The Autumn Break

 I've often complained about my schedule at HZ University of Applied Sciences, but sometimes things align perfectly and I get a week off with splendid weather. That's been the case for the last few days! A nice period to relax, forget about next week's exams, and have reality come crashing back towards me on Monday morning. 

A really bad selfie by the sea and a nice afternoon reading down by the canal.

The northern and southern halves of the country take turns with fall and spring breaks here. This goes for all schools, from basis to middelbare to universitiet. I'm in the south, so we get the earlier week off; next week they'll be free in the north. typically Dutch to be so coordinated!

In regular circumstances I'd be travelling during this week, and until a few weeks ago that was the plan. I had Denmark or perhaps the Eiffel region of Germany in mind, but an easier and more fun opportunity presented itself. House-sitting for a professor! A good rule to go by in life: always sucker up to your teachers, and reap the rewards. 

There's no payment, but all the food is free game and I'm allowed to have people over. The place is mine for nine days and eight nights, and while it's just a half-hour walk from my usual cell domicile, it feels like a totally new city. Quiet neighborhood, no early-morning construction, (a story for another post...) new supermarkets, plants, CATS, CHICKENS, A RABBIT to keep me company. 

For the first time in months, a couch to sit on!

Gezelligheid is the name of the game here. I've explained this word before but it's come up often enough to merit another breakdown. Literally "cozy-ness", it's used liberally for an appealing space, setting, or moment. Similar to the Danish idea of hygge, and it has a strong connotation with koffie and bier. I think it was one of the first Dutch words I ever learned, certainly one of the most useful!

Dinner with classmates Paul and Mattieu: tough chicken (I'd accidentally selected a rooster from the freezer... should have used google translate!) but a good atmosphere!

The house is an old bakery which has been renovated in the most sustainable way possible: by using almost exclusively natural and recycled materials. The walls are adobe, with local clay and straw, dried rock-hard. It's exactly like drywall, and  not dusty at all. The cracks give the place a nice texture, and the warm color suggests a burrow. The ceiling is insulated with wool, complete with a huge skylight for light and heat in the wintertime.

Most houses here have solar-arrays anyways, but this house has a twist: the panels power a heater inside a 250 gallon reservoir of hot water. This circulates in the walls, providing warmth in the winter and cooling in the summer. (when the heater is turned off)  Everything has a lovely old-fashioned and yet strikingly modern vibe to it. Antique furniture, but fancy triple-paned windows. Pots and pans older than my grandparents, and an induction cooktop for them. 

But what I like the most about the place is that it's full of life! Houseplants like you wouldn't believe, literally coming out of the woodwork. And a big garden in back for good measure. I'm tasked with watching two cats, Zoey and Kusha, Flip the rabbit, a diverse fish tank, and two chickens. 

Kusha (disgruntled, on the pillow) and Zoey. (sleeping in background) A good example of the adobe walls and antique furnishings!

Flip, the rabbit. He's a lot larger than it seems in this picture. 

The birds and their residence.

Most of my week has been cooking and entertaining; I have a full-sized oven, plenty of counter space, extensive kitchen tools, so I'm taking advantage of it. Not to mention access to high-quality ingredients, spices, and fresh eggs. Some highlights so far: 

Fig and ricotta cake on the left, a quiche with mushrooms, onions, parsley, and gruyere on the right.

Rozijnbollen, a Dutch classic. Think of a white dinner roll with a lot of raisins inside.

It will be a bitter pill to return to my regular room on Sunday night... I'm not optimistic that my roommate will have cleaned anything in the last week. As I mentioned above, it's already exam-week, so expect an update on these in the next post. Following that, a week-long excursion to Friesland and Groningen provinces! Stay tuned for more tomfoolery. 

Unrelated to house-sitting: there's a snack bar nearby, and yesterday afternoon I noticed at least a dozen city vehicles, garbage trucks, street-sweepers, and bicycles parked outside. All the Middelburg city workers were having lunch together at a long table, classic "fried stuff with mayonnaise" too. Why not, on such a nice autumn day. I had a laugh at that!

One Handsome Devil

The atelier: an escape from the endless procession of digital assignments! 

