Catching up

Yes, yes, I know.  Nearly four months without a post. But hey, things have been busy!  I'm trying to finish up the dissertation, we went home for a month, and in between all that, we're trying to plan a wedding!

So, at the very least, I thought I should post photos from the trips we've taken since I last posted.

First, Belgium.  We live about 35 kilometres from the Belgian border, and we kept saying that we should bike there one day, just to say we'd done it.  So we picked a nice weekend in August and went!  We took a bit of a scenic route, so it ended up being about 40 kilometres each way, and we split that over two days, so we stayed a night in Belgium.  I have to say, I don't know how the pros sit on their bike seats for that long.  I couldn't sit comfortably for a couple of days, after just 80 kilometres!  But we did it, and the photos are here.

Next, Germany, and another visit to Stefan's aunt and uncle in Speyer.  More castles, more churches, more wine... it doesn't get much better than that!

Technically, we went to Canada next, but there are basically no photos of that, because I tend to forget about the camera.  Unless you want to see a photo of the plastic mermaid in my bellini?

Finally, in October, we took a weekend and went up to the north of the Netherlands, to Leeuwarden in Friesland.  We got a good deal on a fancy hotel, and we had a nice relaxing weekend.  We wandered the city, we hung out in the hotel's sauna and hot tub, we had some fantastic meals (seriously, best food I've had in the Netherlands, hands down).

And that's about it up to now.  Between work and wedding planning (okay, and the new Assassin's Creed), we're keeping pretty busy, and hoping it slows down soon!

Bazinga

Yes, I know I haven't posted in quite a while, but I do have an excuse: I'm trying to get a full draft of my dissertation done by the middle of August.  And yes, I also know that the word count in the sidebar indicates that I'm now past 75,000 words, but that's more a guideline than a hard and fast rule.  I'm not done saying what I want to say, so I'll keep writing until I am.

What that means, though, is that I've been concentrating so hard on the dissertation that I usually use up a full day's worth of brainpower by the time I'm done with writing for the day.  After that, I'm pretty much useless.  I don't have the focus to sew or cross-stitch, or even to read something as fluffy as a romance novel.  I can manage about the level of attention required by something like South Park, or sports (good thing the Olympics start today), and other than that, I'm a little crazy.  Not quite the Sheldon-in-the-ball-pit level of thesis crazy -- that episode of Big Bang is about just this sort of thing, when you're trying to work through a paper and it's all you can think about to the point of insanity -- but still a bit crazy, at least until I get this done.  So if I neglect this blog a bit more, that's why.

Helsinki

I have to admit, I'm jealous of Stefan's travel grant.  His conference travel is almost entirely paid for, which means that he can afford to go to exotic conferences far more than I can.  Although really, sometimes I don't mind, because it gives me an excuse to go on vacation.

This time around, it was Helsinki.  It was a lovely time of year for it, too: while I liked Sweden in November, the weather was far more conducive to enjoying a vacation in Finland in June.  Except for two days of rain, we had clear blue skies the whole time.  Plus, the days were super long.  Helsinki sits right on the Arctic Circle, and we were there for the longest days of the year.  It wasn't actually as much of a difference as I'd expected.  It would be twilight around midnight, only about an hour different than what we're used to.

So, what did I think?  I loved it.  The city's beautiful: most of it is young, for a European capital, barely a century old, so there's a lot of Neo-Classical buildings (see white-columned cathedral) and Art Deco architecture (see stylized train station decoration).  The core is fairly small and easily walkable, despite the fact that a fifth of the country's population lives in Helsinki alone.  And -- Stefan was particularly excited about this, having been in monolingual Russia -- everyone speaks English.  Fair enough, because no one outside of Finland is going to bother to learn a complicated language -- inflected, with an appalling fourteen cases, for those of you who care -- that's not related to the rest of the European languages anyway.  Fortunately for us, there's a small but protected Swedish-speaking minority, which means that most of the signs are in Swedish.  And Swedish is close enough to Dutch and German that we can decipher some.  Enough to get important words like "exit" and "train station" and "summer sale," anyway.  Oh, and "lunch buffet."  Turns out the Finns love their lunch buffets.  Out complete lack of Finnish, except for "thank you," didn't stop the locals from assuming we were Finnish.  We get this all the time, no matter where we go in Europe.  I understand it in northern Europe, because we both look vaguely northern European, but we've gotten it in Greece and Italy too.  I suspect that, in Finland, part of the reason was that we didn't look like tourists: all the tourists were cold, wearing heavy pants and thick fleece jackets, and we were in shorts with bare arms, like the Finns, because hey, sometimes 21C is all the summer you get.


As for touristy things, I explored a bit while Stefan went to his conference, and did some shopping, during which I saw an awesome busker who was playing water-filled wine bottles (and had the presence of mind to get it on video).  We stayed a few days after he was done, too, and got out of the city for a bit.  We went to Suomenlinna, an 18th-century sea fortress in the harbour of Helsinki (and we learned on the way that the seagulls in Helsinki are vicious and will attempt to snatch calamari directly from your hand).  It's definitely worth the trip, if you find yourself there, but I like exploring tunnels and learning about history, as does Stefan, particularly when cannons are involved.

And then, because we'd pretty much exhausted what we wanted to see in Helsinki, we took a daytrip to Porvoo, which is the second-oldest town in Finland.  It's just up the coast, about an hour east, and has a lovely little medieval centre, with windy cobbled roads and colourful wooden houses.  It would have been even nicer if the rain had held off, but you can't really do anything about that.

Helsinki is, however, very expensive.  Most of the hotels near the university were about what I'd expect to pay in London or Paris, so we stayed in a staffless hotel instead, which was about half the price.  It was kind of interesting, actually.  They e-mailed and texted us the room number and door code the day before, and it automatically activated at check-in time.  That code gets you in the front door, into the right hallway, and into your room.  There's no check-in desk, no room service, just a cleaning service that comes every five days, if you're staying a while.  It's probably not for everyone -- some people want new towels every day and people at the front desk and such -- but we thought it was pretty cool.

The food was expensive, too.  Part of that is the taxes: there's a significant alcohol problem (and we saw evidence of that in the drunken people wandering around), so alcohol is heavily taxed.  In a restaurant, we're talking an absolute minimum of six euros (about $8) for a beer and thirty euros (about $40) for a bottle of wine; that's three times what we'd expect to pay here.  You could eat cheap take-out, sure, but we both like food too much for that.  So we sucked it up, went to our usual mid-range restaurants, spent a bit too much on food... and had some incredible meals.  Raw fish was always part of the traditional diet, so the sushi was excellent (and no more expensive than anything else, when it's usually the more expensive option).  There was an enormous variety of food, too: we had traditional fish, Thai buffets, burgers, sushi, pasta and pizza, Belgian food, and even a garlic-based meal.  The latter was at a garlic-themed restaurant.  We started with garlic butter and a variety of garlic-based spreads for the bread.  Then garlic chicken and salmon, with garlic potatoes.  And for Stefan, garlic beer, which I swear isn't as bizarre as it sounds.  It's actually good, if you really love garlic.  To finish it all off, garlic ice cream.  Again, not as weird as it could be: it had a lot of lemon and ginger, so the garlic wasn't overpowering.  We didn't do the touristy thing and have the reindeer steak, mostly because it was super-expensive, and because we did have reindeer on pizza and in pasta.  Tastes pretty much like elk, unsurprisingly.

And that's about it, I think.  The pictures are, as usual, available here.  And now, because it's 30C here today and our apartment is a sauna, I'll go back to lying in front of the fan with a popsicle and the Germany-Italy game (in which Italy are, much to my surprise, currently up 2-0).

Oranje

It's Euro 2012 time here, which means that the whole country is football-crazy at the moment.  Buildings have flags draped outside, both the national flag and various orange football flags.  Houses have banners and streamers and other colourful decorations, as you can see here.  This whole row of townhouses, just down the road from us, went in together and decorated their block.  There are flags over the windows, streamers wrapped around and between the streetlamps (which you can barely see behind Stefan), and banners all over the place.

Oh, and yes, Stefan has three crates of beer (and his orange, because I took this picture shortly before the game on Saturday).  That's our little collapsible dolly, which has proven to be quite handy and well worth the investment.  It can haul multiple crates of beer, our currently-broken oven, and even a futon, and it folds up so that you can carry it without it being a pain.  The beer's not full: those are the empties we were taking back to the grocery store, which is where the bottle recycling machine is located.

To be fair, he did buy two more cases, but the grocery store is very smart and put Heineken on sale this week.  Heineken is smart too, and has replaced its usual green bottlecaps with bright orange.  They're not the only ones: there's orange Pringles, and M&Ms, and donuts, and (bizarrely) yogurt.  I get the others, because that's sports-watching food, but yogurt?

And, as usual, the TV commercials have gotten into the spirit.  There are the normal patriotic commercials, including an excellent beer ad in which the beer caps sing the Dutch national anthem.  But there's also a particularly obnoxious series of ads from one of the energy companies, with the overall message that "if you don't switch to our energy company and get the free at-home beer tap we're offering, your husband will leave you for a Ukrainian woman."  I kid you not: you can see it here (although it's possibly not safe for work), and you don't really need to understand the Dutch for it to make sense.  Classy.

Finally, because I get asked this all the time: the proper name for the country is the Netherlands, but the football team is often called Holland.  Technically, Holland is only two of the twelve provinces; it would be like telling people from Alberta that they're from Ontario.  But when it's football time, everyone's suddenly from Holland.  I think it just chants better :)

Now, if only they could win a game...

