Croissants!

Last night I had the privilege of having 4 female students stay at my place overnight. (the reason is a whole separate story...) When they found out they were going to stay over, we thought it would be fun to try to make croissants together - we had been trying to find a time to do this project, and this was the perfect opportunity! I mixed up the dough before they came, and then we rolled it out several times in the evening before going to bed, and then even in the middle of the night! The result was DELICIOUS chocolate croissants!!! What a perfect Saturday morning!

Yulia holding the dough before rolling it out the first time

rolling, chilling and more rolling

before going into the oven...

And afterwards - YUM!!!

Creating Enns History

When I was in college, my RD made a video to commemorate the people who lived in his dorm that year. I love to watch this video and laugh at myself many years later... So, this year my RAs and I did a special project with the residents of our dorm. We had lots of fun making the video - hope you like it! :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywJQgoT6dWo&feature=youtu.be

Thanks to my RAs: Ira Pompa, Natallia Shliazhka, Kirill Agapov and Ausrius Filipavicius, and a HUGE thank you to Dmitrii Vasiukov, our videographer!!!

LCC Late Night Show

Last week as a part of Spiritual Life week, I got to play in a band! The Spiritual Life team asked Josh, Alisha and I (all three RDs) to play together as the "backup" band for the LCC Late Night Show, where the topic of the night was about discovering your talents. We decided to call ourselves "Amanda and the Love Cannons". (Ask me about the story sometime...) Playing with Josh and Alisha was the highlight of my week! They were in a band together before they came to LCC, so I learned some songs they knew already. Here's a link to one of them, in which we also got to whistle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHEOF_rcND8

L-R: Mark, the host of the show, and "Amanda and the Love Cannons" (Josh, me & Alisha)

Parade of Stars

One big event that happened during the week my parents were here was called Parade of Stars, where countries represent themselves based on a certain theme. This year the theme was literature, so many of them told stories or fairy tales from their country. (Thanks to Ira for the pictures.)

Latvian team acting out a story from their newspaper about the

Latvia vs. USA volleyball match (Latvia was the winning team)

Belarus student proving he can entertain the gods

Moldovian buying a cow for himself (and becoming good friends with it!)

Ukrainian dragon tempting a prince coming to rescue his sister

the week after Amsterdam

After we visited Amsterdam, my parents came back to Klaipeda with me and got to experience a bit of Eastern Europe and LCC. They helped out with different things going on during the week, like making food for my RA meeting and setting up for a big event on campus. We also got to taste different Eastern European food and go to the sauna on the spit.

walking through the woods on the way to the Baltic sea

the sauna is right on the beach, so once you're warmed up, the idea is to run right into this freezing water, which we all did!

afterwards, we had pizza from a food truck nearby

i wasn't able to join them, but my parents got to experience the traditional Lithuanian dancing evening that i sometimes attend

we also went walking on the sea a different day, and it was really COLD

Amsterdam flowers

On our last day in Amsterdam, we went out of the city again to visit some of my mom's friends from a long time ago when she used to live in the Netherlands. On the way there, we visited the Alsmeer flower market, where they sell millions of flowers every day by auction.

This is a huge building where they auction around 20 million flowers each day!

All the buyers sit in a room (there are several different rooms), and bid on the flowers for their suppliers.

The Dutch way of auctioning is to start the price high and go down from there. The buyers push a button at their table to buy the flowers, and the one who bids first at the highest price gets first pick.

The flowers are then lined up by buyer, and shipped off the same day in order to stay fresh.

Amsterdam museums

We also went to several museums/tours while we were in Amsterdam. Some places we could not take pictures, so there are only pictures of the outside.

The first was the Rijks Museum, which displayed some of Rembrant's paintings.

We also went to an exhibit that had digitally remastered all of Rembrant's paintings for one exhibit. It was interesting to see all of his works in one place. One of the things I found interesting to look at was his use of shadow and intense light and dark colors, which this remastered copy shows clearly.

The Stedelijk Museum was a modern art museum.

We also went to the Hermitage, where Van Gogh's paintings are currently located. Another place we visited was a canal house museum.

We also went on a canal tour. Notice all the bridges!