Mushrooms

Marcel got me addicted to Hugh Fearnley–Whittingstall's series, River Cottage. In this series, Hugh, a London cook, downsizes by buying a farm in Dorset. There he grows all his food and meat, supplemented with fish etc. from the ocean, wild picked edibles and game. In several episodes, he goes mushrooming with serious mushroom experts. One episode even involved hang gliding.

Inspired by Hugh, I took a trip to the Utrechtseheuvelrug with Effrosyni, Jasenko, Yulia and Jorn. Yulia turned out to be a mushroom expert, although she was very modest about her skills. The book we brought turned out to be totally useless, but we ended up picking out 3 types of mushrooms we thought were edible (thanks to Yulia). Mushroom hunting turned out to be a very exciting way to enjoy the outdoors.

Now they are molding in my fridge, before I got a chance to eat them...I will definitely go again.

Slacklining, Man on Wire

Yesterday I tried slacklining for the first time. Loucas became obsessed with it on a trip to Dortmund, and ended up buying one for himself. We made plans to make fish for dinner, but once the line was up between the two trees, our dinner plans quickly devolved to take-out anchovy pizza.

We strung the slackline between two trees in the park behind his apartment. Though it was initially hard to get on the line, I got the hang of it pretty quickly. We spent the next 2.5 hours practicing, with some happy interruption from some little girls who also wanted to try it out. My furthest record was to the midpoint of the trees. Heart banging in my chest, one would have thought that I was 500 m up in the air rather than a mere foot off the ground.

I'm definitely hooked. We ended our day by watching Man on Wire, a great documentary about Frenchman, Phillipe Petit, who fufilled his dream to walk between the Two Towers in NYC.

By the end of summer, my goal is to walk across my canal without falling into the water, or more importantly without impaling myself on a bike. More to come...