Breda, Netherlands

I know, it's been a while since I've posted.

I just got back from a business trip to Breda. These pictures are all from the internet. I've yet to find anything there inspiring enough for me to pull out my own camera.

This is the hotel I stay at, the Golden Tulip Keyser. It's fairly decent.
If you walk out of the picture above, to the left, just a 2-3 minute walk away is the city center, or Grote Market. The picture below is one of the streets leading into the center of the market. This is generally where we go each night for dinner because the entire center is surrounded by restaurants.

Even at night, at the right time of year, the place is filled with people sitting out and eating, drinking or smoking. Eating in the Netherlands is quite an experience, and far from my favorite thing to do. I don't think I have yet to eat anything I truly enjoyed. It's actually hard to explain, but generally it's either very plain food or strange combinations of foods. They eat lots of bread cheese and cold cuts. (I know, that doesn't sound bad, but there's more to it than that.) In the cafeteria my co-worker and I were trying to figure out what some little boxes were that looked similar to small raisin boxes. Someone came along and explained - it was a box of chocolate shavings and the Dutch eat them on bread. ?? I used them in my yogurt.

When eating in the Netherlands you also have to plan for at least 3 hours minimum. No joke. The servers are not working for tips and so you're lucky if they come to take your order sooner than 30 minutes after you sat down and good luck catching them after they brought your food. And you have to ask for the check, they won't offer it. The first night we were there we literally asked for the check at the same time they brought us our food. The waitress did look at us a bit funny.

One of the evenings on this trip my European counterpart, Elly Bisschops, took us out to dinner ( I was with 4 other US colleagues) at what was a very nice restaurant. Imagine this picky eater's surprise when after Elly spoke to the waiter for a minute she then announced that dinner was going to be a 4 course meal and it was going to be a 'surprise'. !!!!? I was very nervous. The first course was something similar to prosciutto wrapped around something and a dab of some kind of creamy stuff on top. It was pretty good but was all of about 3 bites worth of food. Second course was a small piece of fish (which I don't eat) and another 3 bites worth of risotto. The risotto was ok with me but it was black in color. After some discussion I discovered the black was squid ink. !!!!? It's a good thing I ate most of it before I knew that. Third course turned out to be rabbit legs. !!!!? It did taste like chicken and wasn't too bad, but was slightly tough. Fourth course was dessert - finally something that I recognized! And it really did take about 30 minutes or so between each course. We were all polite but I could tell there was at least a couple others who were as dismayed as I was. Oh well. On the way home on the plane I also got served a very strange dish of venison that seemed to be chopped up and made into a little loaf, which I got a slice of. I tried one bite and had had enough. So, in this trip I ate squid ink, rabbit and venison, all very new experiences for me and all things I never want to try again.

Ok, that's probably more than you ever wanted to know about my meals. But it's all that was interesting enough about the trip to tell. Oh, I did also get a sore throat the day I left on the trip and it progressed into a full blown head cold while I was there. That was pretty miserable and made for an even better flight home.