Sentimentality

It is October 4 - World Animal Day.

Of course this makes me think of my own animal, our pet cat Manchego, who has been a member of our little family since 2009.



But it makes me think of other things, too.

A couple of weeks ago Dutch researchers presented the first lab-grown hamburger to the world. For years I have been pessimistic, or even downright depressed, about the way we deal with animals as a source of food, but this left me hopeful. Like it or not, this appears to be where we are heading and I, for one, welcome it with great enthusiasm. Moreover, I do not appear to be alone in this - Andras Forgacs agrees with me. When I showed this to my students, though, they could not have been more repulsed by the idea. I guess there is still a long way to go.

I have been a vegetarian for more than two years now, so I no longer crave meat or fish. Last week Jochem and I were in The Hague to have dinner at Bacco Perbacco to cash in my birthday gift to Jochem from April and we made a quick stop at The Vegetarian Butcher to spend a small fortune on fake animal products. It turns out that we find their fish salads too 'fishy'. I guess we've turned into 'those people'.

Darcy Cosper once wrote that "principles don't mean anything if you abandon them when they become inconvenient or uncomfortable". Truth is, though, that while I do not miss meat or fish, it can be tiring to be a person of principle all the time. Why travel to Morocco if there is nothing to eat there but lamb? But then I remember one of my favorite excerpts from Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals about sentimentality:

"The valuing of emotions over reality. Sentimentality is widely considered out of touch, weak. Very often, those who express concern about (or even an interest in) the conditions in which farmed animals are raised are disregarded as sentimentalists. But it's worth taking a step back to ask who is the sentimentalist and who is the realist.

Is caring to know about the treatment of farmed animals a confrontation with the facts about the animals and ourselves or an avoidance of them? Is arguing that a sentiment of compassion should be given greater value than a cheaper burger (or having a burger at all) an expression of emotion and impulse or an engagement with reality and our moral intuitions?

Two friends are ordering lunch. One says, 'I'm in the mood for a burger,' and orders it. The other says, 'I'm in the mood for a burger,' but remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and order something else.

Who is the sentimentalist?"

Manchego and I will be home alone today, since Jochem is going out with some old colleagues. For myself I am making a Roman pasta dish for dinner called cacio e pepe - spaghetti with two of my all-time favorite ingredients: Italian cheeses and lots of crushed black pepper. Manchego will be having white fish for dinner. He is a cat, after all.

I wish you a Happy World Animal Day! 

Summer of Love

There are times in life when everything is exactly as it should be. It is as if the planets have aligned and everything is working in your favor. That is how I will remember the summer of 2013.

I had a wonderful summer. Amazing things happened during those months. I survived my first year as a teacher. I got a promotion. My cousin got married and a few weeks later his wife gave birth to a baby boy. Spanish relatives and American friends flew in to see me. My best friend eloped. I spent a week in silence at a yoga retreat in the Algarve in southern Portugal.

Perhaps most worth mentioning, however, was my own wedding day. Jochem and I got married in the midst of this summer on a warm and sunny day, in the middle of a historic vegetable garden, surrounded by family, friends and vegetarian food, being showered with joy and happiness.


Vorden, The Netherlands

Afterwards we spent two weeks eating our way around Italy.


Amalfi, Italy

Everything was just right.

It has not been easy getting back into the swing of things after such a great summer, but as the dust is settling down and life is getting back to normal, I have some amazing things to look forward to. I hope that I will make the time to tell you about it.

Pan de Cristal

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.

I’ve been thinking about my life – about what makes me happy, what makes me unhappy, but most of all, I’ve been thinking about how to change it so I won’t be so unhappy anymore.

Talking about this topic is hard for me, because I know that in the grand scheme of things, my life is pretty great. As soon as I speak my mind, in fact, as soon as I put these words to paper, I feel as if I’ve been injected with a heavy dose of guilt for uttering these very words, for even feeling them in the first place. The guilt quickly courses through my body with every heartbeat, seeming to grow more and more as it spreads, until I feel so silly for feeling this way, that I quickly start apologizing and taking it all back, claiming that my life is, indeed, pretty great, that I have no reason for feeling like this, and then I continue on as if nothing ever happened. This goes well for a while until I inevitably become overwhelmed with my life once more and come crashing down into a million little pieces again. Poor Jochem has had to help me put myself together far too many times during the last year.

