Driving holiday

We are soon leaving to Finland driving our car through Scandinavia. The luxury of traveling with as much stuff as possible is rare, but I'm assuming the load the other way will be way more :-) Here are anyway some of the important stuff that we are going to bring with us

Non-pasteurized cheese on request

Beer, more beer, chocolate dinosaurus cookies, space blanket and a few books

Old piano will move back to Finland

Baking

I finally got a good reason to do some baking without having to worry about who will eat the ready made products. Today is the Dutch guys birthday, so as a good Dutch worker he needs to have something to serve to his colleagues, so instead of going with the ready made taartjes I opted to bake something.

As following the Finnish recipes requires quite some imagination in finding all the ingredients at the supermarket, I opted for Albert Heijn (the local food chain) recipes. And that was actually really handy, as all the ingredients can be found with a picture and packing size without the need to decypher what rahka now actually is and why isn't there any chocolate flavoured cream available.

Melted chocolate.. mmm!

Digestive cookies are also here Digestive cookies, but Marie-cookies are Maria-cookies

It got a bit too brown but the taste didn't suffer too much

Marie-cookie lime cake

Collective society

In some intercultural communication class roughly 10 years ago one of the topics was the individualism vs. collectivism in the society. After two years in the Netherlands it seems, that there's some things still to learn for Finland in the topic of collectivism. Below are examples of some services of which I always think why don't these exist in Finland (or maybe they do but I haven't found them?) or if they do exist, there's someone wanting them gone..

Picture from here

•  You love cooking, but you live alone - what do to with the rest of the boeuf bourguignon? Set it up on thuisafgehaald.nl! This brilliant service let's you sell the rest of your home cookings with the price of the ingredients. Looking at our neighbors, I could today take my own plate and go get a serving of e.g homemade meatballs or cheesecake

• A tree needs to be cut down, an Ikea kitchen needs installing - werkspot.nl is the place to be. You can set your task here, and just wait while the entrepreneurs start making offers to you and you pick the cherry on top. For every offer you see the recommendations and reviews. It's a bit like Tripadvisor, but then for all sorts of work that you want to be done around your house.
 

• Going away for a few days and need somebody to feed your cat? Or you just broke your leg and need help with the groceries? This neighbor help service helps you in all categories from dating to IT support.

• If you have too much free time on your hands and would like to help children/animals/immigrants or all of them, you can go here and get a list per location of all the opportunities. I've been surfing long in enough the opportunities around Utrecht, and maybe it would be now about time to stop feeling like an introvert Finn and actually start doing some of them.

 In the mean time in Finland the Tax Office has expressed their interest in taxing the volunteer/time bank work in Finland. As someone phrased out, in addition to giving half of your salary to them, you also need to start giving your TIME to the Tax Office? Thanks, but no thanks..

Tour de Zeist

It's again the time of the year when all the Dutch cycling enthusiasts are glued to the TV (I have one at home also..). Instead of watching Tour de France, we had our own tour today - Tour de Zeist. It consisted of five hours, five restaurants, five portions and glasses of wine and roughly 10 km of cycling. Absolutely excellent way of getting to know the near-by restaurants! I'm sure we add at least few of them to our regular list. And hope of course that this event will be organised also next year!

Our ticket

Really dutch and brilliant - bakfiets to transport your kids/dogs/stuff!

First stop, and definitely in the top 2

I could already see myself lounging there with a mojito..

The restaurants herb garden - I took the photo as a guideline for the Dutch guy to build me one :P

He still doesn't know about the building plans and therefore looks happy.. 

Vitello Tonnato

Salade Caprese

Something with witlof

Indonesian restaurant - reeeeeallly good!!

And these chairs went to our shopping list..

.. even though they are a bit difficult to get up from

Biking after three meals and three glasses of wine, going steady..

.. no problem what so ever ..

.. maybe the photographer had one too many?

Second to last restaurant - there we got some water too!

Wine vines

Salmon with homemade chips

And in the last etappe we got still a fish plate - luckily to share

Beautiful Helsinki

Helsinki has showed it's beautiful side (as it always seems to do nowadays when visiting, strange? ;-) and the week has been filled with midsummer, rock, family, friends and good weather. Here are some pearls from the archives.

I almost melted while sitting in the garden!

Punch, made by a person who doesn't drink

Midsummer crabs

Floating sauna

Lawn mowing

Even one work related meeting was fitted in to the busy holiday schedule.. :P

Rock the Beach, still starting up

Rock the beach - 3 days ticket!

Bare footed listening

Life guard performing his duties

My dad's t-shirt

Old hoods

Cider & beer, 6 eur per glass. I'm getting too dutch for the prices

Sun setting over Helsinki

30 secs to Mars

Helsinki Pride

Peas! Fresh peas! The dutch don't know anything about this delicacy

Lunch back in the NL, some bitter lemon was needed after this week..