As you can all see I’ve been extremely busy and I didn’t have any time to put a nice new post recently. This is why I decided to put a note about various places and events this time.

In the beginning of April Amsterdam hosted a next edition of the World Pillow Fight Day. It was truly amazing! Dam Square was all covered in fluff, feathers and leftovers of some destroyed pillows. Actually, my coat was covered in feathers for the next two weeks even after washing. The whole fight lasted about an hour, but I guess cleaning this place definitely took longer!

One weekend we visited the famous, because of the cheese obviously, town of Gouda. It’s a very small town, with no much to do around, and actually the Saturday market was way worse than the one in Leiden. There were no freebies and no tastings available! However last minute we discovered the cheese store where I stuffed myself with various cheeses and dips. My favourite one was the garlic gouda.

We also visited the famous Zaanse Schaans in Zaandam. The place is a museum of Dutch culture with various windmills. We’ve seen the oldest Albert Heijn (Dutch supermarket chain) in Holland, entered the windmill with lots of spices, cuddled in the sheep skin (I’ll definitely buy some when I own the house!), and obviously tried some nice cheeses! We had fun, however the weather was typically Dutch (read: cold, rainy and awful!), so we were soaked.

We also went sailing in Leiderdorp. Believe it or not Holland is bloody windy all the time… Apart from the day we went sailing, so it was a bit slow. But fun anyway!

Talking about Leiden there is always something going on here! ISN Leiden does a good job organising things like bowling, climbing, cocktail parties, etc etc.
I cannot also forget about the Cooking club! This semester we made sushi, Lebanese meals, Creole dishes, tapas & meze, Easter brunch, and more are yet to come!
However, I am also organising things. I’m actually working for the University committee and we’re responsible for the organisation of the Orientation Week for the new incoming students. Lots of parties, and fun included! Also, I joined the Mexican team to prepare the stall for the Cultural Festival in June.

In March I went to Risoul-Vars ski resort in France. Risoul is a small town in French Alps, between Grenoble and Torino in Italy. The whole trip was organized by ISN/ESN (International/Exchange Student Network) Netherlands, so we went with Dutch and International students from all over Holland, but just five of us from Leiden. I cannot deny that we, as Leiden team, were extremely well prepared for the trip predicting that buying food out there would be expensive we took two suitcases, ikea bag of food, 10l of milk and a huge box of bread. Yes, it was worth it!
Our accommodation was quite bad. The resort policy of check-in and check-out was quite unpleasant, because we couldn’t check-in until 6pm and we had to check-out at 8am even when we’re leaving at 10pm… moreover when we got there our room was covered in short black hair and to get our deposit back we had to clean the room ourselves.

During our stay snow was falling from the sky in incredible amounts, so all the slopes were powdery and fluffy what was awesome for snowboarding, but quite bad for skiing. What is more, on the second day of our skiing almost all the lifts were closed because lift operators couldn’t get to work. Playing with the powder was nice tho even if we were stuck many times we decided to take off trail route under the ski lift. I have to admit it was the hardest trail I’ve ever done when skiing, but we managed! However, next time I wasn’t as lucky doing a black trail and got stuck in the snow without my skis, moreover twisting my ankle.
The last day I decided to try snowboard. Thanks to M. who taught me some basic things I managed to down even red trails after a few hours. However, I collapsed on the flat green trail spot and injured my shoulder, wrist and elbow hardly enough not to break my bone, but twist it instead…

Talking about nightlife we had some amazing parties like ‘white trash’ theme party, St Patrick’s Day, or the pool party. Also, we were introduced to vodka/tequilla haribo bears or frogs by the guys from ESNow committee.

I’d say generally I can recommend Risoul-Vars for skiing, however lots of patience is needed when it comes to accommodation out there!

People were laughing at us when we were bringing approximately 40kg of food (for 5people) for the ski trip in Risoul, France. Although we brought very basic ingredients we created amazing dishes, so I decided to share the ideas on the blog.

