First Thursday Dinner

On the first Thursday of each month a group of people from my company get together for dinner. Meg and I went in December and I'm not sure if they had one in January due to the holidays, but I went to the February outing Thursday night.

We had dinner at Cafe Restaurant Amsterdam, which is a former water pumping station that was converted into offices and a restaurant. The room where the restaurant is used to the be the engine room of the pumping station and there were still pieces of machinery randomly throughout the place.



Quite a few people showed up... the food and conversation was nice. Luckily, Jonathan (the guy from Philly) and I sat by two other people that didn't mind speaking English most of the night. We found out some interesting facts about the Netherlands, their politics, foods... all sorts of stuff.


Group photo... I'm waaaay in the back.



I ordered the pasta with mushrooms, thinking it would be mostly pasta with a few mushrooms on top. Nope... it was mostly mushrooms, which I like, but not in that quantity. I couldn't finish it all, but lucky for me, Michiel is a human garbage disposal (kind of like Bryan) and he ate the rest of it. I could see him eye-ing it and finally I just said... here, you can have it! : )



For dessert, we had chocolate ice-cream with "advocaat", which is a Dutch brandy egg-nog. It was pretty strong stuff, but tasty.



At the table across from us, there were these guys with shirts that said "Help mijn man is klusser!"... which someone told us kind of translates to "Help, my husband is a handyman!" Apparently, there is a TV show based in Amsterdam where wives call in to ask for help for their husbands who try to do handy-man type projects around the house, but either fail miserably or just never finish them. So, teams of people (which we assumed these guys must be part of), come in and finish the project.