Timmy, JJ, and I went to the temple on Friday evening. It was Timmy’s first time. I’m so grateful for these two great kids!

I’m a little late on this post, but I wanted to finish up about our trip to Germany.

After Berlin we drove to Frieberg, where our church has a temple. Fun fact, it is the only temple ever built behind the iron curtain! Unfortunately, we forgot to take pictures of the temple. But, I did get a great prototypical German forest picture!

I did a session at the temple in the afternoon while Linda and the kids went to a castle and rock museum.

In the evening, Linda and JJ did baptisms. The next morning we drove home.

Turns out, it’s hard to bike in the snow.

We only got an inch or two, but I was sliding all over the place. I fell once. My backpack fell off. I didn’t realize it for 2 blocks until I slipped again.

Eventually I decided today was a day to work from home and turned around.

I am pretty far behind on my posts, but there is one I can’t delay.

I am frequently impressed at how kind and considerate my colleagues here at Tilburg are. One just stopped by to tell me that he will be at a conference in the US this weekend and asked if there was anything that we were craving from the US that he could pick up and bring back for us.

Little things like that mean a lot.

In a previous post I talked about Nutri Scores. I thought I had them all figured out.

Then we went to Germany. I stopped at a grocery store to buy some things for our lunch. I went to buy some lunch meat. They had scores of “D” and “E”. I realize that German meats have a lot of fat and salt, but I was surprised to see an E given that a stick of margarine is a D. Granted, it was on some meat that was labeled “sausage ham”, but I still have a hard time believing that it is worse for me than eating a plain stick of butter. At least the ham has some protein in it.

After doing some searching, I found that Nutri Score calculations are based on the amount of good stuff (fruit, vegetables, nuts, fiber, protein) minus the amount of bad stuff (sugar, salt, saturated fats, calories). Each category has its own point system (e.g., 1 gram of salt is not equivalent to 1 gram of vegetables).

However, for oil, butter, etc. are a little bit different. Specifically, they don’t care about absolute saturated fat levels but rather percent of total fat. Furthermore, calories and saturated fat have point caps such that unsalted butter/margarine will never be an E. It needs the added salt (or sugar) to push it into the E category.

Thus, ham with an E score is not actually worse for you than unsalted margarine with a D score. The ham is less bad on the fat and calories dimensions, but the fact that it has salt gets it pushed into the E category.

The Netherlands is almost an entirely cashless country. For example, I can neither deposit nor withdraw cash at my bank, and the lunchroom on campus doesn’t take cash.

Most people don’t carry around cash at all. Street vendors, parking meters, etc. all accept the local bank transfer system here, and they often accept credit cards too.

I expected the same in Germany. Nope. A lot of places only accept cash.

I’ve seen World War II and Cold War memorials before, but it’s a little different seeing it from Germany.

Picture today after rubble cleared away.

Tuesday night we had dinner in Hamburg. We just started walking from our hotel until we found a restaurant that looked good.

The first one we found was a Chinese buffet. It was the first all-you-can-eat buffet we’ve seen since leaving the US, so we jumped at it. It was a great meal, but not exactly German 🙂

The next night we were in a small hotel in a small town on the outskirts of Berlin. We didn’t have a lot of nearby restaurants, but we found a great Italian place.

American, living in the Netherlands, on vacation in Germany, eating dinner in an Italian restaurant, after having eaten in a Chinese restaurant the night before. Multicultural trip!

The owner spoke Italian and German, but not English. However, there was a regular customer there who was excited to have guests, so she translated for us.

It was some of the best Italian food I have ever had!

The kids have this week off of school, and we’re all feeling better, so we decided to drive through Germany.

As a quick tangent, we had originally planned on flying to Italy. However, every time I went to book flights, something felt off about it. I just kept putting it off. Good thing too as we were too sick to fly last week!

Anyway, today we drove to Hamburg. We did a fun river cruise and then got some hamburgers in Hamburg.

We thought it would be fun to get hamburgers in Hamburg (even though the modern hamburger was not invented in Hamburg). The kids wanted us to go to McDonalds, but Linda insisted on something more authentic.

So, we got them from a local shop at the pier. The hamburgers were so fresh, they microwaved them right in front of us! Good thing I got the bratwurst 😉

New Years is a pretty big deal in the Netherlands. We were still recovering from the flu (we’d been taking turns being sick for about 3 weeks at that point; most of us were feeling better, but Linda and I thought that staying up till midnight wouldn’t be a good idea), so we didn’t stay up very late.

We ate oliebollen, which is a traditional New Year’s treat here. It’s like a donut, but no hole in the middle, and the center is a bit doughy. We also had some home-made milkshake, and we called it a night pretty early.

However, we were woken up at midnight by fireworks! Lots and lots of them! I’ve never seen so many fireworks. They went on pretty continuously for about a half hour. Lots of fun!