Winter Games

One of the cool things about living in another culture (or mix of cultures in the case of the UT community) is the chance to learn about the simple things that make diversity so valuable. I'm talking here about life's pleasures- food and drink, and games and sport; or how does your culture celebrate and play? We had a chance to turn a writing assignment into a rare night out for the three of us Saturday for the Chinese student's association's New Year party. 2006 is the year of the Dog (to Ghost and Keskas delight I'm sure); there was a great article in the Dutch paper last week about the New Year subtitled- 'We eat dog about as often as you eat rabbit..'
It was a great party, mostly Chinese students with a small group of int'ls- awesome food: dumplings and spring rolls, and of course an enormous screen and really loud PA with karaoke.

We've also learned a bunch of new games abroad- a few very Dutch and some random. It seems like each region here has its own particular local game- when we lived in the trailer park in Hengelo there was a group (with matching uniforms no less,) that played klootschieten. They would go throw their balls down these long country lanes and then come back and drink beer the rest of the day. Our neighbors in Enschede introduced us to sjoelen. Its this very addictive sort of indoor shuffleboard where you have to distribute little wooden disks into slots at the end of table to score points. It can get pretty vicious as the pictures indicate.
Our Canadian-Hungarian friend David introduced us to snapszer, a card game that I think has to be an ancestor of euchre. Its also pretty cutthroat but extremely social especially when paired with palinka.
Finally, Ronald and Maaike next door, recently showed us Kolonisten van Catan. I never played Risk or anything when I was growing up but I know people who became pretty crazy about it and I always thought this would be similar. I'd seen this big red box on the shelf of almost every Dutch household and always wondered what it was. We have only played once but it was quite addictive; keeping us up to the unheard of 1 am.