Day 39 - Haarlem Meetup

Friday I pretty much worked all day on finishing up my presentation for Monday. I will still need to do some work on it this weekend, but it’s nearly done.

After work I went to the pie store because I’ve been craving cherry pie like you wouldn’t believe. The best pie store around is definitely Multi Vlaai (vlaai=pie). So I head there on my way home from work, and even though its only about 2km from my house, it takes forever!! My little GPS takes me a weird way and right through a ton of Friday traffic. So I get to the pie store around 19:00, and they only have about 5 slices of pie left… in the whole store! What?? So it turns out, they only make a certain number of pies each day, and when they run out, they run out. Bummer. No pie for me today.

So I head home, quickly change, brush my teeth, and head up to Haarlem to meet a bunch of people for dinner. Its part of an expat meet-up group. I’ve been talking to the coordinator a few times, but this will be the first time I actually meet everyone and I’m looking forward to it! I get there right on time, 8PM. Traffic on the way up was non-existant, which I wasn’t expecting since I have to go right by Amsterdam to get to Haarlem. Haarlem is a gorgeous city, kind of a bigger version of delft. It’s also an old city, with beautiful canals running everywhere, brick streets. It had a bit more of a modern feel, like Den Haag, but definitely feels like delft.

So I meet everyone at Venezia, an actual authentic Italian place. Small, warm, wooden tables. The people that work there only speak Italian. This isn’t American Italian, so forget about olive garden, or even Armando’s in Oxnard (sorry Armando). But this is real Italian. The front of the restuarant has a real wood oven and I can see the guy making pizzas and calzones all night.

So there’s a big long table right in the center of the restaurant. About 15 people came to the dinner, all people that are living in NL but are originally from somewhere else (definition of expat I guess). So end up sitting on one end of the table, next to Sandra, Amy, and Alex, and across from Duncan. Sandra is actually originally dutch, but has lived the past several years and new Zealand, and says she prefers non-dutch people. She is hysterical, probably late 30’s/early 40’s, and looks a lot like my cousin Dawn except she’s really tall. She says ‘bloody hell’ after nearly every sentence, takes about 5 smoke breaks during dinner. Her current occupation? Selling MDF. Yep that’s right. Artificial wood. She used to work for Ernst and Young in their financial department. I can tell she has led a very cool life. We were talking about how there are never any veggies with dutch meals (besides potatoes), and she said to me “Lady, I didn’t make it to the top of the food chain to eat vegetables… bloody hell…” hahah!

Amy happened to be originally from Schenectady, which is the town next to where I lived near Albany, NY. Her dad worked for GE, and we reminisced about Mohawk mall. Ha! What a small world. It never ceases to amaze me. Amy is here for about 6 months studying for her master’s or PhD, I’m not sure, in some sort of music anthropology. She’s small and asian, and surprisingly, she smokes too.... cloves. Wow.

Alex is from L.A., I’m not sure why he’s here, but he is. He’s Mexican, and we laugh about the food they call ‘mexican’ here. He’s pretty cool, I don’t really get the LA vibe from him. Maybe he’s been in NL long enough to have lost it.

Ducan is a brit but has lived in NL for 5 years. He is very very funny, as are most brits that I have met thus far. I asked if he knew any good bar songs. He said he actually knew surprisingly few. What! Somehow the conversation turned to cannibalism, and he had quite some disturbing things to say. I’m not sure if he meant to be funny or if he was serious, but either way, kind of freaky. Overall, I thought he was really cool and pithy and I liked his sharp wit. there are some pics on my facebook of the haarlem dinner.

Dinner was amazing. A-mazing. The menu was pre-arranged so I wasn’t too sure what I was in store for. They just kept bringing out more and more food! Breads, meats, pasta, bean salad, stuffed mushrooms, sun dried tomatoes, red and green pepper salad. That’s just the appetizers! Then the main course was either pesce or carni. The fish was some sort of white fish, and it was the whole fish. Bones, head, tail and everything. The meat (which is what I had) was chicken stuffed with bacon and cheese and rolled up. Oh so good. Dessert was some sort of fluffy lemon pastry. Oh my gosh so good! I’m getting hungry just typing this. Oh also I forgot to mention the unlimited wine. So for everything we had a pre-arranged price of about 30 euro, which is on the expensive side, but for everything we got, and it being Christmas dinner, I felt it was definitely worth it J I got to meet some cool people and have an amazing dinner. Sandra is going to organize a little rock climbing trip maybe next Sunday coming up in Den Haag. So hopefully I will get to see everyone again. got home around 12:30. exhausted!!