Homemade foodz

After too much meat and drink this weekend, we decided to make our own dinner on Sunday:



Moroccan ratatouille (eggplant, peppers, courgette, beans, onion, garlic, tomato, cumin, turmeric and cinnamon) and fried potatoes (pictured in the background, even though they may have been even awesomer than the ratatoille).

Today, we did ate the leftover ratatouille, as well as leftover stew, as well as some freshly made fries.



Our life may suck at the moment, our food does not.

Still confused and angry

I.e., nothing new. Here is a video we forgot to post way back when (we were happy):

It was a gift from Amanda.

Hobbies

It turns out that we share many hobbies with Amanda.

First of all food of course. Not only making it and eating it...





... but also catching it.

Second, photography.





Especially when combined with number 3 and 4: hiking and sightseeing.





We are not the only ones who best enjoy the scenery of the Great Wall through a lens.



Finally, rock climbing.



This was actually an easy part.

Here is a picture of Anke after she involuntarily free climbed a much harder part of the Great Wall.

Time off...

...from feeling angry, stressed and powerless.

We are going to climb the great wall today with Amanda. Look what a wonderful day we chose for doing physical exercise outside!





By the way, we have received no reply yet to the surprised and shell-shocked email that we sent on Tuesday night to our fearless leader, who we now think is perhaps not so fearless. (And we can come up with hundreds of nasty expressions about things he does seem to lack). Damn, now I am thinking about him again!

We need a little love

Things are not going well here. What we expected would happen, seems to be happening indeed -- we may lose our last month's salary.

We arrived here in August 2008, but could not register with the university at that time, because the HR offices were closed. We were told that we would get paid from September, but that this would be no problem, because we would just get paid for an additional month after we left. The same thing happened last year with another postdoc.

Now, the institute is denying that this ever happened. They claim we chose to come before our official appointment date, and that the fact that we worked during August is irrelevant. Unfortunately, we do not have any record of our starting date -- we have emails in which we discuss possible dates, and we discuss that we may want to take a language course in our first weeks. We did not end up taking a full time language course, and we got an office, and started meeting with people at the institute from the beginning of August.

We feel confused, angry and even physically ill, because our boss does not even seem to be willing to hear our side of the story. Sure, it is only month's salary we are talking about, and maybe we should not get too worked up about that. But this lack of any respect for us is something we really did not expect.

So I think we need some long-distance hugs. Please do not send them by email to our official email addresses, but either to yahoo or gmail accounts, or in the comments.


Amy has us by the tail -- a picture from better days.

If you want to be like a bull

...you should eat bull head...



...and good luck you will have every day.

We finally went to eat bull's head with Amanda.





She even convinced five other friends to come along, because she was told the bull's head is really quite big.







And indeed, a bull's head really is quite huge. Apparently, it has about 5 kg of meat on it. Between the 8 of us, we managed to eat maybe half of that.



Besides getting all her friends to eat bull's head with her, Amanda was also on a mission today to show F and A some good old fashioned Chinese drinking. And hence we had to do "bottoms up" with all six of them in turns (and some of them even drank cola because they had to drive).

It is a good thing we have ridiculously big bodies and hence are hardly affected by alcohol:



Anyway, we had a great time. Some tasting notes:

- the meat around the eye socket is highly praised. It is kind of translucent and looks fatty, although I am not sure it really is. It definitely soaks up a lot of flavor in the eight hour cooking time.

- the meat on the cheek is very tender and stringy (in a good way), but the meat a little closer to the nose is even better.

- the meat in the "ear socket", or whatever you call it, is my favorite - very tender and nice.

- the tip of the tongue is nice too, but the rest of it (the tongue is huge, about 2 kg), is a bit too gamey for my tastes.

- finally, the brains are very nice (but stick to the white parts not the black parts). Amanda thinks it tastes like tofu and if you ever tried fresh tofu, I think there is something to it. It is definitely good and who cares about Creutzfeldt–Jakob.

Some ladies like head

Some gentlemen like sausages

Some ladies like beer

Live from Cafe Konstanz.

Operation Successfurrrrrrrrrrr

We successfurry bought some radishes today.



Sure, they are not a successfurrrrr as some people's radishes.

And neither are our photos as artistic.

But we enjoyed them nonetheless.



As we also enjoyed this stew.


Man, are we going to miss the tomatoes here... Being from the Netherlands, we know all about the Wasserbombe they are selling instead of tomatoes in Germany.

Dragon Boat Festival

Our institute generously supplied us with the traditional food for Dragon Boat Festival: Sticky rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves.



At least the different colored strings made it look festive.

Yes, Virginia

... we still eat. Even more strongly, we cooked!





The lamb was a slight disaster however, so shame prevents us from posting pictures.

On the subject of shame, remember that our espresso machine failed us? It turns out that we failed Miss Silvia, our espresso machine. We decided to clean her, before boxing her and getting her ready for being shipped to Europe. After more than one hour of backflushing in which I abused 4 liters of spring water, and kept on channeling Gordon Ramsay ("I drank espresso from that, you PIG!!!"), the water that came out of Miss Silvia was finally not brown any more. And guess what? Her pressure had risen significantly as well! It turns out that Miss Silvia was not broken, but just very dirty. We are pigs. Hurray!

798

Or the red light district?



Whatever it is, it is smoking!

Teaching

Yesterday (Saturday), we taught our final class. Look at the discipline and order that A instills!

Smooth Ferry Operator

This is prolly his sister, luring us to the ferry with her golden smile:



And one more photo of the beautiful surroundings for good measure:



Last but not least, a performance of the smooth ferry operator:

Some more pretty pictures from Guangxi

And proof that we were really there:

Cormorant Fishing

Right before getting on our bike to return to Yangshuo, we saw this traditional fisherman.



The birds have a string tied around their neck, so that when they catch a fish, they cannot swallow it. The fisherman then brings them back aboard and makes them puke out the fish, after which he picks them up (by the neck) and throws them back in the water.

Here's the whole sequence: