All went well at Tilburg University yesterday, where I talked about religion versus science. About 100 people showed up and there were no disruptions, though I was told later that there was plainclothed security in the audience. The student protests appear to be confined largely to Amsterdam.
Before I talked, I had a cup of tea for my throat (this nasty cold still hasn’t disappeared), and a Dutch donut, shown below:
Below: a photo taken by one of my hosts showing the title slide of my presentation. The talk was in English; it’s impossible for me to say much in Dutch because the damn gutteral sound is impossible for me to make, though the Hebrew or German gutterals come easy to me. Every Netherlander speaks nearly perfect English, and some classes in Amsterdam are taught entirely in English. This makes it dead easy to get around, especially if you can’t master those infernal gutterals.
The Q&A guest, local faculty Hans van Eyghen, couldn’t make it as his wife went into labor prematurely (I’m told mother and baby are fine). But that left us 15 extra minutes for student questions, and we could have had even more than half an hour for questions except another lecture was scheduled right after mine.
The talk went well, I think, and there was a full half hour of questions by students. They were good questions, too. It was a lively and inquisitive audience (some were religious), and it more than made up for the mishigas of the Betabreak organization in Amsterdam.
After the talk and a beer, my hosts took me to a fancy restaurant, theAuberge du Bonheur in Tilburg. We all chose the three-course meal from the Spring menu. Although I was told the courses were small, it was more than enough food.
The restaurant.
We walked past the assortment of cheeses while entering, and I decided that I must have some Dutch cheese at the end of dinner. (The profusion of bovids in the fields between Amsterdam and Tilburg tells you that this is dairy country.)
An amuse-bouche. I won’t be able to tell you all the ingredients of each course, as there were so many things in each course. All I can say is that there is a deft hand in the kitchen that knows well how to meld disparate flavors. This is some kind of cucumber-based soup with other stuff.
Another kind of amuse-bouche soup. Don’t ask me what it was; call the restaurant if you must know. It was terrific.
Another excellent mystery dish, with two kinds of strawberries (red and green), little white puffs of crunchy stuff, and a savory green ice cream. Again, I can’t specify what was in it, but it was very good. And isn’t it lovely?
We had a choice between lamb or fish for the “mains”, and I chose lamb, which came as a bipartite course. This is the neck, served with mashed potatoes and a gaarnish:
And the meat, served with perfectly cooked carrots and white asparagus, which I love, as well as a bit of sauce. The meat had a slathering of pesto:
A pre=dessert dessert, which I believe was strawberry ice cream on top of cooked beetroot.
The real dessert, which I skipped in favor of cheese, but was told it was very good. It was some kind of ice cream or pudding made with green apple and garnishes.
I had the cheese platter, with samples of five Dutch cheeses (the blue was made only a few km from the restaurant). The cheeses were fantastic, as they should be here, and were served with raisin-walnut bread and candied walnuts. My one quibble is that they should also have provided white bread, for you don’t want to dilute the flavor of such good cheese with a fancy fruit bread. But of course I ate everything.
We had no wine as everybody else was driving home, and, truth be told, I had no appetite for alcohol after my post-seminar beer.
I can recommend the Auberge du Bonheur highly, and if you happen to find yourself in Tilburg (unlikely given that it’s a small town there to serve the University) and have a spare 50€ or so, give it it a try. It was a great place to wind down after my talk.
Today the three of us who were deplatformed by Betabreak are going to privately record the discussion we would have had at the University of Amsterdam. It will be put on YouTube at some point, and I’ll let you know when it’s up.
🙂
Glad the talk went well.
Yummy! Soup #2 reminds me of bubble tea, which are popular drinks featuring flavored gelatin balls. So bubble soup maybe?
Terrific meal! Those cheeses look fantastic! Glad your talk went well. Thanks for taking the time out of your trip to post!
Nice take on plain white (crusty) bread with cheese. A subtle detail which I’m glad to see promoted.
The dishes look like artwork. Almost a shame to eat such a lovely presentation. You certainly know how to make your readers envy your experiences.
Glad the talk went well!
The food looks beautiful, but it seems like an awful lot of work to eat!
Glad your talk went well with good interaction with the student audience. Always rewarding! Glad you missed the Amsterdam messiness and thanks for the lovely food photos.
I enjoy your writing and your mix of food for the mind and the body. You make the case for ‘incompatibility’. I’d have enjoyed that as a lapsed atheist – finding the idea of a-theism unsatisfactory amid the conjectures, leaps of faith and revelations that, by self account of those involved, accompany the mysteries of relativity, quantum and string theory. I’ve been reading a book from the 1950s by the mathematician C.A.Coulson ‘Science & Christian Belief’. Instead of incompatibility Coulson sees thinking at the leading edge of scientific and theological enquiry as congruent. My dear and sceptical Dutch friend says of my reflections on this “Simon, you are interested in these things because you are very old, and soon you will be dead.” True I’m in the dusk of my life and perhaps I’m unconsciously fearful of death, but then the absence of afterlife could be just as consoling as the prospect of an endless wait in purgatory or far worse. I’ve so enjoyed my long life that expecting to have more of it seems ungrateful. Thanks again for your blogs.
