Kyria's journal

Last week I was home with the flu, and this week I am returning to a nearly empty building. No students, most of my coworkers are on holiday. In short, it's summer at the university!. This allows me to catch up with certain tasks and then get some preparation done for my next semester of classes. Plus I am teaching a workshop 'bellydance during pregnancy' on Sunday the 31th to two ladies and it's the first time that I am teaching it to non bellydancers. I need to go over my material and add stuff. Ideally, when the home studio is done, I'd be able to offer this workshop and maybe short courses on a regular base. It would be interesting to reach mostly non-bellydancers. I will do my best to make them go 'I really like to keep on dancing, this is so much fun!'.

Eliza is a bit bothered by the heat (it's between 25-30 degrees celcius). She has trouble sleeping, I ended up taking her sleeping bag off and putting her in her bed covered in a loosely woven cotton cloth. She then promptly slept between 23.45-05.45. Huzzah! We are slowly getting closer to her sleeping through the night. She has some mosquito bites that look really uncomfortable, Eduard is making screens for the windows to keep mosquito's out. I fervently hate mosquito's (who doesn't) and I have a hard time falling asleep if there's still something in the dark buzzing around.

Health wise I am trying to cut down on snacks. Due to breastfeeding, I have been snacking a lot in the past eight months and it is a habit that has to stop. I haven't gained weight because the extra energy is going into making milk, but it is unhealthy for my body plus Eliza is drinking less and will sooner or later stop drinking altogether. So far, so good: it's been roughly one and a half week and it is doable. I am still eating cookies or chocolate, but I stop at one portion. As compensation I eat more vegetables and fruit during the day to keep me feeling full. After a couple of days, my body started to send me hunger signals at mealtimes again. It is good to feel this again, instead of eating all the time and not feeling much difference between before and after eating.

Eduard is teaching a private class in hunting horn to a man who works with biological produce. Instead of paying in cash, he pays with whatever is available that week. Yesterday we ate garden beans, he brought some biological apple/pear juice and I've experimented with beets. Eduard would love to try and go all organic, with the meat being provided from the hunt and the vegetables and fruit from our kitchen garden. That's not really an option as we don't spend enough time on both activities to create enough to sustain us. But this option with receiving biological vegetables and fruit plus Eduard going hunting once a week and bringing home the geese is a nice middle way. I can now identify five different types of geese plus I am getting more and more creative with vegetables and fruit that are uncommon in the super market. It is fun to work with food in this way.

We started to clear out the garden in anticipation of planning permission. We have a stack of wood that Eduard moved to the other side of the garden and on Monday night we lighted a campfire to burn the smaller twigs and branches plus wood that is unsuitable for burning inside. Eliza went to sleep around 21.30 so we had an hour of sitting outside, roasting marshmallows, singing campfire songs and huddling on a woolen blanket. Noushka was a bit weirded out but ended up huddling with us so it was all very cosy and nice. As we're not going on holiday, we're going to make the most of our house and garden while we can.

This has been a hard week, partly because I work hard all day and spend the nights partying with my friends. My life is just sooooo hard, you know? And when I say party, I mean that my intermediate students had a get together with couscous, salads and tea on Tuesday where they presented me with presents to thank me for being their teacher. Awwwwww!!! I'll post a picture of the bicycle bags they gave me to replace the old run down bags I have now when I have them installed.

Wednesday was FaKyMa. We did an hour of having dinner and catching up, and two hours of practicing Khaleegy, melaya leff, our Enchanted Gardens and our drum solo choreography. For someone who feels like she isn't doing much with dance these days, this week looks pretty full with dance activities.

Thursday night I travelled to a small town near Arnhem with Annelies, one of my intermediate student whos is also a friend. For my birthday she gave me an Arabic cooking workshop. A small Arabic looking women in her forties welcomed us into her spacious professional kitchen. the kitchen seamlessly flowed into a lounge area with rugs, pillows and the swirly shiny trays that are so common in the Middle-East. The group consisted out of ten people, mostly middle aged women. Two guys: Hans, husband to Marianne who looked sweet and quiet, and Jeroen, a 2.07 m tall twenty something boy who came with his controlfreak loudmouth mother.

