Pass the Maalox

I'm feeling slightly ill as I'm writing this. Today, a group of us went to the coastal town of Volendam where fresh fish is the name of the game. As a seafood fan and having missed breakfast, I was very excited to stop at the first fish stand we came across. Having no idea what I was looking at, I asked the woman what I should get and she motioned to some plates of raw fish strips covered in chopped onions. A Dutch specialty, she said. Feeling like the guy from Bizarre Foods, but mainly just hungry, I downed them, skin and all. They really were pretty good but I doubted myself when a Dutch girl we were with looked at me and said, "that's disgusting."

Our next stop was a small local brewery for a tour. The guy who ran the place spoke little English so the tour was in Dutch. He did know enough to say "Nobody's perfect" when I told him where I was from. After a few minutes of praising Obama in broken English, he gave us the tour of his one-room brewery. Five minutes later, it was on to the samples. The beer was excellent but because he said I looked like Obama (yes, it happened again), he had me try some of his Dutch moonshine, a suprisingly good concoction. After thanking him for spreading the wealth, we headed back to the bus station, but not before I got some more fish, a decision I now realize was unwise.

Class has been an interesting experience but I've only had two of the four so far. I wasn't aware until the second meeting of my Intro to Public International Law class that its secondary title was "The U.S. Sucks: One Professor's Musings". The other class, Law and Technology, was fairly bizarre as the professor spent about a third of the class talking about people having sex with robots. Ah, Europe.


mmmm


Markermeer Bay, Volendam

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