Most students in The Netherlands have some job or another, whether that be dishwasher, shelf-stocker, laundry-doer or ice cream scooper. How else are they supposed to afford beer? I too have a profession, though in a somewhat fancier field: I'm a model at an artist's collective!

I got the opportunity about this time last year via WhatsApp, from a former student. And boy was I lucky to seize it. Most international students can only find work at big-box stores or in hotels- my roommate works at Action, a sort of Dutch Walmart, and makes €8.50 per hour. 

The studio is in Vlissingen, so naturally I commute by bike. It's an unassuming single-story brick building, between a primary school and a shopping complex in the suburbs. The atmosphere is my favorite part- you can tell that people have been doing art here for a very, very long time. There's lots of old work on the walls, dried paint on the floors, and the smell of art-supplies. 

Various charcoal sketches of me in the studio. It's a strange feeling to look at so many Aarons!

For a long time my schedule didn't agree, but starting in May last year I began what has been a steady job for a busy student. It's definitely part-time: there are five three-hour sessions, once a week for five weeks. I make €15 per hour, coffee breaks and snacks included. But the ideal part is, it's all under the table: no contract or taxes! 

It's also a great opportunity to practice Dutch. All the artists are in the 55-70 age group, and very interested in what an American is doing with Water Management in their corner of Zeeland. On account of this, my vocabulary has a disproportionate amount of words for body-parts: kaakbeen, oogkas, voorhoofd, adamsappel, neusgat, to name a few. 

The focus is on facial-geometry and lighting. I think the eye and nose in the lower left is really good!

The "sitting perfectly still" part isn't so bad either. I do 20-minutes, followed by a 5-minute break, in four increments, from 9:00 to noon. With a generous 30 minutes for coffee too. I find it rather meditative, and I have giant plate-glass windows to look out of. My language skills are good enough to understand that, when the phrase "het koffiemachine is kapot!" is uttered, there will only be tea during the break. 

Everything is orchestrated by Peter-Paul, an artist from Belgium who reminds me very much of a particular art professor I had when I studied at Gustavus. For me, the hardest part of all this is not reacting when he points to and explains the particular curvature of my left cheekbone. "You can see here, from this angle there is..." and so on. 

Peter-Paul explains some detail to the group.

Naturally, some of the painters are better than others. (if you can distill their work to a sense of "good" and "bad"- I find that too critical, and I'm a student, not a connoisseur) It's said that every artist paints a version of themself into an artwork, and I'll let you readers be the judges of that: 

Various interpretations of me. (works in progress) 

For the spring session, I was even gifted my own portrait by one Lucia Boerna, which now hangs on the wall above my bed. I've covered it with thick brown paper, since at the time it was made I was reading The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. I want to avoid that kind of situation!

I think I look rather grim in this one... 

In Search Of Tacos

 I can get most foods that I like here in The Netherlands; from Thai to Spanish to Indonesian cuisines. But one thing I miss is a good taco: Mexican food is hard to come by here. Ask a Dutchie what they like in a burrito, and they'll probably ask if you mean shawarma. Near Middelburg, my options are limited. I have El Mosquito, a bar that has tacos as starters. There's an Argentine steakhouse in Vlissingen that does some Mexican dishes, and of course Chefy-Chef.  

Picture from Google Reviews, but it gets the point across.

This hole-in-the-wall dive, just a stone's throw from my flat, is centrally located between an Albert Heijn supermarket, the canal, and the liquor store. It opened last year, and I've been meaning to go ever since. At the special request of one Joe Urban in Saint Peter, I caved in. And writing about it in this blog provides the catalyst for my fateful visit. 

And if you'd like to hear about more of my culinary misadventures, you can support me via BuyMeACoffee (though odds are I'll be buying more interesting things than coffee!) 

On Sunday night I went their with my fellow American, Thomas. While he lives in Hong Kong, he has experience with real tacos from visiting family in Oklahoma. It was typically cloudy and cold, some light mist was in the air, and the sun was setting at an upsettingly early time already. We placed our orders: three tacos for myself and a burrito for Thomas. (with choice of filling; fries or rice, and sauce; Mediterranean or Mexican) 

We got our drinks at the supermarket across the street, since they're 1/3 of the price there. They do a steady business in takeaway and delivery at Chefy-Chef, so I think we waited about 20 minutes for our food. The canal-side seating is exceptional; you can enjoy your meal in the presence of seagulls, ducks, pigeons, and jellyfish. 

