Doei geofysica-nerds!

Celebrating the end of my MSc thesis with a 'night out' (well, evening). We dined at Kartoffel, which is a German restaurant in the city center of Utrecht. I had to try the cheese fondue according to my friend L., because that is kind of the national dish in Switzerland and it is (much!) cheaper to find out if I like it by trying it here than in Switzerland.

My verdict on cheese fondue:
I liked the bread and the vegetables (I like raw vegetables). I dipped things in the cheese and it was okay, I guess.. There was this weird aftertaste (apparently the wine in the cheese fondue) which I did not like. So, I didn't eat a lot of cheese. In fact, I barely touched it. Apparently, that is not how cheese fondue works, though, so I think I'm going to say I do not really like it. But that is only because I don't like the cheese :p


The geophysics nerds: M., L., J., and me.

Doei kantoor!

Goodbye to the office I have occupied with my fellow students for the last 2 months of my thesis. It was a blast!

My computer spot is the one with the motivating Mickey Mouse. I sure love my Disney!

There was also some last minute decoration in the office, to make sure I will become a legend there: my very first (and only at present) conference poster now cheers up the whole room with its lovely colour scheme!

Doei Barnies! (or: how to make a picture in the car)

So, as we continue our journey of saying goodbye to good food in the Netherlands, I said goodbye to the chicken snack bar Barnies in Den Bosch today. This is always quite an outing, as it is a 20 minute drive to the snack bar from where we live, so we do not do this regularly. They have the best chicken legs and chicken kroketten (or croquettes as wikipedia translates it in English.. It is a very typical Dutch snack, I believe).

There is always a very specific Barnies ritual: We park the car in the street where Barnies is located. As it is situated next to a brothel, this always makes for very interesting crowd gazing (are they going to go in or not?). One of my parents goes to the snack bar and actually gets the food, after which we have a picnic / we camp in the car.

Now, as I am saying goodbye and because I have a blog now, we thought it would be nice to take a picture of ourselves camping and eating in the car. This turns out to be quite hard though.

We put the camera on the dashboard and set a timer, but we hadn't really taken into account the Sun, so we ended up with this beautifully lighted picture:


After a few more of these horribly lighted pictures (including trials with flash and without), we decided that the only option was to move to the shadow, so we moved the car and parked it at the other side of the street, to obtain this picture:


Now, I was pretty content with that picture, but then my mother started saying that the picture wasn't very spontaneous: we were just posing and you couldn't actually see us enjoying our chicken. So, in a last, desperate attempt we just started eating and again set a timer and stuff, but we just didn't care anymore (because we were enjoying our chicken). This is the end result:

I am actually quite pleased with this.