Meeting the Neighbors

Late last week we had a piece of mail mis-delivered to us. It was from the US IRS, so rather then immediately write "Return to Sender" on it and put it back in the mail Kevin looked the addressee up on Facebook, trying to find an email address to let them know we had their mail. The street was right, however the house number was completely illegible.

Turns out Courtenay (the addressee) is an American who works for Adidas and lives two doors down. Her next door neighbor is Andrea & Adam, Andrea also works for Adidas. They both have dogs so we took all 6 of our dogs to Beatrix park on Sunday. There were many jokes about our respective shoe companies and the little things about the Netherlands that are challenging.

• Our joyous ABN Ambro experiences are not unique! Thank goodness it isn't just us.
  
• No one picks up their dog shit. It is everywhere and I think we all get looked at like we are weird for picking up ours
  
• You can be ticketed for not having your dog registered (and it is expensive to register them)!
  
• You can also be ticketed for not having a poo bag on you while walking your dog, if you use the one you had and see an "enforcer" (which is likely at either Beatrix or Vondelpark) and do not have a spare you can be ticketed.
  
• Dog food costs 67 euros for the same brand and size we would buy in the US for 28 dollars!
  

Courtney & Brian are going to watch Duke & Maggie this weekend, with their older golden retriever and Andrea's young chocolate lab. Bless their hearts as they are going to have a house full!

We are so glad that the letter was mis-delivered! Andrea & Courtenay also told us that our downstairs neighbors are German ex-pats with a little girl and a second on the way. Yay!! Possible baby friends, now we just have to meet them :)

We are headed to Milan on Friday. I don't know if I already posted that or not. Kevin was able to get us tickets to see the Last Supper too! Hopefully we will have some great pics of the city and not freeze. It has been somewhere between 4 & -2 Celsisus here for the last couple of days. Brr.

Sunday morning while Kevin was out for his long run (he is training for a half marathon and I am very proud of him!) I made cookies. We have an oven, but it isn't want you think of when you think of an oven. It is a little more then a glorified microwave. I think they are called "combi-oven", meaning you can broil, grill, bake and nuke food...It seems to be a Convection / Conventional / Microwave, all in one. One small problem is that it is small! About the size of an average microwave... Before I could start the cookies I had to figure out how to convert the grams that my butter comes in to the tablespoons the receipe calls for. I figured it out, but have now forgotten what the conversion is :) Something like 14.56 grams in a single tablespoon, of course the butter is marked in 50 gram increments... The cookies turned out quite tasty, particularly with a glass of halfevolle milk (I think this is equivalent to about 3%. It seems more creamy then 2% and is the next available step up from nonfat).

Sunday evening we went to dinner with a friend of Barry's (Kevin's oldest brother). He is in town for work, for the month, and Barry put us in contact with each other. We went to a "brown cafe". It was tasty, even if it was freezing outside!

A "brown cafe" is a cafe that has been around so long that the walls are actually brown from old cigarette smoke. You can't smoke cigarettes in any restaurant or bar in the European Union now, but you can smoke pot in "coffee shops" in the netherlands. One other note...if the sign reads "Coffee Shop" and not "cafe" or "Koffie.." then it is for smoking pot, not drinking coffee. You might be able to find coffee in a "Coffee Shop", however it is not the product of choice.