I got the pulled chicken, regular chicken, and pulled beef variants. What struck me most about the tacos was that they were grilled! The hot-sandwich press is popular in this country, so I guess they applied that to tacos for whatever reason. (traditionally, it's used to make greasy grilled cheese sandwiches, tosti's) The shell was tortilla-like and much larger than any other taco I've tried. 

The lightly burnt flavor went quite well with the package!

There were no familiar seasonings on these, no cumin, chili, lime, cilantro, onion, etc. Very mild salsa and guacamole, and a lot of shawarma sauce. (sweet, lightly garlicky mayo is the best description I can muster) Which, of course, caters to the local taste for Turkish cuisine. I was expecting at least a little bit of unique flavoring- all I got was plain salty and savory. These were very good, but they weren't tacos by any measure. 

Pondering our choices: what had we gotten into here? 

Note the scattering of canned corn, which is a nice gesture at least. 

After this hearty meal we went to return our cans and buy something sweet at Albert Heijn: their cheapest coconut macaroons, enjoyed on a bench in the park at dusk. So some consolation in that! Alas, there's no tacos to be found in Middelburg. 

De Kalmthoutse Heide

 

Middelburg is a nice city, but it lacks one thing that I enjoy: a good swath of forest! That's thanks to the inundation of October 1944, where the dikes were bombed by the RAF to flush out the Nazis. The whole region was flooded by the tides twice per day for nearly a year- the 80th anniversary of this, and of the liberation of Middelburg, is coming up next month. 

Lovely forests with old oak and pine trees in the Grenspark. They were all planted about 120 years ago to provide lumber for future generations, though I think they've ditched that plan now. 

That in mind, I wanted a nice day trip this weekend. So I selected "Grenspark Kalmthoutse Heide", near Bergen op Zoom, on the Belgian border. That's about 45 miles due east of Middelburg, an hour and a half by train and bus. I was out the door at 7:55 on Saturday morning (may as well continue the weekday routine!) with high hopes for this vast area. 

I love public transport

Vast for European standards, that is. I saw one sign that said nearly 6,000 hectares in size. That's 14,000 acres for you imperial-system fans out there, or about 23 square miles. So there's a lot to see there. Heide, "heathland" in English, is a landscape of low shrubs, poor soils, and (in the case) a lot of wetlands. This landscape once covered a lot of Europe, but it was mostly converted to cropland after the invention of chemical fertilizers allowed the nutrient-poor soils to be farmed. The heather-plants have beautiful purple flowers from July to September, and I just caught the end of the bloom. 

Heide in bloom- this must be incredible at its peak!

One of several very complicated maps. There were separate ones for horseback, hiking, biking, regional walking routes, and general visitors. That's the one you see above, an amalgam of the others. 

I got off the bus in Hoogerheide, and found a cozy cafe to get coffee and an appelflap, an apple turnover. Then I started walking, by the end of the day I'd cover about 12 miles. And that's going in as straight a line as I could manage, to give some sense of scale to this place. the weather alternated between warm sun and cold, heavy rain showers- a classic autumn day. (really every day, regardless of season) 

One of many wetlands

I walked for most of the morning without seeing many people: perhaps a dozen in three hours! The landscape was uncannily like Minnesota, but maybe that's just my jaded view of many Dutch landscapes. The ground here is very sandy, and it's actually where Middelburg gets all of its drinking water: the aquifer here is pumped, treated, and piped 45 miles to the west. All the groundwater around my residence is salty, so this is the system they've worked out! 

Wetland selfie!

By the afternoon I'd come to the interesting parts, the inland-dunes and the observation and fire tower. (with all the conifers and dry shrubs I can see how they're worried!) And I can say now from experience that walking over sand is about twice as grueling as I'd thought, after a couple hours. Combine with the weather, and perhaps that's why there were so few fellow hikers. But the sights made it well worthwhile: 

The fire tower is 24 meters/79 feet tall (40 meters for the fire-lookouts!)