I’ve kept up this self-destructive routine ever since we came back from our trip in June last year. But not anymore. I keep thinking that there will be time to stand still, observe, take notice and do something, but of course this will never happen unless I make the time. I work in education for heaven’s sake – rule number one in teaching school is that your TO DO list will never be done and that it is therefore of the utmost importance to your survival that you learn to take your eyes off of it, look the other way, and pretend it isn’t there. At least some of the time. On Sunday, for example.

I, however, have not given myself this luxury. We came back from our trip and I gave myself no more than three days to acclimatize to life back home before I started working again. I promptly got myself a job and an apartment and wasted no time getting back into my exhausting obsessive compulsive routines. When I started my job (my very first, real, grown-up teaching job) it took over my life completely. Being a perfectionist, my work became my whole world.

My friend Aimee, whom I met in 2011 in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia, is a teacher herself from Birmingham. She told me that her first year working as a teacher was like being in a roller coaster that just wouldn’t stop. That sounds about right. I feel blessed that I at least like my job and that I feel confident that I’ve become quite good at it. That has never been the problem. The problem is that with my job taking up so much of my time, there is just not enough room for a whole lot else.

I became so overwhelmed one day that I actually sat down and made a list of all the things occupying my life on any given day. The list was endless. It was filled with work, of course, but also with appointments, household chores, yoga routines, social engagements, 30-minute swimming work-outs, things to read and watch and listen to, money to budget, places and faces to meet and see, and don’t even get me started on the long list of social media apps that was checked every single day.

It just got to be too much. I was losing out on sleep, on time for myself, on time with Jochem, on attention paid to my cat, on the things that I actually like to do because I like to do them – instead, all my time was spent on things that I believed I had to do. Because that’s what’s been wrong, I’ve come to realize – the premise that I HAVE TO do these things. My life was so busy, so filled to the brim with stuff to do, that everything became a blur. Everything became an errand. Everything was a chore.

That’s no way to live. Especially when you’re constantly reminding yourself of a simpler time when all you had was your fiancé, a backpack, lots of money in your back account and all the freedom in the world. It’s unhealthy not to live in the present moment – to always be looking back at the past or to look forward to the future. I became unhealthy.

However, I continued to live my life this way for almost a year – constantly on the verge of another emotional breakdown, trying to find some kind of balance between doing all that I thought I was supposed to do and wishing for a life I no longer had and from which I felt farther removed than ever. And, of course, I kept all of this to myself. Jochem was a powerless witness to my madwoman ways.

But then something amazing happened. My parents, my brother, his girlfriend, Jochem and I went on a road trip to Spain to pick up my wedding dress.

The joy that this trip gave me, after not having been on a trip for so long, cannot be exaggerated. Even though it was just a short week among relatives in surprisingly cold and rainy Spain, a country where I’ve been dozens of times already, it lit me up. I felt like a junkie who’s finally managed to score some dope and is beyond relief - as the pain subsides and the itchiness recedes and some light is shone into the dark corners of his mind, he is at last able to breathe deeply, look around, think clearly and just be. No worry, no pain, no nothing. Until the effect wears off, of course.

During that week in Spain a couple of wonderful things happened. I finally got that wedding dress, for one.

Jochem and I went on a road trip of our own through Don Quixote country to Toledo.

My brother asked his girlfriend to marry him. My friends even flew over from The Netherlands as a surprise, nearly giving me a heart attack, in order to celebrate a small pre-Bachelorette Party. There was sun and sea and good food and wine.

Surrounded by so much love and happiness, I came to feel that I had to do something about this crazy state of mine, something that would stick. Clearly, the idea of working hard at life until the next holiday would come along, was not working for me anymore. I needed to do something to relieve the pressure right now. I had finally grown sick and tired of being such a burden to myself and others.

So, I made another list. A list with all the things that gave me joy and happiness. How shocked was I to see that this list was significantly smaller than my daily TO DO list. No wonder I was so miserable half the time – I had rearranged my life in such a way that it was filled with errands.

Then I tried to make another list of how to change this status quo. This is a list that I am still working on and, boy, it is by far the most difficult list to make. My instinct, whenever I feel overwhelmed, is to run away. Take all the money from my bank account that I’ve been saving for the wedding, buy a plane ticket to Polynesia, and just hide for a couple of weeks. Of course, this is hardly practical. Not to mention the fact that it’s not a real solution – when I eventually return, all of my problems and issues and neuroses will be right where I left them (as I’ve already been painfully made aware of once before).

