foreign cuisine

since my last post in leiden, i have been to england and scotland and the weather has been absolutely perfect! i am trying to experience each culture to a higher degree. in order to do that, i have been experimenting with the local cuisine. in holland, i ate poffertjes (mini pancake type things), pannekoeken (dutch pancakes that are really thin and have different stuff in them like bacon and cheese), and the delicious traditional dishes that gert and monique made for us - mashed potatoes with cabbage type stuff in it, sausage, and a vegetable dish. in amsterdam, we had a heineken. i also ate a bite of herring. for those who dont know what herring is, its a fish with its head cut off and sliced in half length-wise.

it actually wasnt bad tasting, i just couldnt get over the mental barrier of eating raw fish, holding its tail, and dangling it over my mouth to take a chomp. 

in england, i ate crumpets with nutella, went to a tea room and had tea with milk like the british do, i tried nikkis fish and chips, and had yorkshire pudding. 

the haggis is the one that looks like a veggie burger

in scotland (nikki and i went to edinburgh for the day), we asked the waitress what a scottish person would traditionally order for breakfast and she suggested a plate with bacon, pita bread, an egg, toast, sausage, baked beans, a tomato, and something called haggis. she described the haggis as a mixture of meat and oats and spices so we decided to get that. it wasnt our favorite meal and we didnt love the taste of the haggis so we each only ate about half. we also had some scottish whiskey which wasnt a favorite either. the next day when we were telling the girls in england what we ate, we discovered what the "meat" portion of the haggis consisted of: sheeps heart, lungs, and liver which is traditionally simmered in a sheeps stomach. we thought she was kidding but she wasnt... she wasnt.