On the Way Back from Florida

After swimming with manatees, kayaking with alligators, snorkeling with sting rays and jelly fish, and camping with mosquitos, we are back in a motel with internet access on the way back home.



Here is Anke and a whole gaggle of other tourists trying to pet a manatee (and succeeding in doing so):



One of the hundreds of birds we saw (I think this is an ibis):



And here is Anke kayaking:



Yesterday, we had a food day. We started with an amazing huevos rancheros at Rosita's in Florida City:



Followed by a famous rock shrimp restaurant, called Dixie Crossroads. They served corn fritters, which was a great (early) substitute for the obligatory oliebollen (Happy New Year!):



And these amazing rock shrimp:



We then drove on to a town that is even crazier than Williamsburg, St. Augustine (still in Florida). Anke found another great restaurant though, Catch 27. We had a wonderful fish stew:



And an even better main course of shrimp and grits:



We also had blackened flounder which was good, but paled in comparison with the shrimp.

We then enjoyed a little bit of the local craziness:





Happy New Year!

On the road to Florida

We left three days ago to follow the birds on their journey south. On our way, we encountered countless buffets with delicious southern food, beautiful beaches and wild camp sites, and, of course, hundreds and hundreds of old people who were enjoying their retirement in their RVs.
We would share our photos here, had Flickr not made it near impossible to do so. So, why don't you visit the bastards directly, and check out Frans's photostream?

UPDATED:

Here are the other photos:

It's the most wonderful time of the year

It turns out that Richmond is famous for its tacky Christmas lights. We only visited three houses on our first tacky lights tour. The first were two houses next to each other belonging to a mother and son, which is apparently a local favorite.



We preferred the second place we visited. The owners of the house invite passers by to drive through their driveway. They even created their own radio station that you can tune into. How awesome is that!?

8720 River Rd from Anke on Vimeo.

Cornell get together

We drove up to DC for a mini-Cornell reunion, meeting up with some friends from grad school. We also took advantage of this opportunity to eat insane amounts of food. Even now, I am still in a bit of a food coma, so I will just leave you to contemplate the vast amounts of food we managed to put away.

Fall

105 bags of leaves, ready to be picked up by the municipality.



Approximately 10 of these bags were filled by yours truly, and the rest of this back breaking labor was undertaken by the husband. Our neighbors keep commenting to him that he makes them feel guilty -- imagine how I feel!

Next year, I bet "we" will just blow them all into a corner of the yard and leave them to rot there.

Halloween!

Our neighborhood is really into Halloween. 

Pictured above are Snow White and her father Iron Man as they are going out for Trick-or-Treat.
Father Iron Man was eyeing us suspiciously as we walked around (and took photos) without having kids of our own in tow ...




Our favorite house in the neighborhood had a full grave yard, a tree full of ghosts, a witch coming out of well full of steam, and loads of gigantic moving spiders and spooky sounds.



As our coworker's son sighed this morning "Too bad it isn't Halloween every day!"

Integrated into the American society

After storming out of a research meeting like a Diva (would love to say more, but this is not the place for it), I found this in my mailbox:

GROUPON informiert: 
Änderung der Datenschutzerklärung ab 1. November 2013

Normally, Groupon sends me messages in English, so I responded with the following message:

 "Dear Groupon, I don't understand the message you sent me. Why are you sending me emails in Spanish? Could you please subscribe me to the English email list? Thank you, Anke"

Nailed it!

Newport News Fall Festival

This weekend there was a fall festival of folklife in Newport News! And you know us, we always follow any crowd...

... and are always in for some cultural immersion. Case in point: we did not know the NRA was so cute.



Nor did we know that rednecks make awesome fries: we ate this local delicacy called redneck fries, which featured melted cheese and barbecued pork.

Sometimes I am just at a loss for words.



Seriously at a loss.



Anyway, lots of interesting arts and crap, and fried foodz to enjoy.



And even a ventriloquist with jokes that were older than Methuselah.

Conclusion: we have not fully completed our integration process here yet.

