Pesach and Paris

This week has been full of eating and cooking and eating and cleaning and eating and writing papers and eating and preparing for Paris. And eating.

Both of my seders were awesome!

There were about 10 people at my Monday seder (a few people were coming and going and stuff). We had my amazing food-processor-free charoset, and I made matzo ball soup. The soup was really good for my first try, but it was way better the next day! Next time I'm making it a day early! My friend Vivian brought dates with goat cheese, and Sarit made a salad, and Andrea brought the hard boiled eggs. We had all the items on the seder plate (with a beet filling in for the pesach and the addition of an orange, of course). Eliyahu's cup was a wine glass wrapped in foil. The seder plate was a round piece of cardboard wrapped in foil and decorated by yours truly. It was very cute! We even had gefilte fish. We did the entire seder, using the nice (brief) family haggada I scored at the Jewish museum. I made a real seder happen! I'm like a grownup or something!

Night two was possibly even more fun. Vivian and I went to our professor's house and met her husband and daughter and some friends. Her daughter is one year younger than Jake. She was trying to convince her parents to let her go to Berlin alone with a friend for the weekend. Problems parents only face in Europe I suppose... The house was really interesting. It's really old and has a lot of history. We brought radishes, parsley, nice kosher wine, and maple sugar candy. The company was awesome. There were two guys there from Amanda's program (the semester at Columbia, semester at Amsterdam international law thing). One of them is from Framingham, MA! He was a prosecutor in NY for several years. cool stuff. I also met a guy who makes harpsichords. And a guy who has a 15-month-old daughter and may be looking for a babysitter. :-) There was soooo much food and it was all really, really good! It was just awesome! Awesomeness all around!

I miraculously managed to get my paper written on time for Tuesday's class. Kosovo stuff. Very exciting. Not really. Maybe? I'm slowly getting my midterm grades. I kicked ass on some stuff, and did alright on others. They keep trying to tell us that a 7.5 is a very good grade but it just feels wrong! 7.5?? Isn't that supposed to be a C?

My Public International Law class is going to the Hague on April 19th to hear some of the proceedings for the Diallo case (Republic of Guinea v. Democratic Republic of the Congo). Very current stuff. All exciting-like! Plus I'm just stoked to be going to the Hague! And the effing ICJ! But yeah this case is really interesting because it's so heavily about an individual. The ICJ is only supposed to deal with states. In very recent history, they never would have taken this case. It could be a giant precedent. Whoa.

What else is exciting? There's a Dutch brand of cigarettes called Caballero. That's pretty cool. Cheese on matzah is not as good as cheese on dark bread. But it's pretty tasty.

We got an e-mail today saying that the Queen wants to meet 5 people from our program and asking us to write blurbs about ourselves if we're interested. I'm totally stoked, but then I realized it might be a very cruel April Fool's joke. I'm going to be soooo pissed if it is. Who does that?? I have realized I hate April Fool's day and here's why: There are two kinds of jokes on April Fool's Day. Either the joke is really lame and you know right away and it's just annoying, or the joke is really mean! It has been a very, very long time since I got April Foolsed and actually found it amusing. In fact, I can't remember a good April Fool's prank. Not one. And I like to think I have a good sense of humor.

On Tuesday I'm participating in a role play experiment for the Center for Conflict Studies at UvA. "The Amsterdam Centre for Conflict Studies is focused on understanding conflict dynamics and providing training to policy makers. Currently our research primarily consists of fieldwork, and in order to focus on specific elements of conflict dynamics we want to expand our research methodology and include the analyses of somewhat ‘controlled’ or ‘systematic’ role play exercises. The first role play exercise is coming up soon." Good stuff. There's gunna be free pizza AND drinks.

But you know what's before all of that???



Gotta go pack!

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Right after I posted this, I got nailed with an April Fools joke that was actually entertaining and well done. But still! I generally hate this "holiday." :-b