• Amuses

    Food for thought

    These first weeks, everything is different. My husband and I have a new routine. You must understand, he spends the same time in Nijmegen (where the university is), as I do, because he still drives me there. He spends some of that time in the various WiFi-enabled cafe’s at the campus, with the inevitable big book on big things to keep him company. But as he was born in Nijmegen he actually knows people there. Plus he takes an interest in historical places, and in the Netherlands, things do not get much more historical than Nijmegen. He is also a keen photographer. If your Dutch is any good, you might have a wonder over to his blog. Yesterday’s pictures are to be found here.

    So my husband is around somewhere in Nijmegen when I take my lectures. We meet up at the end. Now there is a challenge. I get lost on the campus due to my lack of genes for spatial orientation, but he is the opposite. He knows his way anywhere, and has no idea how people like myself manage to survive in the real word. However, I have a trick. Since we have this phone app by which we can tell where the other one is, I am no longer lost. Or not for very long.

    At end of a lecture day, if it is late, we grab a pizza and an alcohol-free beer at the Cultural Cafe. Like everywhere else on the campus, it is clean and friendly. No one looks at us twice, ancient as we are, and the pizza is great and cheap. On other lecture days we might be home earlier than expected and I raid the freezer for strategically created leftovers or failing that, eggs on toast. So that is two days per week when we don’t eat a home-cooked meal at a set table – quite a change. We manage 🙂

    Actually, husband is overjoyed. He has long maintained that it would be efficient to eat the same thing every day, or at least on any one weekday. In the way that his breakfast has been the same for the past 60 years: yogurt, muesli and dried fruit. Eh, that would be 60 years minus 3 weeks. When we first started to live together, I used to present him with a full romantic breakfast every day: orange juice, eggs, jams, croissants, butter, cheese, ♥, etc. After 3 weeks he asked me if I would mind him eating yogurt? Eh, of course. Back to now: he was already cooking me my favourite pasta every Friday: spaghetti puttanesca and salad; plus due to the lecture schedule his other cooking day was being taken over by fried eggs on toast. Cooked by me. Bliss! Predictability has finally arrived.