So you're sitting there wondering, "What do Ben and Ellen do on an average evening?" Are they building their very own windmill? Sitting a cute restaurant eating french fries with mayonnaise? Having coffee with Dutch royalty? Going to bars and drinking Amstel while chatting with the locals in fluent Dutch?

Well, no.

Here is what a Monday (or Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, etc) night looks like in the Morrison household.


We start off with a game of Skip Bo. If we're gettin' really crazy we have a glass of wine or beer or something.

Then, things go downhill. Ben gets a snack to go with his beer, let's say a handful of mushrooms, and then...
Aw, that's cute, they made a snowman out of the mushrooms...

Oh...

Oh my...

Well, that's kind of...

Delicious.

Yep, since we've moved to Europe we HAVE become more sophisticated. Really.

Zee treep to Paree!

Ah, Paris. How we love thee.

Let me start at the end, and then I'll go back to the beginning. Monday night, as we sat on our couch we both stared off into nothingness. "I want more crêpes," Ben said.

"I wish I had bought more pastries," I replied.

"And croque monsieurs."

"And baguettes."

"And crêpes."

"Pastries. Mmm."

I'd like to tell you that we snapped out of it and went on our merry way, but instead, we moped off to bed and then trudged wearily through Tuesday, Ben at work and me unpacking and cleaning. Tuesday night, I looked at Ben, "I should have bought more pastries..."

In short, we miss Paris. And we miss its food. We had a really good time there, even when we weren't eating. On Friday morning, Ben dropped the dogs off at the kennel (we like to refer to it as "doggie camp"), and then we walked with our suitcases to the train station. A few stops and a little more than four hours later, we stepped out of the darkness of the Paris metro into a bright and bustling Paris. Voilà, Paris!

After a brief stop at our hotel to drop off our stuff, we were off to see the sights, and boy, did we see them. All weekend, nonstop, we walked and walked, and hopped on the metro and then walked some more. We did the big touristy things - Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Champs Elysées, Jardin des Tuileries, Louvre, Notre Dame, Bastille. And then in the evenings we would return to Montmarte, where our hotel was, wander the streets, and find a nice café (or two) where we would sit and drink wine and watch all the other tourists wander the streets. Our favorite café was right on the Place du Tertre, a square near the Basilique Sacré Coeur where artists gather to paint, draw, sell stuff. It's totally touristy, but at the same time it's a very nice place to sit and drink wine and feel very frenchy and relaxed. It's also very nice to wander the short distance to Sacré Coeur, and look out over Paris as the sun is going down. Ahh, Pareeeee.

To give you all the details of everything would take much too long and be much too boring, so here are some of our highlights:

The Tour Eiffel!



Notre Dame!

Gargoyles at Notre Dame!



Us at a café!

Ben found a Starbucks! (I know, I know, we're in Paris and we end up at Starbucks. What can I say? Ben needed to buy a mug to add to his collection.)

Oh, and the food... The croque monsieur in the park, the quiche at a little cafe, the pain au chocolat by the Seine, the baguette from a boulangerie by Notre Dame, the tarte au chocolat in it's perfect little individually sized pastry box, the crêpes at 11:30 p.m. as we walked back to our hotel, the croissants for breakfast on a bench in Montmartre...

Oh, the food. We may always have Paris, but we won't always have warm ham and cheese crêpes and freshly baked croissants. For that, we'll have to go back.


*If you want to see more of our photos, we've got plenty. Let us know and we'll give you the link to our Snapfish album.

Valentine's Day in the Netherlands. What to do, what to do? We hadn't been out to any restaurants since we've been here. We hadn't really gone out much at all. So, we made reservations for dinner at a castle.

The castle, Kasteel Erenstein, is not far from our house. We had walked to it once with the dogs and noticed that it is now a hotel and restaurant, so we figured it might be a fun place to go eat. We got there last night at 7:00, parked the car, and walked across the bridge that goes over the moat (the moat!) and up to the restaurant.

From the minute the hostess took our coats, everything was perfect. We started with a glass of wine while when we sat down, which was really nice and helped dull the shock when the menus came and we discovered how much dinner in a castle goes for these days. We ended up ordering the special, a four course menu that sounded so good we barely even glanced at the other choices on the menu.

