Live from the Windy City

We've moved to Chicago.

This project has been in the works for quite a while and has kept me far too busy to post regularly for a while now. However, seeing as how I recently encouraged friends and family to start paying attention to this blog, it seems only appropriate to start writing again.

We'll be here for at least one year while my husband works at the University of Chicago. I'll be busy trying to find a way to combine full-time mama-hood (for now) with PhD writing and all the crafting and other things I love to do. It is going to be an interesting year.

Getting here has already been good fun. We sold our house and car in Haarlem, sold or stored all our household goods, and packed suitcases to move. Our first stop was three weeks in North Carolina. We spent most of the time recovering from the shock of our move and not enough time at all seeing friends (sorry!).

Last week we packed up a car and U-Haul trailer to drive to Chicago by way of a visit with wonderful friends in Kentucky. We arrived in a huge thunderstorm and have been busy installing ourselves in our furnished apartment in Hyde Park. Things are starting to quiet down a bit here and we're quite happy with things so far.

Now, if I can find the cable for getting the pictures off our camera - pictures next time!

Van Nelle Factory

One of my responsibilities at work is to visit students who are doing placements (internships). That means travelling all over the Randstad and sometimes further. Some of these students end up working in nifty buildings, like converted houses in the Amsterdam grachtengordel. Earlier this month, I went to Rotterdam and visited a student working in the old Van Nelle factory. I'm familiar with Van Nelle because I bought a second hand Van Nelle tin. They used to make coffee and tobacco.

The factory has been magnificently converted into work and event space. I was blown away by the beauty of the conversion. Details like pipes within the building were preserved. They haven't gone in and ripped out everything in order to install an office complex, instead the renovation preserves the massive windows, exposes the steel structure, and incorporates industrial looking design elements.


These types of projects seem to be more common here than in the parts of the US where I come from. Closer to my home, they have been working on converting the silos of an old sugar factory into what looks like office space for nearly five years. It looks like they´re done now. The silos are the tallest thing around and there are colored lights in the windows that can be seen from miles away. It´s quite a sight!

my secret city

St. Bavo and the Vleeshall, originally uploaded by erdapfelgal.

A long time ago (November 2008), I was tagged by myyear for my first ever meme: my secret city. Now, I'm finally getting around to it. I believe proper meme etiquette is to tag someone else... but to be honest I seem to have lost any readership I had, so I'll hold off on that for now and just work on getting some blogging done again!

Haarlem has been my city since July 2004 and it has been a delight to discover. One of Haarlem's biggest secrets is that it's next to the Kennemerduinen, a natural park area that's great for biking and walking. On the other side of them is Parnassia (which I posted about a while back), where you can stop for a drink or a meal. They've undergone a renovation in the past year and it's pretty fun for looking at inside, too.

Then there are the food secrets. The best burger in town is at Dikjers. Best place for a good beer and a cheap dinner is Bruxelles. Favorite lunch place and great name story would be de Overkant (no website, just good food!). The husband's favorite is Applause, which has a pretty interior and yummy pasta. I always order a soup and half order of pasta.

My happy little treasures include the Filmschuur, which is an independent movie theater. The Adriaans windmill, which is open for tours on Saturdays, has nifty models inside. From the top of the V&D downtown, you can see a great view of the city. The Schalm is a great thrift store and organization that helps people who've been out of work for a while. They've added a furniture workshop and sewing project in recent years. These folks are the source of almost all the English language fiction I've bought in the past five years. There's also the public library, which has a surprisingly big collection of English language books. Every spring and fall, the staatstuin near my house has a plant sale where they sell off extra plants from the botanical garden. They're a steal and they grow like crazy with very little attention. And last, but not least, the 300 bus, which is my direct connection to Schiphol!

Best Burger in Haarlem

With no baby in the house yet, we're killing time and looking for entertainment close to home. Sunday morning the sun was shining and it felt like the first cool day of fall. Although you won't catch me saying this often, it was a beautiful day to be outside in (North) Holland! What these days make me really want to do is go for a long bike ride, preferably through the national park to Parnassia, but that doesn't work out so well at 39 weeks pregnant, so we settled for lunch at Dijkers.

Dijkers is a little place in downtown Haarlem, just up a side street from the St. Bavo church. They used to be half the size and only serve lunch, but sometime last year, they added the adjoining building and started doing dinner as well. Inside, they've got a beautiful fireplace and a super modern interior. We, however, prefer to sit outside in the sun. You get the added entertainment of watching everyone lined up next door buying their sacks of fries. Not our favorite fries place, by the way, but that's for another post.

While I've tried a couple of other things on the menu - good salads and sandwiches - the truth is that Dijkers makes the best hamburgers in town. They're flavorful, juicy, and served up on a yummy crisp bun. The only potential down side is that the burger is all you get on your plate. A token salad or side (they don't do fries at Dijkers) would be nice, but in reality the burger is more than enough food, so no real complaints here. Given that I've done some recent reading and commenting on favorites, ordering my favorite feels better now than it used to. My natural inclination is to try more different things if possible, but favorites are ultra-satisfying. Knowing both what you want and what you're going to get are such good feelings that maybe we should take advantage of them more often. In the meantime, if you're in Haarlem or planning to visit - have a Dijkers burger!

House Weekend

This is our house. It's an old house, built just before 1910. We've been living here since May 2006. It's home now, and we enjoy it.

Unfortunately, any house needs work. This is especially true if you move in with almost exclusively borrowed/second hand/cast off furniture that you've bought in the "If we don't have a couch we'll have to sit on the floor" mode of shopping and would like to make it homey and nice. We've made good progress, but it's tough to find the time for planning and little projects that make a big difference. About a year ago, we introduced the House Weekend. We pick a weekend (usually three or four over as many months) and devote it to working on the house. We'll allow ourselves one evening out with friends, but otherwise turn down all invitations and make no plans to do anything other than work on the house. It sounds kind of boring, but it works.

Since it's been a while since we did any concentrated work on the house - something about getting married and a perfectly insane fall semester at work slowed us down - we started yesterday with a giant inventory. We walked through the house with a pad of paper and just wrote down everything we dream of doing in each room of the house. Now we've got a starting point for setting priorities and getting things done. Not such a bad system, really. Of course, my favorite was my comment about our kitchen. Everything goes at list writing time, so I said, "Rip it out and start over." I don't think that's going to make our final cut. I tried...