A bit chilly

Cold cold cold cold cold!!!!! We do not seem to be able to get used to the NZ building style. In NL, almost every house has insulated double brick walls, double glazing and central heating. Here, almost every house has a wooden frame with thin walls attached to them, very thin insulation (if any) and single glazing. No central heating either, because gas is not available here. Just an electric heater here and there. The single electric heater in our student room is attached to a timer of 15 minutes, after which it shuts off automatically. When the temperature outside equals 13 degrees Celsius (which it did yesterday, and today as well), the temperature inside is not much higher. To think that we didn’t even had to go through winter here yet… I know, we are wusses like you wouldn’t believe, but it surely needs a big portion of adaptation for us. Maybe next year we will be hardened. Well, if we don’t hop into bed with the electric blanket on all the time, that is…

Today there’s a bank holiday called Labour day. The whole country has a day off, except the store personnel. On radio and TV we are swamped with ads that today of all days there are fantastic discounts, so don’t hesitate to spend your well-earned free day rushing through stores. Maybe we will, our electric blanket couldn’t stand the cold anymore so it broke yesterday evening. By the way, did you know that when a bank holiday would be on a weekend day that it gets shifted to the next Monday? Never again Christmas on Saturday and Sunday, because the days off will just be shifted to Monday and Tuesday! Nice eh! (In Holland you just lose the days off when bank holidays are in the weekend)

We keep on discovering culinary oddities over here. Crumbed chicken schnitzel made from chicken thigh (never seen that in Holland before, there they are always made with chicken breast fillet)??? It looked nice anyway, so we tried it. Normally we fry chicken schnitzel in a non-stick pan without any fat, to keep the calories down. After some time in the pan loads of fat started dripping from the schnitzels. Where did that come from??? As we discovered during dinner, the skin hadn’t been removed, it had been crumbed so it didn’t become crispy but stayed very gooey. Cutting fat off meat isn’t really a widespread habit here :-)