First, they brought out a plate with a small piece of smoked salmon rolled around some crème fraîche with a little dish of a saffron foam. Once we figured out which fork we were supposed to use, it was very nice. Next was our actual first course (the smoked salmon was just an "amuse bouche"). It was tuna on a bed of greens, a gratinée oyster, and a lemongrass mousse. Delicious. Our second course was sea bass with steamed spinach, langoustine, and a tiny exquisite cherry tomato that burst in our mouths. Amazing. Our main course, was veal with all sorts of stuff I couldn't even identify including something orangeish that was like a tiny bit of mashed potatoes with crunchy little somethings on top, and a fried ball of something on a bamboo spear that was balancing artfully across the plate. Absolutely incredible. So good I didn't realize I was eating brussel sprouts until Ben said something about them as he inspected something else on his plate and asked, "Are those turnips?". Hmm, they were turnips. There were bits of turnips and brussel sprouts on my plate (both of which I am not a fan of), and I had eaten them without realizing what they were because the food was just that good. So good. Incredible. Each course was better than the one before and it was all amazing. We expected a lot from dessert, a cake with a layer of chocolate mousse and a layer of vanilla rice, but it was merely "good". Luckily it was accompanied by a little bowl of coconut ice cream that tasted like heaven. Out of all the plates they brought out to us, not one went back with any bit of food on it.

Full and happy, we paid and walked out to the entrance where they had our coats waiting for us and then held the door open for us as we left our castle and crossed back over the moat. Needless to say, dinner in a castle definitely lived up to our expectations. And now we're headed off to Paris for the weekend. I don't know what we're going to do for Valentine's Day next year, but it will be hard to top this one.

Every day, Ben goes off to work, where he does IT stuff and NATO stuff and occasionally plays with remote controlled battle tanks. Back at the house, after he leaves for work in the morning, the dogs and I have a staring contest that usually results in them getting a walk. Okay, it ALWAYS results in a walk as I am not very good at resisting Bella's hypnotic voodoo eyes, not to mention her pouting and moping.

We start out from the house and wander in some direction. Our town is pretty small, so sometimes we make it to the next town and back. Sometimes we just walk around the town for a while. Other times, we turn and go past the train station and suddenly we've left the town. To our left, expanses of green field dotted with a few houses, and occasional paved paths that cut through the green and lead down to a lake.

These are some pictures from a typical walk.




And then some from a day when it snowed.



Not bad for our daily dog walk, huh?

Gosh, Ellen and Ben, what a big pile of chocolate bars you have!

Yes, we know. The ladybug is chocolate, too!

This weekend we went to Cologne, Germany to visit the Schokoladen Museum. Oh yes, a museum all about chocolate. It has the typical museum-y part, explaining things like cocoa production and the history of chocolate. And that's nice, I guess. But even cooler than that, it has a scaled down factory showing how the chocolate is actually made and formed into little bars, truffles, and stuff.



It was very neat.

And, also, there was a chocolate fountain!

With a woman standing there continuously dipping wafers into chocolate and giving them out to everyone. Very very neat.

The museum was very fun and educational and all that. And I do admit that I stared at all the machines mixing, dispensing, molding, sorting, and wrapping for quite a while. But we both agreed that the restaurant at the museum was more fun than the museum itself. The menu had, of course, about 50 kinds of chocolate cake (okay, maybe I'm exaggerating), but it also had a large selection of different kinds of hot chocolate. Ben had ordered a beer to drink with lunch, but when he saw the hot chocolate called "Spirit of the Aztecs", he changed his order. Spirit of the Aztecs is hot cocoa with rum, tequila, tabasco sauce, red pepper flakes, and possibly something else, but we can't remember. Sounds dangerous, yes? Ben, not being able to look danger in the face and walk away, had to have it. So we got that, a slab o'chocolate cake, and a pizza-like "tarte" that was really really delicious.



The Spirit of the Aztecs proved to be too potent for Ben's delicate tastebuds, so I took over the chocolate drinking duties and found it to be surprisingly delicious, at least until I got to the bottom of the glass and kept sucking up little bits of red pepper through the straw. That was a little icky. But the food was absolutely delicious, even the tarte which had not even a trace of chocolate on it.

My very favorite picture from the day is this one:

Because I look like the CEO of the Chocolate Museum, which is like one step away from being Queen of Chocolatopia.