Cape Cod Recap

Joint post written by Mikaela and Carolyn on Monday, August 10th (but wasn't published due to planes and exhaustion and maybe a little bit of laziness):

Hello friends! It’s Mikaela and Carolyn again, checking in before another awesome vacation with the Prestowitz grandparents. This year, we’re vacationing in Maui which, we agree, is not a bad place to spend the end of our summer. As we write this, we’re flying somewhere far above the Pacific Ocean. We likely won’t land for another several hours, so in the meantime we’ll leave you with a quick recap of our summer so far. J

In early June, Mikaela finally got to try summer skiing up at Mount Hood, Oregon under the instruction of her Sugar Bowl coaches. After enduring a six am wake up, a broken flip-flop, and a ten-hour van drive, she finally reached the famous glacier. Mikaela proceeded to have blast with the rest of her teammates (so much so that she didn’t take any pictures. Oops.) Five fun-filled days later, she returned home smiling, sore, and with a large pile of laundry. She’s crossing her fingers that she gets to go again next year!

In the meantime, Carolyn was busy goofing off at UNR soccer camp with all her soccer teammates. Carolyn played soccer all day with her closest friends under the guidance of the university women’s soccer team. They played scrimmages together, worked on drills, and had a mini match of world cup. Carolyn spent her nights in the college dorm rooms, her days at the college stadium, and every second having fun (once again, no pictures. Sorry. Heh.) All in all, Carolyn improved her soccer skills while having fun with her best friends.

Then, in mid July, the entire family waved hello to the east coast and our relatives on Mom’s side of the family. This time, we got pictures (although still not enough)!

                                                  First stop: Cabot's Ice Cream!

Cousin Leia digs into her giant sundae, while Mikaela prefers to strategize her plan of attack.

In the meantime, Carolyn digs right in! (Mom mostly just takes pictures and giggles at the green mint ice cream topping.)

To counteract all that sugar, the next day we helped Lola out in her garden and had loads of fun picking all of her homegrown vegetables.

Mikaela holds up the tomato harvest before adding them to the harvest basket.

Carolyn proudly holds up the day's harvest.

The next day, we drove down to Cape Cod to stay in Tita Krishna's gorgeous beach house (sadly, no pictures) where we mostly just hung out at the beach for the next several days (again, no pictures :( ). We do, however, have pictures of our visit to the nearby carnival.

Mikaela and Carolyn wait for their ride to start, while Mom tries (somewhat unsuccessfully) to wave to the camera as she passes.

We also visited our Grady relatives (Papa's sister Betty and her family) and splashed around in the lake behind their house.

From left to right: (Top Row) Uncle Mike Grady, Dad, Papa, Cousin Donovan, Cousin Savannah, Mikaela, Carolyn, Cousin Leia (Bottom Row) Aunt Betty Grady, Lola, Mom. (This would be a good family picture, if it weren't sans Uncle David, who was busy being the actual photographer.)

Mom always talks about getting candy at the 1856 General Store and mixing it with her ice cream, so we replicated the experience (in case you wondering, it was delicious).

We spent the next few days hanging around the house and the backyard beach again, taking a little bit of time to brush up on our musical skills.

Leia sings, while Savannah and Mikaela provide instrumental on guitar and ukulele, respectively.

One night, we treated ourselves to famous Cape Cod lobsters, completed with hard cider for the adults and lemonades for the kids, and followed up with delicious local-made ice cream.

After our fun filled week in the Cape, we eventually had to head back to Boston. We parted ways with Uncle David and Donovan as they start their drive back to Maine, while Tita Julie and Savannah stayed in Boston for Savannah's hockey tournament. In the meantime Lola recruited Mom, Carolyn, Mikaela, and Leia to help out Iskwelahang Pilipino (Boston's Philippine cultural school) make and sell food at the annual Lowell arts festival. As quickly as we could make food, people were eating it! There was a line stretching from our booth all the way around the corner, and we had to work hard just to keep up. One of the most popular foods was Lumpia, so Lola put us to work mixing up batches of filling. 

The gang gets ready to do some serious cooking.

While we were busy mixing Lumpia filling, others had plenty to do grilling a variety of skewed meats, which were also quite popular.

One of our favorite foods at the festival was Turon, a traditional Filipino desert made up of a plantain, a wrapper, and lots of sugar.

By the end of the day, we were tired, hungry, and smelled like food, but it was absolutely awesome. (Side note: If anyone ever finds themselves needing enough Lumpia to feed a small army, let us know. We memorized it.)

Anyway, those are all the pictures we have right now. If we receive any more pictures from our various relatives we'll be sure to post them, but in the meantime we're going to get ready for our imminent vacation in Hawai'i. We'll try and post soon!

Try, try again

So let's try this again. I wrote a beautiful post (I swear!) about our first day in Brussels, but lost it due to some technical difficulties having to do with the fingers and the brain. Miss M says I'm not a real blogger until that happens. So here we go...

Post for Tuesday, June 17.

After 18 hours of travel, we arrived in Brussels to reunite with the girls! I'm a little fuzzy on the details since we didn't get a lot of sleep on the plane. Basically, we came back to the flat, cleaned up a bit, then went out to old Brussels.

We first went to the Grand Place, or central square surrounded by the City's old Town Hall (Hotel de Ville) and various guild houses (bread, cloth, meat, and beer?). They were all built around the 1600s in the gothic style, but each had their own character.

I didn't take a ton of pictures, but I hope Chummy can fill in the pictorial gaps.

This is the Bread House, or Maison Du Roi or the King's House.

Cookie peaking through the door of the Town Hall.

Grammy and Grampa taking their first selfie.

From there we wandered over to the Manneken Pis, or Piss Boy. I honestly don't know why he is there, or why he is famous, but he is. I know Chummy has a picture somewhere, so maybe he can share it later.

