Good friends, good food and wine and good conversation

Today my sister Barbara and I drove to Enschede in the east of The Netherlands. A friend of ours had bought a house there last august and it took us this long to go see it... (This is even worse when you think about the fact I was living only 20 minutes drive away until very recently!) The house was beautiful, built in the 1920's which I know for some of you is very old...:-)

We then walked around the city of Enschede. As it was Saturday there were markets in the central square where you could buy anything from bread, to fish, to meat to clothes, and some exotic stuff as well. We kept walking and had a good look around Toko Het Oosten (Zuiderhagen 50), a speciality store for Asian foods and artefacts. It's a very good one and I would definitely recommend it! After that we walked to Boekhandel Broekhuis, a book store, and then decided we had used the excuse of shopping for long enough, we really just wanted to have a couple of drinks and some nice food! We ended up at Paddy's, which at first glance you would expect to be an Irish Pub. (The name and all the shamrocks did it for me), but it's actually a Bar and Tapas Bar. We had some red wine and tapas, and everything was wonderful and if you ever get a chance to eat there don't go past the pork fillet in spicy chocolate sauce! (Number 69 on the menu) Please remember to make reservations if you want to eat here anytime after 7pm as it is always packed...

After some good wine and good food we walked back to our friend's house where we talked some more and had some dinner which our friend cooked for us. She had recently travelled to Morocco where she trekked through the desert and the High Atlas Mountains which made for interesting conversation, and the meal was based on Moroccon quisine, prepared in a tajine.

The whole day was worth repeating sometime soon!

Then back to Beuningen for bed to get some sleep...