View to the South

View to the North

Open and windy landscapes, a lot like a prairie if you squint!

I arrived to Kalmthout, the next town across the border, at 4:00, and hopped on a Belgian train back to The Netherlands. My opinion is that these are superior to the Dutch trains; affordable, better coverage, faster; more style. (though the Dutchies like to make fun of anything in Belgium- "cheap Netherlands", they call it) This was one of those exhausting but very fulfilling days; and that night I slept better than I had in a long time. 

The Student's Kitchen

I live about 50 feet away from a canal- typically Dutch housing. So this time of year I wake to the sound of squawks and trills, from countless migratory birds. Which means but one thing for me: it's autumn, and it's time to bake something! 

The majority of student-cooking at my residential compound peaks at simple pasta dishes and sandwiches; thank goodness I was raised well and have a knack for crafting scrumptious grub for myself and roommate Alex. Given the time of year, apples have figured into our diet lately. 

Enjoying een stukje appeltaart met slagroom at the Zuiderzee museum, August 2023. 

And since I've moved here, I've been of the opinion that Dutch apples are inferior to the ones I can get in America. All different varieties of course, but they lack a certain crispness. They are, however, excellent for baking! I can get 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) for €3.98, so it's quite affordable too. The Dutchies know this, and after the stroopwaffel their national dessert must be appeltaart. 

Literally translated as "apple cake", it's unsurprisingly similar to Dutch apple pie which I've made before, though with a cookie-like crust. This was my goal one fine and unseasonably warm Saturday- while I may have a small kitchen, I can produce great things from it! 

A typical cooking scene

I used a recipe from Heel Holland Bakt, "All of Holland Bakes", the regional spin-off of the Great British Baking Show. You can find it here, (spoiler alert!) it is outstanding. New season on October 27th if you're looking for cozy Dutch bakes. Here's what Google translated the recipe as: 

Dough

200 grams of soft butter (plus extra for greasing)

160 grams of brown caster sugar

0.5 teaspoon cinnamon (ground)

300 grams of white flour

pinch of salt

1 egg

breadcrumbs for dusting

Apple Filling

100 grams of raisins

rum

8 Jonagold apples

100 grams of shelled walnuts

4 tablespoons sugar

1 sachet of vanilla sugar

3 teaspoons cinnamon

Assembly

1 egg for brushing

25 blanched almonds

powdered sugar

Preparation

Grease a 24 centimeter springform pan and dust with flour.

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Dough

Mix the soft butter with the brown sugar and cinnamon.

Sift the flour with a pinch of salt over the butter mixture and add 1 egg.

Knead into a smooth dough and leave covered in the refrigerator for at least 15 minutes.

Roll out 2/3 of the dough and line the springform pan with it.

Divide the breadcrumbs over the base.

Place the springform pan in the refrigerator to rest further.

Apple Filling

Soak the raisins in some rum.

Peel the apples and cut into wedges.

Sift the raisins.

Mix the apple slices with the soaked raisins, walnuts, sugar, vanilla sugar and cinnamon.

Assembly

Spoon the filling into the pie dish.

Roll out the remaining dough and cover the top of the pie with it.

Brush the top with a beaten egg and sprinkle with the almonds.

Bake the apple pie for about 60 minutes.

Let it cool.

Dust with icing sugar when serving the cake.

I think the famous "Dutch Directness" shows a little bit, even in this translation. You won't find any kilometer-long blog posts before their recipes! I found this one to make a ton, my largest baking pan was just large enough. A good problem to have. Typically, such pies are made in springform pans, but I don't have one, and neither did the neighbors. Helaas!

I think this sequences captures the preparation well.

Success! Usually when I do baking, there's something that goes awry. Bad conversions, too long in the oven, a poor substitution. This taart was, by all accounts, perfect! I've shared it with friends and neighbors so far, but surprisingly not my roommate: he hates raisins, end of conversation. Even this delicacy couldn't sway him. So more appeltaart for me!