Here in California I recently befriended a Dutch software programmer-artist in the last third of his life, and somehow your quote — “Simon, you are interested in these things because you are very old, and soon you will be dead” — sounds just like what my Dutch friend might say. It’s very precise, yet casual. And funny.
(I’m an atheist by default, as I see no plausible evidence for the existence of any gods, and I see no compelling reason to believe in any of the many that have been proposed, and imposed, over millennia. Scientific inquiry, on the other hand, has exposed a wondrous — if indifferent — natural universe that was invisible and unknowable to even the most ardent believers of their respective ideas about supernatural gods.)
Glad to see your cold hasn’t impacted your appetite and palate! This is indeed fantastic looking food that even I would enjoy although I am not not much of a meat eater.
To my knowledge, the EU wants to massively reduce the amount of cows in Dutch agriculture (by at least half!), and thus the amount of cheese produced, supposedly in order to reach EU targets on soil nitrate. This isn’t popular with average farmers and the deplorables who already suffer from the inflation rises in milk/cheese prices, which is probably one of the reasons Geert Wilders’s party scored highest during the last election. Regarding soil nitrate, yes, the levels are much higher than optimal from a biodiversity standpoint (although they have already been reduced massively from their historical high points), but the main problem for biodiversity in the Netherlands (in my opinion) is not nitrate, but the land use by the dense population and the industrialized greenhouse agriculture needed to produce plant food. The EU is a large area, most of which has perfectly okay nitrate levels. I don’t think it’s a good idea to impose the same standards on everyone.
Sure glad that was uneventful.
I’m actually amazed at how Derrida’s Deconstruction – what I expected to be offended by with the rejection of objective reality – actually resonates and makes sense – even if it does result in hilarious hoaxes and feminist glaciology. This page came up from a search for “can Derrida Deconstruction possibly be classified as a religion of the apophatic type ?” https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/derrida-politics-and-the-little-way/ with some interesting claims:
“I hope to offer something of an introduction to the relationship between Derrida, mysticism, and politics.”
Or we used to call it misty schism. That’s what passes for academia in the secular humanities these days.
“The separation between Church and State has had more than a little effect on the academic disciplines as well. Theology has been so cordoned off that even the vaguest offer of a rapprochement can be greedily grasped at.”
Anyway, I’m looking at the New Athiests thumping the books of logic, reason and rationality for the Church of Reason as the new Evangelists promoting a new Catholic religion that’s going to bring a pie in the sky golden age of world peace, somehow, out of a deeply divided west, maybe with a realization of the Marxist dream, I don’t know.
As a beer aficionado, I feel compelled to ask: anything noteworthy about your post-lecture beer?
No, it was like a Heiniken. I haven’t tried any fancy Dutch beers yet.
Thanks for the reply. If you do have a beer you find noteworthy, I hope you’ll drop a mention in one of your daily reports.
Glad to see you had a satisying day in the Netherlands. If I was religious I’d pray for Betabreak to grow some balls and go through with the cancelled event.
I’m glad everything went well!
Thanks for the photos.
Oh boy does that food look good. (I love lamb.)
Glad everything went well.
Wondering if you wore your cowboy boots for the lecture? I hope you did!
I’m curious as you mentioned you were asked some good questions.
After the “carry on” of BetaBreak this is looked like a very pleasant experience for the trials and effort made. The YouTube talk I would imagine would round it off… followed by another great meal and a Dutch beer.
Ummm… an Amsterdam “herbal” may help dry the nasal passages and light relief from the cold. Not a doctor.
I think you mean gutturals, not gutterals 😉 While Hebrew and Arabic actually have gutturals (sounds produced in the throat), probably what you’re picking up on is the Dutch /g/, which is a velar (at the back of the roof of the mouth rather than in the throat) fricative. My Dutch friend introduced me to a very hard to pronounce word, graat ‘fishbone’, which has the /g/ followed by /r/ pronounced on the uvula.
That word sounds like what you would do when trying to extricate a fishbone stuck crossways between your tonsils before it had gone all the way down.
Delicious food! I am looking forward to watching the taping your presentation.
”The student protests appear to be confined largely to Amsterdam.”
Amsterdam is rather atypical for the Netherlands. In that sense, it is sort of like Austin, Texas, or, though in a different way, Munich, Bavaria.