This being Belgium, there are dozens of chocolate shops in every direction, and just as many shops selling Gaufres - the real deal Belgian waffles with lots of toppings. Of course Grammy and Grampa wanted us to have an authentic Belgian experience, so they treated us to lots of samplings.

Curiously, there are also lots of comic stores around the city. We never went in any, but there was at least one on every block we walked on. There were also several building-sized murals of Tin Tin and some gift shops selling Strumpfs, the original Smurfs.

For dinner we headed over to the Petite Rue de Bruchers. I remember this as enticing alleyways crammed with vendors selling fresh seafood - a mix between fisherman's wharf and a flea market. There weren't as many stalls of seafood, but there were plenty of barkers prostituting their restaurants. To be honest, we skipped Grammy and Grampas favorite place in order to get a better view of the TV showing the World Cup game of Belgium vs. Algeria. The service was not unexpectedly slow, but the waiters were definitely entertaining. After each goal and the 2-1 Belgian win, the waiters would run up and down the street, bellowing, blowing whistles, and belly-bumping each other. The sounds of celebration were repeated in every direction and continued for the next few hours.

Girls being girls in the Rue de Bruchers

There must have been about 100 mussels in each of out pots of moules.

The girls enjoy another classic Belgian desert, Dame de Blanche, basically a hot fudge sundae.

I can't remember the name of this place, but I always thought it was beautiful. Essentially a covered mall.

Brussels is a beautiful city, and I would gladly come back. But tomorrow we are off to Ghent and Brugge, on the Flemish side of Belgium.

Poffertjes and Biking

If you ever get the chance to travel to the Netherlands, at some point during the trip you MUST buy Poffertjes. If you've had them before you know that they're absolutely delicious, and if you haven't had them then you're missing out. Poffertjes are a bit like pancakes formed into a flattish ball, but they're made with a batter that's a little bit different (I don't know what changes, but whatever it is makes them delectable). Then, they're covered in heaps of big chunks of butter and so much powdered sugar that you can hardly see the plate. Sadly, they're mostly a Dutch thing (we had them at a place called Dutch Diner) and I don't think that we'll be having them again anytime soon :( . 

Us, right before digging into delicious Poffertjies.

Grandpa, waiting for the picture to be over so that he can chow down.

Update fom Monday, June 16: Yay! We got to eat Poffertjies one more time before leaving the Netherlands. I wonder if I can use Poffertjies as an excuse to come back sometime soon...

After we were done eating, we checked out the nearby flea market. I liked this one better than the last one we went to in France, partly because they had a larger selection of stalls and partly because there were so many flower venders and their merchandise. We ended up only buying olives and hair ties (if you see me wearing puffy colored ties in my hair, you know wear I got them)

After taking the train back to Jean's house (the diner was in Rotterdam), we played a game called "trimino," which is basically like playing dominos with three sides. 

Then, a little after noon, we drove into town and negotiated out a few rented bikes and rode the bike paths by the house. 

We ended up going for a really long ride (as my bike informed me, in the end we rode for roughly 33 kilometers (20 miles) and for a duration of 4 1/2 hours, just cruising mostly). We went by a few flower farms, a river, a forest, and other stuff of the like during the first half of our ride. Then, Carolyn declared that she was hungry so we headed back to the house for a snack. Afterwards, Carolyn decided to hang out and veg, but Grandpa and I kept going. This time, we went in the opposite direction and rode through rows and rows of various crops, some of which looked a lot like kale and lettuce (we also saw a lot of wild rabbits. I've always thought that Truckee had a relatively high wildlife population including bunnies, but it seems that Europe has even more. They were having a blast in the lettuce fields). Next we traveled through horse country. I don't really see why anyone would need so many horses, 'cause it seemed like every farmer had three horses for every member in his family, and two more if he had a dog.  At first I thought that it was really cool, since I've never seen so many horses all together, but after a while the horse poop started to bug me. In the end, our road ended up being a dead end so we turned around and rode back. By the time we got back I was exhausted, so I think that I'm gonna go take a nap for a while...

And Now We're There!

Ugh. I did have this whole blog post written out nicely with the pictures perfectly spliced into the text, but then my silly iPad deleted it and I really don't feel like writing it again. We got here yesterday, but didn't have wifi until now. Long story short, we took a long plane (7 hours!!!!) and watched a lot of movies before landing in Brussels. We spent a few hours resting in Brussels, which by the way is a really cool city, before driving six hours down to the state/region or something of France called Brittany, where we're now staying with friends Gilberte and Jeremy. They live in this really cool house in the smack dab mettle of farm country that was build centuries ago (in the French Revolution, it hid a priest) and they have a huge sprawling green lawn with these overgrown hedges dividing everything, and fruit trees everywhere. All the food is homemade, handmade, and/or extremely fresh, and I mean everything. Bread, butter, jam, fish, hazelnuts, cherries, apples, sausages. Everything. Anyway, the post about today's adventures will be posted tomorrow because it's really late here, and even withe the time difference I'm tired. In the meantime, enjoy the pictures:

A street view of Brussels from inside the car

Brussels is a big mixing pot of architecture. There are old stone buildings everywhere, with tall glass towers rising behind them. Actually, Brussels is a big mixing pot of everything. All the various signs are written in Dutch, German, French, and English, and there are people from around the world covering every street. It's pretty awesome.

A French farm we passed during our drive. Brittany is definitely farm country.

Carolyn catching up on some much needed sleep during the drive

Since our friends' house used to be a farm, this is their barn

Yup, the garden is even complete with a flower-covered gate

While our friends aren't farmers, their neighbors are. These are their sheep.

Artichokes growing in the garden

The stone former farm house we're staying at

Anyway, it's late now, but more updates tomorrow!