A Night At The Movies

 Vlissingen, the next city down the railroad tracks from Middelburg, is renowned for its "Film By The Sea" festival each September. It's held at Cinecity, the great palace and monument to the silver screen just over the dike from the North Sea. And each year the HZ provides the opportunity for students to see a few relevant films for free, so I just had to get down there. 

For the first movie, "De Wilde Nordzee", I was generously given 10 euros in tokens to buy snacks and drinks. Would you believe it, I was one of two students that showed up that night- my generation just doesn't get out. (to be fair, it was a nature documentary in Dutch, so the demographic doesn't align with my international peers) I liked the picture a lot! While it was in that strange and convoluted tongue they know around here, I could follow it easily. For example, they would say "zeehonden hebben problemen met voeding" and show hungry seals eating seagulls. I've always wanted to see seals here in person, but maybe from a safe distance...

The next installment was "I Am The River, The River Is Me", a Dutch-produced documentary about a river in New Zeeland that has been granted legal personhood. I was in Vlissingen that afternoon anyways for a Green-Office meeting, so I killed time at the HZ campus there until it closed at 6:00. The weather was particularly foul-tempered that day, and while it had been beautiful on the ride into town it was changing fast into heavy rain. 

I knew that a group which was promoting the film was having some snacks and drinks at a coffee bar downtown, so I went to join them and wait out the rain. And maybe practice a little Dutch. The organization, "Rechten voor de Scheldes", aims to promote the same legal-personhood for natural bodies idea in Zeeland. Which is great, but as a student with a limited understanding of Dutch, I had always been on the periphery of the club. 

So it was a great surprise for me when I strolled into this establishment they'd taken over: a dozen of these folks were enjoying a three-course meal! I should've read the email thoroughly. Google Translate had said something like "join us for drinks and delicacies at Coffeebar Marcus this Thursday". But regardless, I was warmly welcomed to join them. I'd missed the soup and appetizer but the rest was great: vegetable, mushroom, and goat-cheese tarts, mini-quiches with sweet and sour sauce, and big glasses of fruit cocktail with whipped cream for dessert. 

I'm always something of a novelty at events like these; as I mentioned above not every student is willing to get out and meet local people at events like this. Strangest of all it was free; when the time came we all got up, said our thanks to the owner of the cozy place, and walked 10 minutes to the theater. I had another purpose this evening; once again as a young person. It was my job to stand on stage before the movie started and present a petition, from this Rechten v/d Scheldes group, to the Dutch Parliament to take up the issue in the coming session. 

It's a bad picture, but I'm second from the right in the shadows

If any river deserves legal rights, it's the Schelde: one of the most heavily-trafficked and polluted streams in Europe, and just a few hundred yards over the dike from where I stood on that stage. It's home to seabirds, seals, oyster beds, and salt grasses, but also to plastic bags, PFAS, oil slicks, and microplastics. It is a ecosystem hanging in the balance between nature and industry. Like the Schelde, I have to find a balance between my studies and causes like this one- I care about both but only have enough time for one. 

The petition and the filmmakers, Connie and Petr. Always cool to meet the people behind the camera!

It was a fun evening, but there's always a caveat: that heavy rain I'd mention above. At 9:00 I got out my rain pants and prepared for the worst. That was one cold and wet bike ride! It was a crummy way to end a nice day, but at least my laptop and notebooks didn't get wet. As the Dutchies like to say, in an optimistic tone, "You are not made of sugar in the rain." 

  

First Update of 24-25!

 I’m back!

That is, in The Netherlands after spending the summer in Minnesota. For the last three weeks of the school year I neglected to write, partly because of workload and partly because I wanted to get started with summer already! So you can once again expect updates from me this year, but in a new format…

Since this newsletter has so many (well, relatively… it’s about 30) subscribers, I’ll be moving from emails to a blog-style website, which you can find here:  

So anyways, I arrived back to Amsterdam at 12:00 on September 1st, and in classic Schiphol-efficiency, I was on the train to Middelburg by 12:35. I met my new roommate, Alex from Bulgaria, later that afternoon. He’d already been in Middelburg for two weeks and enjoys life here a lot. (as I’ve previously mentioned there are a lot of Bulgarians here, mostly studying in Civil Engineering and Chemistry) Like my previous housemate, he studies computer science and enjoys late nights. Fine by me, he’s a nice guy and keeps the place clean, what more could I ask for? We shared a big pot of pasta that night and ate it all, probably a sign of things to come this year. 

