've made.

And now I'm back in rainy Amsterdam. However, given the choice, I'll take 31 F over 31 C any day!

Zwarte Piet

Remember how I told you about Sinterklaas and his Zwarte Piet, here they are on a cookie.


Doesn't really look like chimney soot on the Piet to me ...

And here I am at school with Sint and some Pieten:


The celebration at school was interesting. The Piet go around throwing small gingersnap like cookies, most of which end up on the floor and the children follow Sint around. It's definitely festive feeling, but all the cookies everywhere being ground into the carpet bothered my need for cleanliness and order.

Afternoon classes were canceled so that students could give each other secret santa gifts. The fun part in this was the wrapping was as important as the gift and also each came with a poem about the recipient which were at times brutally honest. I really liked that tradition though, makes it really personal.