The Hague, Eindhoven, & more Dutch stuff!

One chilly but sunny Saturday afternoon, two of my unitmates and I ventured off to the Hague! It's only about 45 minutes away from Utrecht, so it was a really nice day trip. We had a really chill day because we were all tired from not having slept much that week, but it was nice to just relax. We started off by getting some coffee (Note: a coffeeshop is where you buy weed, and a cafe is actually a bar, so what do you call a place where you get coffee?? That is the question...), and then we went to the Mauritshuis, a beautiful museum holding many famous Dutch art pieces, including Vermeer's "Girl with the Pearl Earring," many Rembrandts, and more! Dutch museums are like heaven for me. I love taking it all in! It's also fun to see museums in a new light because of the Museum Studies course I'm currently in.

Mauritshuis

The Girl With the Pearl Earring

After enjoying the wonderful museum, we ate at Bagels & Beans (did you know bagels are a bit of a rarity here?) and then explored the streets in the city center a bit. We also saw the Houses of Parliament and one of the royal palaces.

Royal Palace (one of them)

It's a lovely city! When it gets warmer in the spring, I'll go again to visit the beach, and one of these days, I will also visit the ICJ and other cool official buildings.

All Dutch cities are starting to look the same...but still beautiful

Our new friend

The following weekend, my unitmate and I visited Eindhoven for Glow, a light festival spread out across the city. We went with a girl she knows from home and the friend's Spanish and British unitmates -- it was a super fun crowd! Eindhoven is the home of Phillips, so they're really into lights and stuff...that's pretty much all I know about the city. Oh, they also have an airport that cheap budget airlines fly from! We arrived when it was dark already (which is pretty early these days...like 5-6pm) because it's a light festival, and the city looked pretty nice by night. It's small, but still pretty cute! While it was nice, I still Utrecht is the prettiest city I've seen so far in the Netherlands. It's so so beautiful with its canals (yeah, so not all Dutch cities have canals -- surprising but true), and it's the perfect size. Also, because it's above sea level, the canals are lower than they are in other cities, so you walk along the road above and look down and then can go down staircases to sit beside the canal...ah, it's soooo nice!!! Anyway, back to Eindhoven. We saw lots of cool light shows projected on different buildings and stuff; it was a pretty cool event!

Is this not the coolest and most beautiful thing you've ever seen?!

The next day, it felt like Seattle. It was rainy and gray all day, but we still managed to go out in the rain and rush to town on our bikes (biking in the rain exposes so much more of your body surface to the rain, and you get really wet thighs, arms, and feet...it sucks) to see Sinterklaas arrive in town! He officially arrives and is filmed on TV in a different city every year (this year was Gouda, where the cheese comes from!), but we just went to the one in Utrecht, which was less crowded anyway! Sinterklaas is Dutch Santa Claus, but he's skinny and is from Spain. He also used to be a bishop and has a billion "helpers" called Black Petes, who are white people with blackface, an afro, red lips, and a gold earring. So yeah...I prefer Santa. While the Netherlands is a very progressive country in many ways, this tradition is not one of them. They love Sinterklaas, and they love Black Pete, who they claim is only black from the soot in the chimney (I'm still not sure where the afro and earring came from in the chimney...). Just starting last year, there has been a lot of national and international debate surrounding this tradition and whether or not it is racist. It's hard to let go of traditions, so the Dutch are very defensive of this, but I really hope things will change in the next few years. I felt extremely uncomfortable seeing all the Black Petes come down the Oudegracht (the canal), but it was interesting that this year, there were also some Rainbow Petes and other colored Petes.

Black Petes leading the way for Sinterklaas

Does anyone else feel as uncomfortable as I do???

Seeing Sinterklaas after an hour of discomfort in watching the Black Petes prepare the crowd for his arrival was a bit anticlimactic, but it was cool to see a Dutch tradition all the same.

HI SANTA!!!!!!!

Sinterklaas will now stay in town and put little presents in Dutch children's shoes when they set them out by the fireplace any night between now and December 5, which is the actual day of Sinterklaas (it's also the name of the holiday). They celebrate Sinterklaas much more than Christmas, so it'll be fun to be here for that!

The Dom in the fall (note the majestic Utrecht flags at the top!) 

Other than exploring the Netherlands and experiencing Dutch culture, I have been keeping busy with:

• cleaning my room
• keeping up with Downton Abbey
• searching for cheap flights to every European city I can think of
• hiding while my unitmate bravely tried (and failed after screaming and dropping it) to bring a giant spider outside in her hand so that I would not take its life
• having dinner at the home of a dear friend who studied on exchange at UW two years ago -- she has the sweetest family!
• trying not to deplete my dining card money before the end of the semester
• taking advantage of the little time we have left with all the other exchange students before they leave at the end of the semester :(
• participating in research studies to get a little cash
• going on a Utrecht Underground tour where we learned about homelessness in our city
• visiting the market in town!
• and studying, of course...

Sarah and I at the market with fresh warm stroopwafels <3

Olivier -- a church-turned-bar!!! So cool!

Yogurt (actual yogurt, not the frozen kind) with Rhea, a girl from India who studies in Singapore and is on exchange here! The Dutch love their yogurt!

Look at the pineapples and then realize how massive those Nutella bottles are!!!