Netherlands Day 1-3

Wed-Friday 11/10-12
I'm lumping most of the days together because I really didn't get a chance to do much until the weekend.
The team caught a late flight out of Norway and arrived in the Netherlands late to find that the rest of the team that had arrived earlier had done a lot of the setup work. Still, it was well past midnight by the time we had everything good to go for the start of the next day.
I had something called "traditional Dutch meat" for dinner. I couldn't put my finger on what kind or cut of meat it was, but it was really tasty. I topped off dinner with a 4 chocolate dessert dish featuring chocolate mousse, a chocolate covered cream puff, chocolate ice cream, and a brownie. It was the start of eating a ton of chocolate on this trip. I had a Belgian beer named Palm as well that was pretty good.
I am amazed at the lack of clocks so far. Both hotel rooms didn't have one, not even an alarm clock, and there was only 1 that I saw in the entire Oslo hotel. Very strange. The hotel in Haarlem, about a 20 min train ride from Amsterdam, appears to only have 1 clock as well.
Dinner the second night with the HP Dutch team was really fun. It took a little longer to get there because of some road work and one way roads, and we drove through the same intersection 3 or 4 times trying to find the way, but once we parked we got a chance to wander the streets of Haarlem, which is architecturally very close to Amsterdam.
Dinner was a 3 course fixed menu called the Chef's Table. For starters, I had an appetizer platter of tuna tartar, scallops on a bed a beets, and shrimp on a mixture of mashed potatoes and carrots. The main course was a venison steak on spouts and mashed potatoes. They must really like potatoes here...Dessert was chocolate mousse with a touch of coffee this time (I prefer it without), a piece of cake I wasn't too fond of that I ended up trading for more mousse, and some homemade ice cream. Pretty good meal, but I liked the traditional dutch meat the best.
After dinner we went back to the hotel and a few of us had drinks at the bar. I was introduced to jenever, which sounds like "your neighbor". It tasted a lot like akvavit but was easier to drink and had less of an alcohol content. I made a mental note to look for it in the Duty Free later.
The event itself was quite the contrast to the Norway one. In Norway, nobody will interrupt you even if you stop a presentation to ask questions, it's just the way the culture is. They will wait for you to finish and then approach you one on one rather than stop your flow and ask a question in the middle. The Dutch, on the other hand, are very interactive.