Sprinkles for breakfast

Day 2

Morning light

sprinkles for breakfast!

Woke up the morning of day 2, surprised to not be suffering too much from jet lag.  It's more like just suffering from exhaustion of the last three weeks.  It was still a slow start though.  Liselot drinks hot tea, so she doesn't have a coffee maker.  I need to get one of those, ASAP.  Liselot also told me about a breakfast food I had to try.  It seems the Dutch love to eat bread with sprinkles!  So for breakfast I had some crackers with butter and sprinkles (Hagelslag). It was pretty amazing; both creamy and sweet!

That afternoon I had a meeting with the organizers of my program and Kristina!  Kristina is a student from NC State and she's in my class!  She is here with Merial also, but her project is different than mine.  We'll probably see each other more once I get into the lab on Monday. 
We actually found a skeleton of a giraffe that is just like one at NC State, so we obviously had to take a picture with it!  It kind of reminded both of us of home. 

Liselot and Bart

Liselot and Bart invited me to dinner with their friends Hannah and Fred, who live just across the street.  Liselot and I decided to make lemon pie, with all kinds of crazy food coloring!  It turned out to be quite the experiment.  We increased the quantities of ingredients, but didn't really measure it.  Here in Europe, they weigh out all of the ingredients they use in recipes, unlike in America where we measure with cups and such.  So the recipe ingredients were described in grams.  The dough was blue, the custard was green, and we swirled red in it!  Then we had to bake it at Hannah's, and some of the ovens here aren't like regular, giant American ovens.  They are like large toaster ovens on countertops, about the size of microwaves!  So things can cook a little differently.  We think we got it mostly cooked...and since no one got sick, we must have done just fine!  It was quite delicious.

Dinner conversation was incredible.  Fred was the former president of International Veterinary Students' Association and has traveled all over the world attending veterinary conferences.  Actually, at the SAVMA Symposium in Colorado this year, Kristina and I were introduced to the current president, who is also a student at Utrecht.  Bart has also traveled a considerable amount.  I loved hearing stories about international travel!  Like the time Fred was detained briefly and investigated because he had recently been to Turkey.  And the 18+ hour flight Bart took to Japan as a teenager.  Bart actually looks a lot like Daniel Radcliffe, and in Japan they apparently thought it was hilarious because the entire customs counter had to have a look when he went through!  
We also talked about the violence in America, and how it's just not the same here.  Very few people have guns in The Netherlands, and therefore, they just don't have public massacres the way we do in America.  We talked about weed, which turns out, is illegal here!  The authorities just don't seem to care...And the wine we had at dinner was from California.  Haha, I can't believe I flew all the way to Europe to drink American wine!

Local dinner conversations

 We ended the incredible night at a local bar.  It's actually under a dorm, and students volunteer to run it, so the alcohol is super cheap!  Rounds of apple sour shots for almost nothing!  Proost!!  (cheers)