Guus Bosman

The ingredients and food of the American kitchen are not that different of those you'll find in Holland, so most things I'm used to cook with are available. You can even get boerenkool (kale) in some supermarkets.

The other day we found a specialty store with a lot of imported things from Europe. Truffels and vinegar from Italy, special wines, things like that. They also had a few Dutch items, such as drop and Droste chocolate. We bought a package of caramel wafers: stroopwafels!

It's easy to find Dutch beer and cheese, although they're expensive. There's also quite a collection of Belgium beers available here, but I haven't found my personal favorite Grimbergen triple yet.

The only thing that I really miss so far is real Dutch bread: a freshly baked volkorenbrood would be very nice. The bread in Wholefoods comes close, but is not quite the same.

Saturday evening we saw "Taking Lives", recommended to us by a good friend. To be honest -- I didn't really like it very much.

Taking Lives is a thriller about a serial-killer who "copies" other peoples lives, but the movie was never very scary or even convincing.

The acting by the main character, Angelina Jolie, a FBI agent was in my opinion pretty bad. Ethan Hawke, who played the serial killer, was performing well but that couldn't compensate for the other deficiencies of the movie, such as the weakness of the plot.

We saw the trailer (a short preview) of this movie a few weeks ago, when our cable TV was just installed. One of the features that Comcast offers, is something called On Demand. Using that, you can order a movie anytime you want, and you pay the movie on your TV bill, which is about four dollar per movie. Interesting enough it is cheaper to rent the DVD, which is about three dollar; I guess you pay for convenience. Anyway -- we browsed the existing collection of movies available and saw the preview of Taking Lives.

Thursday President Bush will be inaugurated for his second term in office. This Inauguration Day will be a large event, with a parade and a huge amount of visitors, and the preparations started long ago.

Yesterday I went for a walk on the Mall, the strip between the Capitol and the Washington monument, where all the museums are. Many tents and barriers for the festivities were already in place, and they were installing a stage in front of the Capitol with thousands of chairs.

Security will be extremely tight this year and many streets and office buildings downtown will be closed from Wednesday morning on.

A few pictures.

It's raining today, and everytime that happens there's a traffic jam on the road that we can see from far from our window.

Someone joked that the traffic in Washington immediately slows to a crawl as soon as it rains, snows or is too windy. A bit like the Dutch railways, I guess.

At work we're almost done with development of the new functionality and next week the first testers will try the programs. An interesting difference between the way things work here and at Chess is that in Haarlem we had a lot of automated testing, and only very little manual testing. Here is the other way around.

My cold is almost over, but I'm afraid it looks like it's Sasha's turn now.