On Pizza

One of the many irritations of life in Holland that I have yet to write about is pizza. Over the past few months I've had to work very late on many nights and have gotten to learn a lot about the state of pizza here. When we work really late, we order pizza for dinner because it's easy to eat, almost everyone likes it, and it's easy to order a bunch of. There are two main pizza chains in the area, however only one delivers to work. Their pizza is pretty bad, very frugal on the cheese (shocking thing in the land of cheese), expensive, and tends to cause me to have very weird dreams after eating it. Another serious pizza problem is that it is difficult to get at night. Many times I've been at a party or at someone's house and 10pm comes around and we're starving. The immediate reaction is to order some pizza. Dominos stops taking orders at 2145. All the other pizza places are closed by then also. We have found some places open later, but they serve cardboard with cheese on it instead of pizza. Obviously this is a cultural thing, because who would order pizza late at night? A couple weeks ago, we had a large number of visitors at work for some meetings on a day when the cafeteria at work happened to be closed. No problem, we'll just order some pizzas for lunch. Wrong. The pizza places do not open until 1600. Who eats pizza for lunch? We eventually remembered that pizza hut was open at lunch (but doesn't deliver), so we ordered from there. They don't even ask for your name when you order four pizzas, and they hand them to you when you walk in without even having to ask. Nobody has pizza for lunch, so when you walk in, you don't have to tell them your name, they know the pizzas must be for you. It's all very strange and it makes me wonder if people are missing out on the joys of spontaneous and/or late night pizza. I never knew pizza could be so hard.

Christmas Markets

When I came to Europe, there were two slightly strange things on the list of things I wanted to do. One was the Great Scandinavian Road Trip (which I did), and the other was a tour through several of the Christmas markets in Germany. As you'll recall, for the last two years I've visited the market in Aachen. I went there again this year, but due to schedules, I had to go by myself. It was nice as usual, except that shortly after I arrived it started raining heavily, so I cut my visit short. The next weekend, I went to see the markets in Koln (it has several, I went to two). The markets in Koln had a much bigger food selection than in Aachen, but fewer interesting things to buy. Also, many stands seemed to be repeated more than once. On the whole, if you just want to eat, go to Koln; if you want to have nice stuff to maybe buy, go to Aachen.

The final phase of this trip was to Nurnburg and to Rothenburg. I took a day off from work and planned to squeeze in a quick trip down there before flying home for Christmas. That didn't work quite to plan. I got as far as Arnhem when I got a flat tire. I was lucky to be right at an exit with a gas station when it happened, so I pulled in their to change the tire. While I was on the phone to a friend trying to find nearby tire shops, some construction workers came over and changed my tire. That was really kind of them to do (though I should point out that I am quite capable of changing a tire). So, with my little, tiny spare tire mounted, I headed off to the tire shop to get the flat tire repaired. Store #1 could not get me in until 5pm, so I went to store #2. There, they took me in immediately, but quickly determined that they could not effect a safe repair on the tire. So, my Christmas market trip came to an early end and I drove home. Fortunately, I suppose, this happened while I was still relatively close to home, so I didn't have to be stranded for a days someplace waiting for tires to come in.

Berlin Again

During the fall, it seemed like I was not doing as good a job doing weekend trips as I would have liked. So, I decided to take a day off and have a 3 day weekend in Berlin. Berlin has tons of good museums and I was nowhere close to having seen them all. When I got to the airport, I went to my gate and waited for the flight to board. Just before boarding was supposed to start, I noticed that the screen by the gate no longer said Berlin. Thinking they had changed gates, I ran around trying to find the new gate and spotting on the departures board that my flight had been canceled. It was ontime when I came through security, and I went straight to the gate. It appears that KLM canceled the flight without even bothering to make an announcement that the flight had been canceled. That's pretty much the last straw for me, and so one of my plans for the new year is to minimize my travel with them even more. I went to the service desk and got rebooked on a later flight, a meal voucher, and a discout, so I suppose that they did everything they needed to do, but I was still disappointed to have lost effectively an entire day of my weekend.

After I arrived and checked into the hotel, I went for a walk in the cold night air. The city was quite nicely decorated for the season.

From Berlin by Night

By random chance, I walked straight into a Christmas market, that turned out to be pretty good. So I had some food and gluhwein for my dinner. I went to another market that night that was supposed to be good, but found that they were charging admission to get in. That's absolutely unheard of to me, so I turned around and left. The next night, I came across another one around Potsdamerplatz.

From Berlin by Night

It looked really cool, taking advantage of the semi-open Sony Center, and having a snow tubing slope. However, on closer inspection it was quite commerical, there were only a few different stands that were repeated over and over again, and the whole thing seemed to be put on by a company as a staged event. So, it turned out not to be very good. The best part, though, was the big stage where people were playing Singstar karaoke on a huge screen. Unfortunately, it seemed only Abba songs were on the list (probably some kind of sponsorship tie in with Mamma Mia, which serves to further detract from the whole thing).

During the days, I went to as many museums as I could. I managed to see all the museums on Museuminsel, plus the museums down by Potsdamerplatz. It was a long day of museums, but it was nice to do, and I got my money's worth out of the musuem card I bought. The best, though, is still the Pergamon, which everyone who goes to Berlin should see.

The final day I went to the zoo. The zoo is excellent, with tons of animals. I spent half the day there and easily could have spent longer. Even better, since it was winter, hardly anyone else was at the zoo, so it felt like I had the whole place to myself.

From Berlin Zoo

From Berlin Zoo

From there, it was to the Luftwaffenmuseum. Unfortunately, it closed it 4pm and by the time I go to it, I only had 45min to see the place. Worse still, the museum was huge and spread out. I rushed as fast as I could, but there was no way I could cover all the ground or even do justice to the stuff I could see. There were many interesting airplanes there, and I hope I can get back and do it properly another time.

From Luftwaffenmuseum

From Luftwaffenmuseum