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Two weeks ago I had my (almost) last workshop at the Kushi Institute – a 4-day workshop called Art of Cooking. I already attended Art of Cooking in October, but that was focused on healing and immunity strengthening dishes. This time the topic was very different – festive cooking for family and friends, that means much more sophisticated, indulgent dishes which you can make for parties or any kinds of more special events. It was nice to again see some of my friends from the Art of Life levels or from other smaller workshops.

The workshop was fun, as always, but the atmosphere was not totally joyful as it could be. On Friday evening we had a lecture from the Institute director who revealed to us that his son-in-law and the Institute´s  master chef Lander is in the hospital, in a very serious state, after a brain stroke It was a shock for all of us who were used to regularly seeing this young (32 years old!) cheerful fellow in the restaurant kitchen and occasionally also teaching at our practical cooking workshops. He always made a lot of funny jokes and was like a sunshine everywhere he was present. The next day he had to surrender to his injury…He left behind his young wife, our do-in (exercise) teacher (the same age as me, by the way) and a little daughter. On Wednesday after the workshop me and many other macrobiotic friends attended the memorial service in Driehuis, near the seaside. It was amazing to see so many people coming even from afar to say their last goodbye…I think it really says something about the relationship people had with this great man.

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I have to note that I am not totally done with my studies at the Institute though – I still plan to finish my third level of Art of Life, but that is in February, still quite far ahead… Right now the big task of studying my macrobiotic books lies in front of me, I feel I need to prepare myself very well for the next step in my studies…

In the last weeks I spent a lot of time walking Henry, my doggie client that I mentioned last time, two or three times a week.  He´s a real cutie, though he really doesn´t like small children…Walking with him was good for getting to know new areas in town, such as the surroundings of Nieuwmarkt and Waterlooplein. From next week I have a break from Henry though, as his owners will be working from home and then it is Christmas holidays when they have vacation…hopefully I will be able to walk him again after the new year. But I have two new doggie clients, two beautiful shepherd crossbreeds of my Polish facebook friend Julia. Both of the dogs are rescues from Polish shelters, one is a young Belgian shepherd/whippet mix called Ares and the other is an older and calmer  German shepherd/husky mix called Bosfor. They live with their owners in Amsterdam-Oost (east part of town), in the quarter of Watergraafsmeer, almost an hour biking from our place. It is a thorough exercise for me as well, to go there and back by bike, and walk these energetic dogs for an hour! But I really like walking them, because they are very playful and cuddly, and a big advantage is that they don´t need to be on a leash, as the area there is pretty safe – really a dog heaven! There are several football fields where you can go throw a ball to the dogs, as long as nobody is playing there at the moment…

The weather was for a long time reeeeally rainy, reeeeally windy and pretty damn cold. We also had a couple of days with numerous hailstorms. The temperatures are again close to zero, especially at night…Well, nothing surprising at this time of the year, I wonder whether we will get some snow…Better snow than all the rain we were getting.

Some time ago we again visited Nardo´s family´s friend Colette, who gave us several valuable items when we moved in in summer (such as a table, cupboard and a lot of kitchenware), we had dinner at her place and had a look at her photographs, as she is now a photography student. Nardo once had a big photo session with her in the polder and she made some really good shots of him

Yesterday we spent half of the day in the Tropenmuseum, which is a very large, old, beautiful anthropological museum. There are permanent exhibitions about the world cultures, but we only had time to visit the temporary exhibitions – there was a really interesting (though arguably a bit grim..) exhibition about death and its perception in different cultures of the past and present (plus some contemporary art connected to this topic), it was a really large exhibition with a lot of items and accompanying texts. We also saw Man and Environment (an exhibition about the interaction of humans and the environments of the tropical rain forest, savannah, coasts and the city) and a small but nice exhibition about a photographer who portrayed the Dutch East Indies as an idyllic tropical paradise…

In the eve Nardo organized his (very belated ) birthday party at ´t Sluisje, our favourite local café at the Nieuwendammerdijk, it was really cozy there, with all the christmas lights! There came some of Nar´s ex-flatmates and also former classmates, we had nice chats…and nice beers…almost until midnight. Too bad there was just 7 of us in total, though Nar invited about 16 people…

And one last exciting thing : my friend from the studies, Sonya, lent us her portable oven, so we now have a beautiful big oven where we can set time and temperature!! Our previous ultrasmall oven was really a bit of a pain because it only had a timer of 15 minutes and no temperature regulation so I ended up burning a lot of stuff. Well, now we can bake as much as we want, yay!

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