In Delft there is a nice shop called Xotus. It is a big garden center with lots of exotic plants and flowers and also a big Asian supermarket. Here I like to buy boxes of Bapao’s in the flavor chicken or beef. I avoid the pig flavors because a pig is an impure animal.

In addition to Bapao’s I like to try new things, so usually I also buy some weird unknown product. Sometimes I make bad choices because the packaging normally does not contain any information in Dutch or English about the contents. I once bought a big carton with little river lobsters, just to find out that they are probably not meant for eating because they contain very little meat. Probably they were just for decoration. Once I got hold of a big bag of frozen duck tongues but luckily I realized it was something weird right there in the shop and could return the bad to its original place.

But usually the food I try is pretty good… pieces of crab leg that need to be fried, scrimp, strange egg-roles… they all contribute to the risk distribution I try to accomplice with the food I consume.

My last purchase was a bag of deep frozen product. The bag had Chinese text on it, so I just had the image to go on. The image contained a nice plate full of rice and vegetables. I thought it would be a bag of ready made rice, so I bought it. But no… the image on the package was again some optical illusion and it contained only frozen vegetables. The rice and the meat I had to arrange myself resulting in having to clean three pans instead of just one. Even worst, I need to return to the shop because I’m almost out of sate!

Yesterday evening I met the Spanish girl that rented my apartment for a month. All I can say is that I was impressed.. impressed my the cleanness of my home when I arrived; impressed by the bottle of whiskey and the crate of beers that was left for me. And now I’m even more impressed because I was just offered some dried Mexican mushrooms. Nice for a tasty soup.

Those damn mosquitoes!!! This morning I woke up with mosquito bites all over my neck, my arms and on the backside of my knees.. and those bites itch a lot! But what can I do. Killing a mosquito is only possible if you are clear and focused, and this is not my usual state.

I used to have a mosquito net covering my bed, but I threw it out because it made sleeping an uncomfortable thing. I have seen special smell and sound gimmicks that you plug in the wall socket, but because of my paranoia I refuse to buy these because I think they must have some bad effect on humans as well.

But there is always hope. I heard there are certain plants that the mosquitoes don’t like. This afternoon I’ll try and find such a plant.

Today I went into the city and I made some pictures of the typical spots in Leiden. I thought this would be nice to send to some of the people I met in America. Funny thing is that it was impossible to make a picture that did not have a bike standing in it somewhere.

I made photos of the market with huge amounts of bicycles, photos of bars and terraces with lots of bikes, photos of canals with bikes, windmills with bikes, lots of bikes everywhere. As soon as I manage to get some of the pictures on my PC I will post them on this blog.

Home again, and I plan to take it easy for some time. The first few days at home I seemed to notice the jet-lag, but in a good way. It felt like my blood was pumping with endorfines, adrenaline and other -ines (like caffeine and vitamin). It must be because I’m feeling at home again because I feel seriously happy.

I have arrived. Yesterday morning a little after 4 I started my trip home after a very short night with only an hour of sleep. First I traveled from San Fransisco to New York. The flight over was a smooth ride until just before getting of the plane. During the taxiing the pilot hit a little truck and a big piece of metal got stuck right inside the left engine… This resulted in a waiting time of about an hour.

Afterwards I took a flight from New York to Amsterdam. A flawless flight without any problems checking in. I arrived with only 45 minutes of delay and found out my luggage was lost. :-(
Well, I’m happy to be home again. Even happier that I expected. My home was perfectly clean when I arrived… Nice. :-)

Hurray! Today is my birthday :-p. The first few months in this new year of my life are looking very interesting.

I am busy packing and checking if I have everything. Still a couple of friends have decided to come by tonight. That means beer, soda, chips, nuts, cake, and you name it! And all that just while I was trying to empty my fridge and freezer by eating everything. ;-)

Parkpop was the best! Of all the performing acts I did not know any, but this really did not interest me. Parkpop was nice because it started of with a premature birthday gift from Cees, a bottle of Goldstrike! This gift made sure we all enjoyed Parkpop that much more.

Afterwards we then to the central train station in The Hague and we stopped by at the Burger King, here instead of just eating a hamburger we met someone special. A girl that claimed to be a Playboy bunny. She told us she would be published in the Playboy magazine in August or December, and would have one entire page for herself.

She could be easily recognized because she had an tattoo of a rose and a heart in the center of her (pretty nice) right breath (for the viewers, for herself it was the left breath). The only sad thing is that I already forgot her name (I think I recall it being ‘Amanda’), but I do recall she lives near the the Hague central station.

Curious.. :-p