A meandering miscellany

Last night was an emotional one for I said a final 'goodbye' to my old corridor. Actually, that's slightly over-dramatic as it's still less than ten metres away and relatively easy to get to. So perhaps better to see it as a farewell. I had promised that I would bake a cake for the event, so I racked my brain for something a little different and came up with a chocolate cake (not different) covered with baked meringue (different). It was a seat of the pants exercise, and the meringue was slightly marshmallowey, but it was a success and seeing how it all got eaten, I'm rather sad I didn't bake another one. So here's the final picture of the people (other than me) who constituted corridor 153-163 for the first semester:


Both Antje and Sabrina are leaving this week for pastures new, but the first lot of University mail for the people who'll be arriving on Friday has already come, and it looks like the corridor will be repopulated by Spanish and Portuguese, so it's going to have quite an Iberian flavour!

I was sitting on the train today for the first time in a while, and while watching the scenery passing by I was intrigued by the fact that every so often the train line becomes bordered by these translucent barriers. I've seen these before on highways, usually on bridges, but I hadn't really noticed them on the railway before. I had always assumed they were crash protection, but trains usually stay on the rails. Were they there to stop people jumping off? Or perhaps even to punish (rather severely) those who did? Or maybe even to stop people jumping on? Lacking a person sitting opposite to ask, and not being that intrigued at the time I had to wait to find out, but now I know. They're acoustic barriers to keep the noise in. What a fantastic idea. People always moan about the noise from the road and rail, so why not build a barrier to reflect it back? Seems like a pretty sensible idea to me, which is probably why I've never seen them in the UK.

This discovery got me thinking further about sound in the Netherlands generally and I've realised that this is a very musical country. Take church bells. In the UK, they are certainly tuneful, but here, they're positively musical and they often have little interludes between the quarter-hours. Even the Dutch language sounds musical from a non-speaker's perspective. I'd sing "The hills are alive with the sound of music", but there aren't any hills here to be alive, although I hope you get the point.

Something else that's also very Dutch are pancakes. English pancakes are generally rather thin and to be honest, a little wimpy. French crepes are light and delicate. American pancakes are puffy. Dutch pancakes on the other hand are essentially an omelette - with added flour. Yum. Nonetheless, this evening, armed with a couple of left over egg yolks (see meringue above), I decided to try and make my own Dutch Pannekoeken. Surprisingly it actually worked out quite well, although it wasn't quite as bright yellow as the real thing. The real highlight though was dessert. I finally made the blueberry and pear sponge from a few nights ago. When it came out of the oven it was one of those 'I really should take a picture' moments, but temptation got the better of me and now there's nothing to take a photo of. Alas, but I still have plenty of pears and blueberries, so I wonder how best to rectify that one...?

Given the content of recent posts I reckon that I should transform this into a food blog, especially seeing as tomorrow night I get to sample the Dutch speciality Boerenkool, which, politely, seems to resemble a green mush. Perhaps a food blog isn't such a good idea.