But what to do then? I find it so difficult to answer this question. For example, I spend so much time each day cleaning up our apartment, which I detest, but to just stop doing this would not bring me any relief. I hate clutter and I hate dirt and just letting it be would make me restless and cranky and toxic. Luckily I have an amazing fiancé who buys me electric vacuum cleaners that go through the house twice a day, but still, that’s only part of the problem.

So, I’ve started trying to make some real changes in my life by, like, not rearranging the sheets when Jochem has made the bed or by not checking to see whether my shampoo is still in the right place whenever Jochem has used the shower. If you knew anything about how I run this household (which more closely resembles a military base than an actual home where people are allowed to live in) or if you’ve ever had the misfortune of coming along on one of my highly organized camping trips (ladies: thank you for not killing me), you would know that, for me, this is nothing short of radical. It takes all of my willpower not to intervene in these matters. Although I feel that I’m literally fighting for my own happiness (and it pains me to have to write this so dramatically, but there you have it), I also know that I’m not there yet, and that it won’t be easy, and that I will have to keep taking notice of my wants and needs forever, and stop feeling bad about having wants and needs in the first place. But I’m trying.

I’ve also done some other, more fun, things. I’ve bought some stuff that I didn’t need. I’ve booked a yoga holiday in southern Portugal, which will be my first solo vacation in five years, dedicated entirely to yoga, meditation, vegetarian food and the art of leisure. I’ve been seriously looking into horseback riding lessons, something which I’ve dismissed until now, solely because of the costs, even though I’ve loved it for as long as I can remember. I’ve thrown away a big pile of newspapers and magazines that have been staring at me for months (“READ ME!”) and have started reading books again. I’ve also been reading a lot of Molly Wizenberg’s food blog Orangette to reconnect with my love of cooking. She’s actually the reason why I’ve felt motivated to start writing again and if this means that my posts suddenly look a lot like hers, I apologize, for it is unintentional.

On that note, I would like to end this long post with my recipe (or I should say: our recipe) for pan de cristal.

Pan de cristal is something that I believe my brother discovered on a whim one day while he and his fiancé were visiting our relatives in Spain. It’s kind of become a food legend in my family and every time any of us are in Spain, our main goal appears to be to eat as much pan de cristal as possible. I first tasted it while we were in Spain to pick up my wedding dress and it is, indeed, worthy of its status in our family. I had it three times in Spain and have made a successful replica back home. Pan de cristal is nothing special though – it’s basically a crispy sandwich. Then again, isn’t the best food often the most basic execution of arranging a few simple ingredients in perfect harmony?

Pan de cristal

Ingredients:

- 1 loaf of ciabatta bread
- 1 ripe tomato (big, fat and juicy), preferably a vine tomato
- good-quality extra virgin olive oil
- 150 grams of good-quality Manchego cheese, the famous Spanish sheep’s cheese

[NOTE: The original recipe calls for jamón (a fatty Spanish ham) instead of Manchego. As a vegetarian I don’t eat ham, of course, but, in my opinion, it’s better with Manchego even if you do eat meat. Spanish ham can be delicious (I do remember), but has a very dominant flavor. I think that the ham would overshadow the subtlety of the crispy bread with its soft flavors of ripe tomato and olive oil. My family, however, could not disagree with me more. I guess it’s a matter of taste (or principle).]

Cooking instructions:

* Preheat the oven.
* Divide the loaf of ciabatta bread into 3 equal parts and then halve each part to get 6 slices.
* Heat the loaf of ciabatta bread according to instructions. Because you’ve already divided and halved the bread, the slices will come out nice and crispy. You will get the best results if you set your oven to the hot-air or convection mark and if you place the slices on their ‘back’, so with the inside up.
* Halve the tomato.
* Cut your cheese into thick slices.
* Take the bread slices out of the oven and rub them with the tomato, the same way you would rub a piece of garlic onto a crostini, but be quite rough – it should look kind of messy (in front of guests just call it ‘rustic’).
* Pour some olive oil on top of the slices. You can be quite generous, but your bread should not be soaking in olive oil.
* Put your cheese slices on top of the tomato and olive oil infused ciabatta.
* Serve while still warm.

