This week's doings

This week I have continued to get the apartment in order now that we have some furniture! I've been cleaning and organizing, and Wednesday night Rene and I put all the stuff we don't currently need up in our attic! We live on the top floor of a house-like building, and we have access to the whole attic! So the bedroom is no longer covered with clutter- we have our bed and desk in there now, with all our clothes folded up in piles in the weird corner. We still need to get things to put together our walk-in closet, and I think that's on the list of things to do this weekend.

On Wednesday I decided that I wanted to mince up some garlic to store in the refrigerator for whenever I need it. I had three bulbs of garlic already, but I thought, as long as I'm going to go through all this trouble I might as well do a whole bunch! So I went to the store and bought a whole string of garlic- like 8-10 bulbs! I didn't realize just HOW MUCH garlic that is, but hours later after peeling and squishing them up in my messy garlic press, the whole apartment and I reeked of garlic and my fingers were on FIRE! And now I have an entire spaghetti jar full of minced garlic in my fridge! After laughing hard my mom said that the good thing is that I won't have to mince up garlic for another 5-10 years! And all this was done by someone who has a husband who HATES garlic!

Yesterday Rosie and I scoured Leiden to look for a dress for me to wear to the Dutch wedding reception that is in Rene's hometown next Saturday. However, most stores didn't have any suitable dresses, and the ones that had options were all too expensive. It was weird! Like, don't Dutch women wear dresses for anything? Rene suggested I go to The Hague next week to see if I can find anything there. If I already owned something suitable to wear I wouldn't worry about this, but I don't, and I have tried to keep my eyes open for something but apparently Leiden doesn't sell dresses.

I start my Dutch language course on Monday!! I'm so excited! I have been learning a bit here and there (the book reading extravaganza in Belgium really helped!), but I still get frustrated sometimes with not knowing the language. For example, I was making a trifle on Tuesday to bring to our Life Group and I had to look up all the words in the directions. I felt so silly as I realized that they were words like "stir" and "at least."

That's all for now! I keep thinking about weird things that I come across here, and how I need to tell you all about them, but when I start writing I forget what they are! I will have to write them down as they come to me and share them with you! Some things are REALLY WEIRD here!