Dutch Language Lesson 101

Posted on 9 June 2009 by Mimi

I bought a carton of vanille vla (pronounced as ‘fla’) in Amsterdam, thinking it was vanilla-flavoured milk. So when I opened the carton and poured the vla into my cup, I was shocked to see a thick yellowish substance pour out slowly.

“Has the milk gone bad?” I wondered.

I took a whiff of the stuff and I was puzzled because it smelled wonderful. Very vanilla-y. So I took a small sip (if you can sip a substance slightly thicker than yogurt). It tasted all right. That’s when I knew vla is not milk.

vanille vla

Photo from FriescheVlag.nl

I found out later on that vla is custard :P

The photo here is from FriescheVlag.nl (that’s Frisian Flag in English) and would have helped me somewhat because of the bowl illustration. But the particular brand that I bought only had a cow, I think. So it could have been milk, if I were to depend on the packaging design.

So the next time I wanted to buy milk, I carefully looked at the label to check if it was vla or melk. The bottle said karne melk, 0% vet. Okay, some progress here. Melk = milk. 0% vet = 0% fat. Right?

karne melk

Wrong! Karne melk turned out to be this thin, slightly sourish milk drink. It’s said to be the milk that’s left behind after all the butter’s been churned out. It tasted a bit like plain lassi (yogurt drink) and was quite pleasant. But it still wasn’t milk.

Dutch language learned the hard way. But you can be sure I’ll never forget melk, karne melk and vla ever again!

Categories: Travel | Tags: , | 8 Comments

Conversations With MyEldest

Posted on 8 June 2009 by Mimi

Conversation 1:
Inside the car. I was driving, he was in the backseat. It’s amazing what you can get when you have one-on-one time with your kids, even for just a few minutes each day.

MyEldest: Mama, I’m not sure what I’d like to be when I grow up…
Me: Why? Don’t you want to be an astronaut anymore? (He’s always dreamed of being one.)
MyEldest: I don’t know. I just thought of doing something that can be of service to the community…

MyEldest

What I get when I tell MyEldest to pose ‘properly’. Photo taken at Tangkuban Parahu, Bandung, March 2009.

Conversation 2:
At home. I bought some chocolates and toffees from Dubai Duty-Free last May and was ‘taste-testing’ a little bit of each type.

MyEldest: Uh, Mama…Make sure you don’t exceed your daily calorie intake [limit].

MyEldest

What I get when I ask MyEldest to pose HIS way. Photo taken at Taman Safari Indonesia, Bandung, March 2009.

MyEldest will turn 11 in two months’ time. In two years’ time, I’m actually going to have a teenager already! *gulp*

Categories: Children | Tags: | 13 Comments

“The Best Camera Is The One With You”

Posted on 6 June 2009 by Mimi

“Take 100 pictures with your iPhone. Or your Samsung phone. Or your point and shoot. Whatever camera is the closest to you right this minute. The best camera is the one that’s with you.”

- Chase Jarvis, commercial photographer

chili peppers

Feeling inspired by this statement, I took this photo at the fresh produce section of Tesco Hypermarket this morning, ignoring the curious looks of other shoppers. Photo taken using my Nokia N82 phone, landscape mode, flash turned off, auto white balance. No editing other than addition of this site’s URL and resizing for the web.

So this weekend, I urge you to go out, see the world with a fresh, new insight. And shoot photos with the best camera — the one that is with you. Blog about your experience, linking back to this post. Let’s wow the world with what we can do with our phones, point-and-shoot’s, DSLR’s and everything else in between!

Enjoy your weekend everyone!

Categories: Photography | Tags: | 7 Comments

Gifts From Amsterdam (And A Giveaway At The End)

Posted on 5 June 2009 by Mimi

In the Philippines, it is customary for someone who travels to bring back little gifts called pasalubong to friends and family back home. Pasalubong is usually something that’s indigenous to the country/place visited by the traveler and does not have to be expensive. It can be food or clothing (t-shirts being a favourite among Filipinos) or souvenir items, like key chains or fridge magnets. Or it can just be anything that can be found in that foreign land which is not available back home (chocolates, potato chips, cookies, sweets, etc).

The Malays have a similar practice of giving such gifts, which they call buah tangan (buah = fruit, tangan = hand, and I have no idea how the term came about).

Considering how often I go overseas (about twice a month!), I don’t usually buy pasalubong anymore. Otherwise, I’d go broke. The only exception would be if the place I’m visiting has something really, really cheap in that place (but which costs a lot back home) or something that I’d really, really like to share with my family or friends, such as stroopwafels, which I’ve written about in two past posts…

stroopwafels

I’m crazy about them. I don’t know why. Perhaps because eating them, warmed by my cup of coffee or tea, transports me back to the nippy cold weather of the Netherlands…

Prices of stroopwafels range from €1 (if you buy them from supermarkets, like Albert Heijn) to €2.50 (as I’ve seen in a Shell station along the motorway from Rotterdam heading towards Belgium). A tin of these babies costs €5 on board KLM international flights. They’d have to be hand-carried though, because you’d want them to remain intact. And because of their weight, I couldn’t buy as much as I wanted to.

Then there’s the very important matter of chocolate sprinkles a.k.a. hagelslag…

 hagelslag selection

There are 8 small packs inside the box, with three different types: pure chocolate (Puur), milk chocolate (Melk), and the sugar sprinkles (Vruchten Hagel).

How to eat them? Simple. Just take a piece of bread, slather some butter on it, sprinkle the hagelslag on top, take a bite, close  your eyes and groan with delight.

Read more »

Categories: Rojak | Tags: | 23 Comments

My 15 Minutes of Fame

Posted on 3 June 2009 by Mimi

The moment I landed in Amsterdam Monday last week, the first text message I got was from my mom, informing me that my blog’s been featured in a local newspaper. I knew the article was coming out anytime but I didn’t know when exactly. How ironic for it to be published on the very first day of my Netherlands/Belgium trip.

newspaper clipping

And just as I had no idea when the article was to be published, neither did I know what was going to be mentioned there. Thankfully, they got most of the facts correct except for two minor details:-

1) The article stated that I’ve been living in Malaysia for some six years now. Actually, 2009 is my 16th year here.

2) The article wrote about my future plans “to give away some prizes in celebration of my first blogoversary…maybe next year.” Err…my first blogoversary has come and gone (2nd of February, 2009). But I do hope I can have the time to prepare something when my second blogoversary comes around.

No big deal, no harm done. As a matter of fact, my 15 minutes of fame has come and gone. I guess that’s why they call it “15 minutes of fame” ;)

P.S. Watch out for the small giveaway in my next post!

Categories: Rojak | Tags: | 17 Comments