For the new quarter, I have some great classes: Statistics, Climate Change Physics and Effects, Advanced GIS, Vision Design Development, and Climate-Proof Spatial Design. The last two are a seminar/project on Schouwen Duiveland, the next region north of Middelburg. We’ll focus on the typical Dutch issues: salty soils, over-tourism, land subsidence, and excess of nitrogen. So it’ll be a fun start to the year!

The first week back has to go down as one of the busiest I’ve ever had, and I finished it with a weekend trip to Brugge, Belgium to meet my relatives Dick and Mary Graves. They were on a river cruise and the timing worked out perfectly for me to come and see them for a couple of days. So I loaded up my bike and booked a campsite near the city. It’s a two-hour ride southwest from Middelburg, so I was able to travel straight there on Friday afternoon, including a short sprint to the ferry in Vlissingen. Though the city has just 120,000 residents, there are more than 9 million visitors each year, myself now among them. 

I was staying at a classic Euro-caravan campground, full of middle-aged German folks in town for the weekend. I was one of a handful of bikers there, sleeping in a 25-ish year old tent which I’d inherited from my dad. It’s built to last, there were two thunderstorms on my second night and I was just fine. Hopefully my neighbors were too– a Dutch teacher and psychoanalyst and a German sailor from Hamburg, on a tour of Flanders together. That’s my favorite part of bike-touring, the characters that I meet. 

Suffice to say I was wined and dined for those 36 hours. Seeing family outside of Minnesota is strange, but easy to get used to! I became an honorary member of their group, so I joined their city walk and river cruise. And of course we saw one of just four Michaelangelo sculptures that reside outside of Italy, the Madonna and Child. Now I’ve never been to Brugge during the summer months, but I really don’t get the tourist-overload feeling that I do in Amsterdam. For me, it’s the true “Venice of the North”.  

Considering how close this great city is to Middelburg, I need to get down there more often. I have a particular bakery on the north side of town that I like to call my favorite– their cinnamon buns are to die for! For reference, the line was eight people out the door at 7:00 AM, and these people were already buying croissants and baguettes like Frenchmen. 

On Sunday morning I hurried back to Middelburg; to see the beautiful sunrise in the countryside, dry out my stuff, and visit the Koorkerk congregation for the first time in weeks. It was a damp and chilly ride, but I handily made it back to Middelburg by 10:00. All the old folks were grateful to see that de Amerikaanse student had returned for the year. 

I had a nice birthday-excursion on September 9th to celebrate 20 years of bumbling across the Earth. For a couple of my classes, we traveled by bus to Schouwen-Duiveland, the next island to the north, to investigate sustainability and design problems there. We met with Farmer Huub, who grows potatoes and onions, the municipal director of Spatial Planning in Burgh-Haamstede, and some rangers from the Oosterschelde Nationaalpark. Traveling by rented bike, as per HZ tradition. The school even paid for our ice cream at the end of the day, how kind of them to think of such things. (the emotional impact of this after a long day is not to be understated!)

I’ve been getting more scientific about my shopping lately, hunting for the best prices, as we students like to do. So I’ve been investigating Aldi, and the other day while I was there I saw quite the scene. A man was shopping with his little son, and I watched as the elder told his kid: “Oke Pieter, go get the cheese!” (translated from Dutch of course) and of course the little guy selects the largest piece they sell from the case, 2.2 pounds of gouda. That made my day! 

For the coming weeks, I’ll continue to settle in. The goal is to break up my routine a little: go to Lidl instead of Albert Heijn for groceries, start with Dutch courses in Vlissingen, and join some community forums on the American election. I’m glad to see the locals are concerned for my homeland, and very Dutch of them to hold an open debate about this–it’ll be interesting! Have a fine week and stay tuned for more updates on my many adventures.

Regards, Aaron

(more pictures to come in future updates!)