Tea time?

I've lived in the Netherlands for 7 weeks, and have yet to speak to any Dutch people who didn't work in a shop. As mentioned (in Norwegian), we have 10 nationalities in the office, but Dutch isn't among them. Today Jacki, our lovely English secretary made tea to celebrate that Poland is joining ESA as a full member state. So to celebrate Poland in the Netherlands we had scones with clotted cream and jam. Yeah.

Yesterday I got to see these guys spin their thesis in the Large Diameter Centrifuge (catchy name!). The experiment was very cool, though seeing the LDC do 15.5 g was admittedly a little bit less exciting than we'd hoped. Which is probably all for the best, but still.

My mum has been here for the last week, so we've also done some serious tourism, canal sightseeing cruise and the works. Leiden is BEAUTIFUL. She got the last weekend of nice weather (probably), we went to the beach in 28 degrees on Sunday, but this week autumn has arrived. Still not (that) much rain, but colder, I wore gloves while cycling to work today. For the past few days everyone in the office has been telling me and Cristina, the new girls, lovely stories of how nice the Dutch winters are -- 6 months of sideways rain and gale winds. It'll be great.