The teacher was fara, who emigrated to the Netherlands from Iraq twenty years ago with her family. She had been in catering ever since and recently added the workshops as an extra mean of income. She is a no-nonsense tiny women, muttering to herself and being everywhere at once in the kitchen.

We made six dishes in total with the group, Annelies and I were in charge of the salad. We finished early so we jumped into doing stuff for the baklava too, because OMG baklava! I haven't gotten the recipy sheets yet but it was all delicious. There was a tajine dish with eight vegetables and lamb, chicken with olives, the potato olive salad,  bulgur (type of Turkish cooked wheat), lentil soup, baklava and minced meat rolled up in slices of eggplant with tomato sauce.

It was suprisingly easy to make these dishes, I think everything was done in about two hours. The soup and salad are quick and easy to make, or to prepare in advance. We also received a masterclass on What Makes Baklava Delicious. Turns out that cheap baklava is made with low quality nuts and too much sirup, increasing the weight exponentially with the syrup so they can charge more. Baklava is like the English word for cookie: there are many types and styles of baklava, some with nuts, others without. We made baklava with the stringy dough, fileld with cream and mozzarella and topped with nuts and ate it while it was still warm. it was absolutely breathtaking, not too sweet but a perfect mix between crunchy and sweet with the taste of rosewater in the background.

I highly recommend taking a workshop to learn more about Arabic food, as I have previous not gotten further then making coucous salad, couscous with vegetables and chicken, and bread with baba ganoush/hummus. The tricks that I learned where that you have to find a decent Arabic super market and get a good source for the herbmix and you are all set. For the baklava, I can get all the ingredients from the shop next door* so I might try it next time I want to make a desert.

Oh, and did not disclose the fact that I was a bellydancer during the worksop. busy controlfreak mother refered to bellydancing in a joking fashion several times during the night, at which point I averted my eyes and laughed along. Didn't feel like it was the right time and place.

*I live in a street filled with Turkish supermarkets and kebab shops. I live in bellydancer heaven

This weekend was family weekend. Saturday the women of my mothers side of the family did a workshop 'dancing through feelings' which was fun. very basic moves, but every dance had a different feel to it. A little bit to goddess dance for me at times, but fun nevertheless. Afterwards we had a typical family meeting with the men, sitting around chatting and (ofcourse) eating. My grandmother from my fathers side wants us to eat at parties because that's 'gezellig' (see footnote). With my mother's family it's the other way around: being around them is so much fun that you keep on eating little bites without realizing how much you had. The food was made by an indonesian lady who is a friend of the family and who made the most delicous saté EVER! tender meat, tasted like it was roasted over an open fire and with pieces of onion inbetween. We want to do a workshop together about preparing Indonesian food this year, after all, it's in our roots :) Spending more time with my family is one of the things I want to do this year. I grew up with birthday parties, family meetings and sleepovers all the time. I didn't spend much time with them in the past five years but having so many 50th birthdays to celebrate last year made it clear to me that my family won't be around forever. My nieces and nephews are adults now, and every member of my family does something that's fun and unique. I could spend hours listening to the stories they have to tell.

Oh, the TNT guys knocked on my door to deliver my kick-ass bellydance swords!!
these are the ones
So I'm putting my old sword on sale, and start practicing with these. They're really heavy but so much cooler then the swords you can get in the Netherlands. It had an extra customs bill but overall the price is very good.


Sunday's dinner with my father went well. We got to meet his new girlfriend whom I had a really good conversation with about theatre and literature. I got a bonus from my grandmother that went into my 'savings for Egypt' fund and I didn't even felt guilty about being a less then perfect granddaughter/daughter and still getting money.

*note: 'gezelligheid' appears to be a typical Dutch expression, unfortunatly less well known then 'apartheid'. We like to huddle together and play old Dutch boardgames, or just hang out and chat. It's about feeling at home no matter where you are, emjoying the company. A mixture of fun, cosy, and comfortable and good old Gouda cheese..