Weekend

My first weekend was smooth and also recreational! Saturday morning I went over to the new house to sign the rental contract. I thought I'd take five minutes and then I could go cycling, but W the landlord had many stories about Indonesia ('My favourite country in the world!') because he was born there, and his colleague is from Suriname, but also lived in Jakarta for a while. Landlord W got us a special rent for the remainder of this month after asking the foundation that owns this apartment building.

In the streets near my CS host's house there was a market (just like a pasar malam, except from 10h - 15h) so we had to go see that first! This was nothing typically Dutch though - no windmills or milkmaids or whatever else my blog name conjures up of Holland :) In fact, what I gather from observing the streets in the past week is that Dutch culture consists of a lot of cultural appropriation, especially when it comes to cuisines! More on that later, with pictures to boot. So when I saw a stall selling 'soeto', I had to check, and in this case it was correct.

Then we rented a bike and went cycling near Scheveningen Bos ('forest'), which is about 2 or 3km northeast of where ISS is. We went further than that, since we hit the sand dunes! Seeing hills of sand amidst temperate forest is something special. Silvery poplars are abundant too, since they grow best in sandy soil (artefact information from a course on silviculture I took in Spain 2008).

We made it back to the bike rental shop with 7 minutes to spare, and got a quick dinner at Ming Kee chinese restaurant (they must make a lot of money if they're selling rice + 2 meat + 2 veg for 5 euros!) before heading to Korzo5hoog near the Centraal Station.

The performance was ''Readymade Dance/Part of the Deal" by Andre Gingras, for the fabulous student price of 6 euros. The first piece used boxing and its related shuffling, skipping and punches to create a dance. One dancer even got a bloody nose at the end, but the blood was a bit too bright red to be real (I hope, anyways.). The second piece spent some time deconstructing steps from hiphop and breakdance, before breaking out into a frantic dance involving live singing/sounds coming from a wo/man (I really couldn't tell.).

Today is back to school and I also have to start settling into a normal life i.e. laundry, cooking, cleaning.