November

How's your November been? Mine has been busy-good, but also coming increasingly to terms with inevitable winter onset, which is always a struggle.

Anyway...

Alex says this might be the best visual diary I've ever done. It's a fairly accurate depiction of my ever-developing dance skills. My dance teacher very kindly said that my freestyling is getting better, by which she means I now alternate between three different moves, rather than just two.

I've been practising drawing horrible faces.

Spectre was pretty great, if you're into that kind of thing, and can temporarily suspend your sense of political correctness.

Just do it guys. You'll never look back.

Some super tasty Japanese style experiments. That daikon and cucumber relish. A+++

Still never know what to do with a cauliflower though.

Alex asked me to buy long bread, but apparently we differ on the definition of 'long' in the context of bread.

Now that we've finished playing through Sherlock, the Railway Street Irregulars have rebranded as the Railway Research Unit, and we're taking on Pandemic Legacy. So far, so much saving the world. In Justin's absence on the other side of the world, we have created him as a playable character, so he's there in spirit.

And then me and Alex went to Amsterdam! We travelled via train and it was great, we even managed to actually find something vegan to eat in Brussels train station, which was pretty unexpected given that it's normally a barren wasteland for vegans. We travelled on the day of the Paris bombings though, which was pretty unsettling.

On our first day in Amsterdam we had a range of experiences, which were probably about 60% not much fun, and yet somehow I'd consider the day about 90% successful. We were staying with friends about half an hour by train outside central Amsterdam, and they mentioned that at a train station rather excitingly called 'Science Park', there were some cool rotoscopes of famous scientists embedded in the pavement, so we decided to get off there and take a look, only to find a mostly barren, windswept university campus, devoid of anything even vaguely fun. But that was okay, we enjoyed the walk and then a walk through a nice park and then a tram into central Amsterdam (regular readers will know how excited I am about trams). We suffered from a lot of fairly obnoxious tourists, who apparently thought it was entirely acceptable to point and take photos of someone with unconventional gender identity. It's worth stating that absolutely no Dutch people were anything other than lovely to us... it was all tourists, mostly groups of young men. It seemed to me — walking through the red light district and past all the weed cafes — that to these people, Alex was just another object to be pointed at and photographed, rather than a person to be respected and treated kindly. Anyway. We found a great (but weird) Caribbean/Japanese vegan cafe for lunch, where we had some amazingly filling plates of food, before heading out of the centre of the city as fast as we could... We ended up spending much of our afternoon wandering through a deserted industrial estate in the rain, in search of a 3D printed house... Which somehow managed to tread the line between 'fun' and 'bleak' perfectly.

The next day we travelled out to Haarlem to visit our lovely friend Lara. It was a day of lots of wonderful things, including LITERALLY THE BEST CHIPS I'VE EVER HAD. I cannot overstate how amazing those chips were. I didn't even know it was possible for chips to be that good.

On our last day in Amsterdam, our lovely hosts Scott and Susan took us on a much better tour of Amsterdam, including museums, unusual macrobiotic vegan lunch, and the much-lauded olliebollen/appleflappen stand.

So much love for Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and our very kind hosts.

On the day we travelled home, we got to go and visit the Naarden star fort. This is a fairly terrible drawing, but it's quite a marvellous man-made geographic feature. 

Got this very appropriate teabag tag during a cup of tea with a friend.

Round two of Pandemic legacy, great pie, first time we failed, second time we succeeded. I think this is going to get pretty challenging pretty quickly.

Some days are like that.

TFW when your friend is like 'hey wanna come over for some brunch tomorrow' and you're like 'sure' and you get there and she's made savoury avocado pancakes with spinach, roasted cherry tomatoes, grilled mushrooms, avocado and tamari seeds... And then there are sweet banana pancakes with raspberries, blueberries, bananas, syrup and sugared roasted nuts... And then there are banana, peanut butter and cacao smoothies. And everything's vegan. Lou's the best.

Our internet is broken and I am WAY too upset about this. Currently hiding at Wes and George's house (who are heroes) making use of their super-fast broadband. It looks like whatever the problem is, it may require an engineer coming out, which is very upsetting. I have lost all ability to be productive/content without broadband, and I faintly disgust myself.

Onwards into December, in which I can hopefully get into the Christmas spirit and not be too much filled with hate. I did manage to not post any of the November entries in which I did nothing but complain about the cold though, so that's a start, right?