Al Fresco Lifestyle

Fall is here, which means more reasonable temperatures and discounted outdoor furniture! We're taking advantage of both, and are fully committed to the al fresco lifestyle. In the morning, we have our coffee on the porch.



Weather permitting (which means, if it is not too warm), we have dinner on the porch as well.

And, we may even choose to venture off the porch now that we have a fire pit to keep the bugs away.

I love the fall!

Long overdue

I have just been informed that if I don't create a blog post soon, I may never to get F to clean up after himself or do anythings I ask him to, either.

So alright then, I will make a post...



As you can see, the husband and I behaved very professorially during the time we did not blog very much. From this episode, we concluded that Europeans are not as much fun as Chinese tourists. Whereas Chinese tourists would have surely followed our lead, the Germans and Dutch tourists merely pretended not to see how we were making a complete ass out of ourselves. How boring.



I don't really feel like blogging about our holidays besides this, as Ellen is doing such a superb job, and all I would write would just look pathetic in comparison. So go and check out her blog already!

Especially for Tuncay

Bear!

We saw this bear last weekend, after a hike in Shenandoah National Park. It was actually jumping between trees, while I was getting the camera ready.

Some Final Pics from Our Holland Visit

We are home after all our summer travels! So I guess it's time to finally post some (not so recent) pictures from our visit to Holland. Pictured above: a palpable hue of anticipation of the birthday of Poppa...



... and here the Mohn cake Ellen made for him (and us)! You can find more pictures of the birthday on Ellen's blog.

Then, for old times' sake (and great food), we went to Snackbar Bird in Amsterdam:





Still as good as we remember!

Also, Vennington in the Prinsenstraat:



Still famous for their BLT sandwiches and fruit shakes, and rightly so.

Soon: a few photos from the Zillertal. For a more extensive report look at Ellen and Christiaan's Bergvakanties blog. The first four posts are up, and can be found here, here, here and here.

Israeli Food in Amsterdam

In Amsterdam we tried a small Israeli restaurant, staffed by two guys only. According to the one that served us (and cooked for us), the focus was on the food and not and the service. The food was indeed extremely impressive! Pictured above is the cauliflower dish he made for us.



It was actually the second dish he served, the first being eggplant with pomegranate (no picture). The third dish was hummus with mushrooms...



... followed by a tasty Palestinian salad...



... and finally this fennel dish. We decided to stop right there and not to overeat too much, even though all the food was extremely tasty! For a fun experience and some great food, go try restaurant Mana Mana in Amsterdam. It is located at Hemonystraat 66hs.

Impressions of Amsterdam

We just arrived in Frankfurt today, after a strenuous hike in the Zillertal. Some pictures of this trip soon, but here are still a few impressions of Amsterdam, when we were there a few weeks ago.



Believe it or not, the weather in Austria was even hotter and sunnier!

Breakfast in Amsterdam

While we were in Amsterdam, Ellen and Christiaan came to hang out with us. Even Willem joined us for an incredible breakfast at restaurant Gartine.



Hmmmm, pancakes....

Visiting Holland

We have been visiting the Netherlands, enjoying all kinds of wonderful food. Not a good thing as we are going hiking in the Alps, and we have to carry all those extra pounds now.

Holy shit!

It was a bit windy here the other day. Nothing out of the ordinary, though -- apparently, it was not even a hurricane worthy of a name.

Still, it took down about 2 huge trees in our street and about 8 in the street next to ours.

Fortunately, all but one of them fell on streets and back yards, only one family's house got hit.

Although it was not that fortunate for us. Our cul-de-sac was blocked by a gigantic tree, so we could not leave by car. Which is a major problem if you don't have electricity. We had to get up in the morning, ride our bikes to campus, before we had our first coffee. Nooooo!!!!!!

We came home that evening and nothing had been done, so we were wondering if we'd ever get electricity again.

But on Saturday, they came out in full force!




 We left for a couple of hours, and came back to find the tree all but removed.
  I don't know how they did it, but they even managed to patch up all the power lines by 10pm that day. Our internet service came back up by Sunday afternoon, and now, we're back in business!