This recipe serves 2 slices each to 3 people, unless you’re like Jochem and I, in which case you can probably squeeze in that extra slice as well.

Enjoy and, if you’re anything like me, try not to worry about the bread crumbs until after you’ve eaten the whole thing.

Ameland, The Netherlands

I can count the number of times I've been away from home since June on the fingers of one hand. You might be thinking: so what? Well, to you this might be normal, but to me it is pretty much the epitome of sucky.

Since we came back from our world trip we've spent 3 days with my Spanish relatives in Cambrils on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. We've also spent 3 days at Jochem's father's holiday home in northern France. And we visited Jochem's mother, who lives in Germany, three times. That's it. Now, call me spoiled (and, for the record, I do know that when it comes to traveling, I am the very definition of spoiled), but visiting one's family abroad does not a trip make. I need a backpack, a flight that's at least 6 hours long and a sifnificant change in weather patterns to fulfill my travel needs. But for the last 8 months there's been none of that.

Of course this all has to do with THE WEDDING. In case you didn't know this yet, weddings are expensive. You should all save yourselves the trouble and just go down to city hall. Perhaps you're wondering why I'm not following my own advice? Well, let me explain. Despite considering myself to be quite the bitter cynic, I actually am one of those women who's always dreamed about their wedding day. I used to read wedding magazines for fun for years (of course now I can't stand them). And although I'm certainly not the kind of bride who worries about things like center pieces and color combinations, there are certain things that I want to have a certain way. Once we decided to have a wedding, we wanted the wedding to feel like ours. We thought it might be nice to enjoy ourselves on our own wedding day. While you can always cut costs and budget money well, certain things were non-negotiable for us, like the date (Saturday), the season (summer) and the food (worthy of only the most critical foodies). And this costs money. Money which I am happy to provide, were it not that with a wedding there is very real deadline that is fastly approaching (less than 5 months as we speak!) and this means that one no longer has the possibility to travel wherever one feels like whenever one wants to.

This has been on my mind lately. I always feel spoiled talking about it but I'm not sure people understand how much I need to travel. That's right - I NEED it.

Anyway, this is why Jochem and I decided to plan a little trip to Ameland. Although not abroad, Ameland is certainly a world away from where we come from. Ameland is one of the 4 Frisian Islands in the Wadden Sea at the very northern tip of The Netherlands. I had never been there, even though my grandfather was from Terschelling. We rented a little holiday home at the most western town on the island called Hollum. For 4 days we walked on the beach and rode horses through the countryside. It was nice - quiet, tranquil and dark (no lights other than the lighthouse). I look forward to visiting the other islands some day, but with the rest of the world calling out to me as well, who knows when I'll get to it?

Epilogue

Last July a good friend of mine came to vist me at our new home. She told me how much she had enjoyed our travel stories on my blog while we were away, but that what was missing, was a kind of epilogue, in which I elaborated on life post-world trip. Looks like I'm finally getting to it.

I haven't written anything on here since June. 8 months have passed since we came back from South America via Great Britain. So much has happened since then, yet so little. On the one hand, writing about life back home seemed dull and pointless after having written about Inca trails, Polynesian sculpture and Cambodian contemporary history for 9 months. Mostly, though, I've been busy. Very busy. Extremely busy if you take into account that for the better part of last year I did very little and had close to no responsibilities. Being this busy simply made it impossible for me to sit down long enough to write a blog about what I was doing.

I've basically been working non-stop since we got back. We flew back to The Netherlands on Saturday and I was back at work at my part-time job on Tuesday. In between invigilating English exams, I was applying for teaching jobs in the Utrecht area. Having failed to find 'my passion in life' while backpacking around the world, I decided to put the whole search for my dream job on hold for now and try to get a job as an English teacher, since I have a degree for that and all. For a little while I thought about going back to grad school to pursue another Master's degree (in Translation Theory, no less!), but eventually decided that I didn't feel like saving up for another one of my long-term mega projects. Finally making some money, as opposed to piling on more debt, seemed like the more sensible thing to do.

I thought that, considering the shortage of teachers, my MA in English Linguistics and my teaching degree, it shouldn't be too hard to find a job. But while Jochem was back at his old job after just a week, I was still looking. Despite the shortage of teachers and my credentials, I was only invited to 2 job interviews. One job I lost to a more experienced teacher - the other I was offered on the spot. I took it.