We had: potatoes, rice, onions, garlic, pasta, bacon, minced beef, chicken breasts, cheese, fish (salmon, white fish), some leftover veggies (broccoli, spinach, asparagus), milk.

This is what we created for the following dinners:

• salmon pasta with spinach, onion, garlic and cheesy sauce
• Keshi Yena – dish from Curacao (cheese stuffed with beef, onions, mushrooms) with rice
• stampot – Dutch dish (our version with spinach, onion, mushroom, bacon) with lots of jus (type of gravy)
• stuffed (mushrooms, onion, cheese) chicken with broccoli mash potatoes with spinach ravioli
• white fish with asparagus and bechamel sauce with pasta

We also discovered that sandwiches with stampot, cheese and jus are the best for lunch when skiing/snowboarding!

 

 

 

I’m in the Netherlands, so one of the first thing to arrange was buying myself the one and the only transportation – a bike.
I haven’t been much of a biker before coming to Leiden, but the moment I got to buying one I had to learn  a lot about those machines. When I went to the second-life bike store I asked for ‘a bike’. The seller was asking me about different types of brakes, seats, baskets, models, lights and everything I had to learn about bikes in a few minutes. For me ‘a bike’ was just a bike, but after all those questions I got asked I thought that I was most likely wrong. Well, when I finally got my first bike the seller said: ‘A bike is a bike’. Apparently, for Dutch people it still is!

I really liked my first bike. I had no problems with it, it was easy to recognize among others and I felt very excited every time I had to ride it. However, on the day of love (?!) known as Valentine’s Day, somebody in Leiden decided not to love me and steal my bike! My lock was cut and in this cold and snowy day I stayed with no bike!
Getting a new bike wasn’t as easy as I’d thought. Most of the bike stores ran out of bikes after the invasion of  students and the only available ones were expensive. I bought a bike from a friend, but I realized it was too small for me.I had to swap it in another bike store where I got a replacement bike for two days before I finally getting my new bike. Although one night when going to another village I thought that I had a flat time. It was too hard to bike and I had to swap with a friend who had to ride my bike on the way back. It turned out that my break got stuck and I was biking like this all the time. Damn, I thought… I’d have quite big leg muscles if I decided to ride this bike for the whole year.

This is when my love for  MY bike ended… because even if I’m in Leiden for only 1,5 month I’ve already had 5 bikes!

For the last four weeks many people recently asked me ‘how is Leiden?’ and my answer was simple: ‘amazing’. I’ve been too busy to put a note together earlier, but I’m doing it now and as many people asked me I also want to add something about my life here. I wasn’t convinced about coming here after my nice life in London, but currently I don’t want to move from here. I live in an amazing studio flat in the city center (precisely city center – even google maps when you put ‘Leiden’ shows gives you the location of my house!), and I cannot image how could I ever be able to share my apartment, I quite enjoy living on my own.
I’m handling two universities pretty well so far. Also because I simply love being productive and busy I attend Dutch course, theater club, ballet, pole acrobatics, ballroom dancing and I still manage to go out almost every night. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I’m also working part-time for the university. Yes, I do sleep and quite well actually

Leiden is not a big city, although as a student town it’s doing his job quite well. Apart from students I could see many Polish people around, but I’m not surprised because Leiden is the international place. On some buildings there are poems or short stories written by famous authors in different languages. I need to admit it’s quite catchy.
Every Saturday the main streets of Leiden near the biggest canal are changing into a big Dutch market. We usually go there every week to sample food and buy some cheaper and fresh food.

What did I learn about living in Holland so far…?
-Remembered to put more than 20euros on the OV-chipkart unless you want to be kicked out of a train.
-Dutch cheese can be eaten all day long!
-Without Dutch bank-chipcard you cannot pay for anything, since most of the places don’t accept foreign cards.
-Learned to put two good locks on my bike after my first bike got stolen after 5days…
-Managed to drive my friend holding her suitcase on the backseat of my bike. That was a challenge!