Totallympics Open International Song Contest 2020

[OlympicIRL 4,769]

1 minute ago, Dragon said:

With small variations, the national dish of Ireland, Wales, Northern England, Eastern Canada and Bosnia...

Yes and as a farmer I bet you appreciate how good it tastes especially this time of year when you come in from the fields to a nice warm plate of stew

[heywoodu 13,540]

20 minutes ago, dcro said:

There is one. But for some it's apparently easier to wait until 5 p.m., than bring food from home or buy something.

I just take some slices of bread for the lunch break and at home have a good dinner, fine enough  

[kungshamra71 687]

1 hour ago, heywoodu said:

Dinner break - Part 1

 

Canada ends the afternoon session, could those two points they gave to Serbia have sealed the deal? There's only seven voting nations left, meaning there are just 84 points to be earned by a single nation. Only Canada, Malta, India and Ireland have a chance left to catch the Eastern European leaders, although Canada seems to have the only somewhat realistic road to do so. However, it is TISC, and things are never as they seem...

We'll take a break from all the action and have ourselves some dinner. For those accustomed to a later dinner, their will be the option to eat after the final session. Again, we have two main options for dinner, one that is definitely Dutch and another that is not specifically Dutch, although some of the things on the side there may be considered to be so.

 

Keep going on, the finish is in sight!

We start off with erwtensoep, pea soup, which is also called 'snert' in Dutch. Soup being made from peas is of course not bound to one nation, but since this became a thing in the Netherlands - roughly 500 years ago - a different variety was developed. Snert is significantly thicker than your regular pea soup and includes things like carrots and, most importantly, pieces rookworst - smoked sausage. How does one know whether their snert is thick enough? Well, the saying goes that if the spoon can stand up straight in the soup, you've got it right. Snert is often sold at little kiosks along frozen canals, ponds and lakes for people having fun on the ice, just like hot chocolate. It's very rarely eaten in the summer and is very much associated with winter in the Netherlands.

 

Even most Dutch people will agree it really doesn't look very tasty at all, but oh boy is it good...the thicker, the better!

For dinner, we are joined by Normaal, a rock band from Twente in the very east of the country. Singing in their strong dialect, which is often associated with very rural life, they were founders of what became known as 'farmers rock'. Their by far biggest hit is called 'Oerend hard', loosely translated - from the Twente dialect - to 'Very fast'. The song is about two motorcycle riding friends, who've heard of the local motorcross and are racing to get there. Thy're known in the area as fast riders, but one day get hit by a drunk driver and people say they'll never be heard from again...however, at the end, they make a comeback and they're back to riding 'oerend hard'!

 

 

i LOVE erwtensoep! It’s so good and it warms you in the winter, even took my parents to eat some when they came here to visit me, one of my favorite things in the Netherlands (together with kibeling and poffertjes. And stroopwafels. And bitterbollens. And kruidnoten. And ooliebollens. And... I should stop now )

[hckošice 13,217]

1 minute ago, OlympicIRL said:

Like this.... well this is how I prefer it anyway and I like to add barley:

 

yep. dis is what we call Goulash here in cyentral yurop.

[mrv86 2,923]

2 minutes ago, OlympicIRL said:

Like this.... well this is how I prefer it anyway and I like to add barley:

 

Wouldn’t be Irish without it

[heywoodu 13,540]

And lastly: ah, TISC. The twice-a-year-tradition of finding each other's eating times weird  

[heywoodu 13,540]

Right, the people in normal places have finished their dinner, the others...well, they'll figure out what to do, because the fifth and final session of TOISC 2020 is already getting underway!

 

@Bohemia, would you be so kind to share with us the French votes and get us back on track?

[hckošice 13,217]

...allez la france !

[kungshamra71 687]

48 minutes ago, heywoodu said:

Dinner break - Part 2

 

The second dinner option is more of a fast-food kind of dish, we're certain everyone knows the basic fries. They do come in a decent set of varieties of course, everyone present will have some of their liking. The main thing is in the snacks that come with the fries, starting off with the frikandel - sort of a minced-meat hot dog, the modern version of which has been around since roughly World War II. Second is the kaassoufflé, a simple snack: cheese inside a thin doughy wrap, was has been breaded to get a crust and then deep-fried. Take care, the cheese is burning hot! The kroket, known in English as croquette, has more of an international ring to it, although in the Netherlands the real ones are filled with serveral kinds of meat...very much like the inside of bitterballen, and so again, be careful when biting into one!

 

Fries with a frikandel...

 

...although one can just as well go with a kaassouflé or two!

There's a wide variety of desserts people eat in the Netherlands, most of which seems fairly international, think about icecream and the likes. In everyday life, a more common thing is called 'vla', a dairy product and something that's been made and developed for many centuries. There's a whole host of flavours for vla, vanilla and chocolate are by far the most common ones and you'll find cartons containing both in the supermarket: one side is yellow, the other brown and the combination is absolutely excellent...even better with a good serving of whipped cream on top! Fun fact: vla used to come in bottles, and since it's quite thick, it was hard to get everything out of it. The Dutch aren't known to be greedy for no reason, so a special tool was invented: the flessenschraper (bottle scraper) or flessenlikker (bottle licker), to get every last bit out of it. Vla is nowadays mostly sold in cartons, but this tool can still be used to get stuff out of bottles any time!

 

A 'vlaflip', which often contains at the very least vla and yoghurt and generally a good amount of syrup and whipped cream...one can top it off with some fruit and/or hagelslag. Some people like to mix it all together, others take a straw and go up and down, making sure they've got a bit of everything all the time

We close of the musical proceedings of the break with a fitting song, and one of the best Dutch songs ever: Avond ('Evening') by Boudewijn de Groot, born in present-day Jakarta in a Japanese camp, where his mother died within a year. He eventually made his way to the Netherlands and became a succesful singer. In 1973 the song Avond was written by De Groot's songwriter Lennaert Nijgh for his then-wife Anja. Two decades and a divorce later, it was De Groot who married Anja, he rewrote and recorded the song for her.

 

Avond didn't become a hit at all, but he played it live so often it became more and more popular, and nowadays is often very high in the all-time Top 2000. The song is about someone singing to his loved one, how everything is fine - sure, outside it's stormy and dark, but inside it's warm and light and good. "I know your deepest fear, but I believe in you and me", and who cares what the world throws at us? "If the sun shines, we go for a walk after breakfast, if it rains, we go back to bed, waking up slowly for hours."

 

 

Oh that’s right I forgot the fries that you guys eat it not as sidedish, but just as fries. With Mayo.

 

I used to be a ketchup-only and now I can’t imagine fries without Mayo.

 

I guess it’s contagious haha

[Bohemia 1,259]

I'll post them in a minute