I now teach Business English to first-year Business School students at a university of applied sciences in Utrecht. I love my job. It requires a lot of hard work, but I find that I actually like doing it. So, I am not so much stressed out about my job - I just have very little time left for other things. This is what a typical work day of mine looks like:

I wake up at 5.30 AM. I do yoga, get ready and sit down for breakfast with Jochem at 6.30. I leave the house at 7. I get to work at 8 and check my e-mail before grabbing my material to head for my first class at 8.30. The fall and winter term are the busiest here at school, so in between classes I prepare lessons, grade presentations and correct exercises. I usually don't leave the premises until 6 PM. I get home at 7 PM, have dinner with Jochem and get ready for bed at 8.30. I do some more yoga and am fast asleep by 9.30. The next day I do it all again. In this madness only the precious moments with Jochem and the yoga appear to keep me sane.

It wasn't until the Christmas break that I felt like I could finally slow down. The spring and summer term will be easier, with fewer classes and fewer students. I teach the same course every time, which may seem boring, but I really enjoy being able to keep improving the same lessons over and over again. Since I've spent 6 months preparing these lessons twice already, the rest of the academic year comes down to fine-tuning.

I work part-time, so I have some time for myself to finish up on work and to keep the house. I try to go swimming once a week. I look forward to being able to spend more time just reading, watching TV and listening to podcasts.

Another thing that has added to my overall sense of being busy is my social calendar. To be honest, this was almost as much of a shock to the system as being busy at work. Don't get me wrong - I love being able to see family and friends again on a regular basis, but it sure takes up a lot of my already-very-limited free time. I also had to get re-used to planning my calendar weeks, sometimes months, in advance - understandable, yet strange and surprisingly annoying after doing whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, for 9 months. I fully participate in this method, yet condemn it at the same time. Sometimes I reminisce about the times where I didn't have to plan at all, other than making sure to be on time for the next plane to the next amazing destination.

I've also had to get used to only seeing Jochem during breakfast and dinner. For 9 months we were joined at the hip - being apart for 12 hours every day has been quite the adjustment.

After we both secured jobs, we quickly found an apartment in Amersfoort because a friend knew a colleague who knew a friend who was moving out. We live in suburbia now, and it's not even the pretty white picket fence kind of suburbia, but the high-rise apartment building kind. Luckily, Amersfoort is much smaller than Utrecht, so it only takes us a few minutes to get to the city center by bike. It has medieval architecture, canals and an amazing dining scene, minus the mega construction projects that Utrecht has been, and will be, enduring. Still, Wittevrouwen beats Liendert in a heart beat. Yet, we're not thinking about moving - I hate moving and we live in a spaceous, light and airy apartment on the top floor with a view over the city. Buying a house is even farther from the brain - mortgages are for grown-up people ready to settle down, not for us. Although we did go to one actual viewing of a house for sale, we quickly decided against it when we realized how much it would affect our ability to spend all of our money on eating out and traveling. Our apartment is close to the bus stop from which a bus takes me straight to work in 30 minutes while I watch the news on my iPhone. Our home is perfect for now.

One final thing that's been on my mind lately is our wedding. Now, I have come to find that planning your actual wedding is a lot less fun than daydreaming about your potential wedding. Since we want a small and simple wedding, there isn't even that much real planning involved. And then I think that maybe I'm forgetting about a bunch of things. And then I think that maybe I just don't have that bridezilla gene in me after all (who knew?!). Either way, most of the planning is done and I'm sure it'll all be just fine. We're getting married at a historic vegetable garden on July 13. By that time, I will have survived my first year at my first real teaching job with 5 weeks of freedom in sight. All my family and friends will be there, surrounded by beautiful vegetarian food, and afterwards we're going on a little culinary adventure in Italy for 2 weeks. To be honest, I might be more excited about the honeymoon than I am about the wedding. We're making a big sacrifice in order to make our wedding happen our way - no travel abroad for a whole year. It's for a good cause, of course. But it also sucks a little bit. It puts one in the awkward position of kind of resenting one's own wedding for being the cause of something that really isn't the wedding's fault - weddings are thought up by 2 incredibly naive people in love and then they take on a life of their own. So call me spoiled, but despite our beautiful wedding plans, I miss the backpackers' lifestyle. Because although many things have changed, one thing hasn't: my unquenchable thirst to travel. As one of my students put it: I have the opposite of being homesick - I am sick for the world.