A Year in Utrecht

Well it's been two weeks since my last post-- apologies to my committed followers. The past few weeks have been extremely busy with school as well as hosting my first guest in "Abby's Hostel", so I fell off the blogging grind a bit. Not to fear, I am back and today I'm going to be talking about food waste reduction! As a (broke) college student, I am always looking for ways to save money on things like food. Lucky for me, The Netherlands is big on perceived sustainability (more on this in a future post). On Sundays I am a regular at the local "anarchist" bar where they serve free dinners with produce salvaged from the dumpsters of Utrecht. It is always delicious and I have yet to fall ill as a result of consuming it. Last week I tried out an app called "too good to go" where you can pick up foods that are going to be thrown out from local grocery stores, bakeries, butchers, and so forth. I was running low on bread, so I decided to try a "b...

Hello and welcome back to another edition of Abby's blog. Today I am going to be talking about how public spaces are used here in the Netherlands. Winters here are apparently a bit on the bleak side, so as summer draws to a close everyone is very eager to squeeze out every last drop of summer that is left. This means that parks and outdoor activities have been very popular. A common thing that people say about the Europeans (from an American perspective) is that the pace of life is a bit slower here and people take a bit more time to enjoy their time, and as I will get into here in this entry, I have been noticing this to be true more and more. Last year when I was here I was constantly joking about how automatic doors take a bit longer to open than they do in the US (I was frequently gaining a very intimate view of what Dutch glass looks like), encouraging you to slow down and take a breath. This, I think is emblematic of the way life works here. Work is not everything, and there...

Well I made it to the end of my first week of classes. Not only did I survive, but I dare say I thrived. The first day of classes included a walking tour of campus during which I met four lovely ladies (hey guys) who I am happy to consider some new friends. It has been extremely exciting to see how in a masters program, not only are my professors actual geniuses (more on this later) but my peers are people that I can bounce ideas off of and learn a great deal from.  One class in particular has surprised me in this regard. My planning theory class is a philosophy-heavy course, which I am quite unaccustomed to and I can already tell will be one of the more intense courses I will take. My the time the first lecture even started we were expected to have read 80 pages of Marx, which should have set the tone for the course, but I will still taken aback by the level of intensity in the first lecture alone. I mentioned earlier that my professor is a genius, and let me tell you why I think ...

The night I just had. It is 4 am as I write this and I have only just gotten home. It started out with me meeting up with a friend I had made in the park, Mafalda the other night and her friend, Stam. We met in the park and of course it started to rain while we were hanging out there. So we got wet for a while and then eventually went to stand under the cover of a restaurant awning for a while. We stood, the three of us in this location for a while as the sun eventually set and the rain declined to let up. Our plans for the night were yet to be determined. We were debating between three options; one, to go to a university-facilitated start of term party, two to go to a club in the city (with a lower than normal entrance fee), or going out to the forest for a rave. You probably know which option we went with. There were twofold problems with the rave to begin with. One was that the location hadn't been released yet so we didn't know exactly where it would be, just that it was ...

Over the past week I have been participating in UU's (Utrecht University) international welcome week. The welcome week is designed to help us internationals get a feel for how the city works and to make new friends. Yesterday I had my favorite experience yet doing one of the activities. The activity was a beer and wine "tasting", where you go with five to ten other students, pick up a case of assorted beers, and assorted wines, and then go sit in the park and drink. I ended up losing my original group due to unforeseen circumstances (I was busy reading, lost track of time, and was subsequently too late to catch up with them) so I went to the beer store to see if I could find anyone else doing the same thing. Luckily I found a group of eight or nine people picking up their beer case and I tagged along. Little did I know I would be spending the next seven hours with these people.  When we arrived at the park, the first thing we did (at the insistence of the German guy in th...