My first birthday "alone"

I say "alone" because I don't have any family or friends around. Which is fine, a birthday just means you're getting old anyway. :( I did get some pizza from a place called Chipito [http://www.chipito.nl/] - wow, it was good!! I also went to the grocery store and picked up a few things. One of them being....chocolate mousse!! :) Yum. It was heaven. It was no birthday cake...but it was close enough.

It turns out that where I live is a very, very desirable location. I'm quite close to both downtown and the city center. I'm going to venture over there tomorrow, I think.

So let's see, dinner at Johan's on Wednesday night...

Johan has been taking some cooking classes, so he wanted to make us [me, Tila, and Thijs] a meal. We got there around 6:45pm.

The first course made my stomach turn - bacon wrapped shrimp. To most people, it would be delicious...but I DON'T like shrimp. I wasn't sure what to do. We each had a plate, so it would be very obvious if I didn't eat any. So...I sucked it up and chewed and swallowed fast, and followed each bite with some water. They weren't bad. The texture was kind of sick, but I could taste a lot of the bacon, which made it ok.

Next, we had what I will call pot roast, carrots, and potatoes. The Dutch name for the meal doesn't tranlate well to English [something like stringy flesh - eww!]. I don't eat a lot of red meat...but I ate it. We ate it a lot when I was a kid. It was pretty good. I liked the potatoes a lot. We also had a salad.

For dessert, we had chocolate mousse. Yum. It was really, really good. Meanwhile, the three of them polished off a bottle of red and a bottle of white wine, along with 2-3 beers each. Then Johan's wife came home from wherever she was, and wanted to sleep, so we took the party to a local pub. There, they each had another beer. Lots of drinking in this city! :) By the time all was said and done, it was midnight! Wow, 5 hours! There was a lot of good conversation. I really like Tila and Thijs. They are very nice and laid back, and quite interesting too. Everyone hates Bush, which is automatically a notch up in my book.

Thursday was a departmental brown bag. A guy gave a talk on automatic impressions we form when looking at a person's handwriting. It was very cool. I really liked their seminar. Everyone there asked questions, made good suggestions. No one seemed to attack him, and he never got defensive. People brought up good points, and proposed possible alternative explanations. It was a different atmosphere than our seminars. And the students here just think differently. I don't even know how to describe it. The whole thing was very interesting, though.

Here's a shout out to the new Dr. Rachel Reimer! So proud of you! Congrats!! :)

Fred Borgen, one of the benefactors of my generous fellowship, sent me an interesting article about the Dutch a few days ago. It's quite long, but super interesting. I'll work on choosing the most interesting parts and posting them on here.

That's about all I've got in the way of updates. I had planned to work a lot on revisions to a paper today, but two things got in the way -- 1. I had a hard time falling asleep last night, and slept in a bit today, and 2. I slammed my left index finger in the bathroom door. It really hurt to type! I iced it for a bit. It's still tender, but it doesn't hurt nearly as much now. So, tomorrow I really gotta get some work done!

Till then!