These vegetables are copies. I was not aware of how easy vegetables can be regrown. Now that I am I decided to try regrowing every veggie which ends up in my fridge. I have tried so far with six kinds:

Chard
I love chard. After using the top I left the bottom in water for a few days until it developed roots. Then I constructed a self-watering flower pot out of an old sunflower oil bottle. I stabbed myself in the hand while making it, but the chard is growing nicely and I expect to eat it in two months.

Celery
I heard it can be planted the same as Chard, but mine never developed roots, so after one week of trying I threw it out.

Avocado
One takes the Avocado seed and submerges the lower half in water for 1 week or more. roots will grow and then it can be planted. So the internet sais. I cannot verify this information.

Garlic
Garlic is always sprouting in my fridge so I finally threw 3 of them into earth and after one week they had grown incredibly high. No cloves yet, but they look pretty.

Spring onions
Apparently on can simply set the stumps with the roots into water and they will regrow. Makes me wonder why I always bought new ones. I set the stumps into earth and after one week they are growing like crazy.

Chilli
One can plant the seeds inside a chilli pepper the internet sais. I used my first try of self-watering flower pot and planted them yesterday. I'm exited to see if it works.

We are so used to buying things we forgot that some things can be easily made. My new general goal in life now is to be less of a consumer and more of a creator. My sub-goal is to regrow salad, because it is ridiculous expensive and the regrowing food websites say you can. The internet is an awesome place to find out how to do stuff like this.

Some links:
http://www.diyncrafts.com/4732/repurpose/25-foods-can-re-grow-kitchen-scraps
http://food-hacks.wonderhowto.com/how-to/10-vegetables-herbs-you-can-eat-once-and-regrow-forever-0150343/
http://lifehacker.com/kitchen-scraps-you-can-regrow-with-nothing-but-water-1531011995

After I decided to extend my blog beyond a way to inform my friend and family I'm still alive and well, I signed up to three blog aggregating websites.

Two of those Expat Blog and BlogExpat are specifically for "Expat" bloggers. I mentioned before that I do not particular like calling myself an expat, as it is a classification solely based on social-status and ethnicity as also pointed out in this article in the Guardian.

Of those two Expat Blog is the more active one, which means more exposure for my blog and more possible interaction via the forum. However the script they use to parse the RSS feeds of the blogs they aggregate seems flawed. Mainly it does not parse RSS feeds when https is used and these blogs recent posts do not turn up on the webpage. Considering wordpress.com uses https as a default, it means already all of wordpress.com blogs feeds are not shown, which are a lot.

Bloglovin is basically a glorified feed reader. It reads my feed well and presents it really nicely. Some bugs/missing features:
- There are three copies of my blog listed in several stages of up to dateness. Confusing.
- One can only chose one category for the blog. Common categories like" Politics" or "Technology" are missing.
- Interaction with bloggers only over third party apps.
- I have no likes yet . You can change that: http://www.bloglovin.com/blogs/tines-blog-13504555#Follow

I never signed up on Expatsblogs. I tried to, but after having their button for a week on my website (it was required of me, something none of the other services did) and feeling tired of giving them advertisement I removed it and never heard from them again.

The last two months me and my flatmate got addicted to the "Green Energy" Yogi tea. Probably because we need as much energy as we can get in this never-ending winter and the tea contains Guarana. After some time we decided to collect the little inspirational quotes on each tea bag. We wanted to see when they might start to repeat themselves and today when I had my after work tea and cookies (non-vegan, so I did not have to share with my flatmate, hehehe) I read the quote and behold! I had read it before.

Soul is the same in all living beings.

I checked the others and found another one, which was double:

Take care of great problems, while they are still small.

I wonder if the universe meant to emphasize these to us.

Today is game night in Bío Paradís, a cinema specialising in showing alternative movies and a really nice lobby where we play board games every Wednesday (and eat lots of popcorn).

We all bring different games we like. I finally managed to play Tikal, which I had since I was a kid, but for some reason the rules were in Dutch. Thanks to the internet this problem was solved. My flatmate really likes Pandemic and thankfully I do too, otherwise there might be some conflict in our house. Her boyfriend also got a new game for his birthday, called Colonial, which made some of us cringe and others shrug and say: "it is just a game".

In the game one is a "mighty" European power from (roughly) 15th to 19th century, trying to colonialise countries, exploit them for resources (one of which are slaves) and be the most "prestigious" of them all. The subject matter made me think:

When do games about past atrocities become socially acceptable?

If it were some sort of formula it would probably be:

Acceptance = time x current standing of victims

Time
The colonisation period is apparently ok now, there are several "historical" games in the top 200 on board game geek set in this time where one gets to acquire slaves and use them to ones advantage. We also play a card game at game nights called "Guillotine" set in the French revolution where one competes to get to chop the head off the most unpopular noble. Mass execution is a joke if it has happened long enough ago.

Who is the victim?
When the first game about the war of annihilation in the second world war will appear in our western-centric society one will play Japan trying to annihilate China, not Germany - Poland. Another reason why games about the colonisation period and slavery are considered "ok".

My secondary question was : When will it be socially acceptable to make a game about the holocaust?

I googled a bit and found this. A German board game from 1936, where "the objective was to collect as many Jews as you could, and get them off the board".

Racist, but somehow cute


The game was heavily criticized at the time from Jewish societies for obvious reasons, but also in an SS paper because

The game trivialized the anti-Semitic Nazi policies and that the international press would use the game’s existence to make the policies look completely ridiculous.

The game failed, not because of politics though, but because it was really boring. Which is the third variable in the formula:

Acceptance = (time x current standing of victims)^playability

Because if we are having fun, we can justify a lot.

When I came home from the bar in Saturday I met my friends who where unloading a whole trunk full of food they had found dumpster diving. Icelandic supermarkets throw up to 25% of food they order away! They called out to me, asking if I wanted any. I immediately asked: "do you have any cheese?", because my flatmate, though vegan eats cheese when it comes from the dumpster (because then she isn't supporting the animal industry). They had loads, all really nice high end ones. I think I walked home with 3 kilos of it. The next day I was treated to a strange sight: a vegan standing in the kitchen ecstatically eating slices of cheese saying "cheese is the best thing ever!".

We decided to have a spontaneous cheese and wine party and today after class I walked into Vinbuðin (state owned liquor store) and bought a bottle of wine surrounded by tourists and the kind of people who buy alcohol at three in the afternoon on a Monday.

And here it is, real dutch Gouda (the Icelandic one is not Gouda) old and young, Cheddar, Camembert with truffles, goat cheese, home made bread and wine. Yum!