Guest Post: Stefan does St. Petersburg

Hello everyone,

So I am guest blogging today about my trip to St. Petersburg.  The conference was good but I’ll restrict myself mostly to general interest/touristy things.

It is really a city of contrasts.  In the city centre, it is hard to imagine that it was a Soviet city.  They have put huge amounts of money into refurbishing (at least the facades).  Also, it is incredibly unique architecture because it was one of the first planned cities.  It is only a little more than 300 years old but many of the buildings in the centre are 150-250 years old.  Peter the Great set it up as his capital – technically it was still Swedish territory, but possession is 9/10ths and all – and he had entire sections designed by the same architect.  Their brief was something like: build me a new Paris (and add some canals for fun).  So if you’ve ever been to Paris, imagine the wide boulevards and blocks of buildings in the same design and then multiply that to full city scale.  It’s really difficult to capture in photographs.  Unlike other cities where the images are cherry picked from a dissimilar background, the buildings I show are surrounded by buildings that are architecturally similar (see below for an 'average' canal facing view).  As the tour guide said, it’s like living in a museum.

 

There is a lot of money in St. Petersburg but also poverty.  It is really a two-tier system.  When I asked in the hotel about taking the metro they looked at me strangely as though: ‘you are wealthy enough to travel, therefore you clearly shouldn’t take public transport’.  The metro is built very deep (as it is built on a swamp!) and not terribly effective for inner city travel.  Also it is quite old: Soviet era station design and Soviet era trains.  The lights on the metro flicker and go out as you come into the station and you’re always glad when the brakes don’t fail despite making horrible noises.

At dinner one night, a Russian told us a joke about the relationship between Russians and Italians:  Russians are tragic Italians and Italians are comic Russians.  As crazy as it sounds, it works quite well.  For example: a) the only thing they can organize is a convoys for big shots, b) women are required to wear 6 inch heels (actually, I was told that some companies require them as part of the dress code), c) it is a very ostentatious culture (e.g. the lobby of my hotel was all marble and leather couches and the mattress felt like a $20 IKEA job), and d) they love archaic paperwork (see the visa application form.  Note especially the insufficient number of spaces for answers, especially for open-ended questions like ‘list all countries you've visited in the last 10 years’ in 3 lines. Also, I luckily don't have specialized skills in WMDs!)

 

On an unrelated note, I always enjoy a good story about funny taxes (though perhaps not so unrelated as the Italians also have their fair share of strange taxes).  Here are three.  First, there was a tax under Catherine the Great if your house was insufficiently colourful.  One aristocratic family intentionally built a dark grey house, just to show that they could afford to pay any tax that was thrown at them.  Second, under Peter the Great there was an attempt to enact a more European style among the elites.  Part of this was to get away from the long beards, typical of the Orthodox tradition.  So he mandated beardlessness against the penalty of – you guessed it – a beard tax.  If you had a beard you had to wear this special medallion around your neck which showed you had paid your beard tax.  Finally, this tradition continues to modern times.  At the Hermitage museum, the director is fond of maintaining a gaggle of stray cats in one of the courtyards.  (Incidentally, whenever he gets too many he places an ad in the newspaper saying: ‘Free cats, come to the Hermitage.’)  To pay to feed the cats there is a ‘voluntary’ contribution program among the little old ladies who sit in the museum rooms.  But if you refuse to pay you are socially ostracized, so they have, in effect, a cat tax.

While I said above that the city was not at all Soviet feeling, it was interesting to see how many things have stayed the same from imperial to communist to oligarchic.  For example, in terms of education.  The Russians have a strong tradition of boarding schools with intense and specialized training.  So starting from 10 years old, children are enrolled as ballerinas, soldiers, etc.  In the pictures, you can see an image of a pelican with its chicks against a yellow background.  This was at the site of a ‘boarding school’ that Catherine the Great setup.   She believed strongly that parents were a bad influence on children so even aristocratic children should be isolated from their parents during their education.  For the lower classes?  This is where the pelican comes in.  In the Russian tradition, pelicans are thought to be the only birds that can feed their young with their own flesh.  So it is a symbol of parental sacrifice.  It represents the choice that parents had to make in order to enroll their children at the ‘boarding school’.  So serfs (basically slaves) could come by and drop their kid off to get a free education and then citizenship.  The catch?  You had to load the kid into a basket to anonymously transfer him (I’m not sure if it was for girls too) and never see him again.  

Finally, I was on the lookout for unique Soviet gear.  Having seen lots before in Berlin, I thought it would be easy to find.  There certainly were many people selling ‘authentic  Soviet’ clothing.  Just from looking at it, I was 99% sure it was mass produced modern rip-offs.  Then a guy asked me to look at his ‘real Soviet hats’.  The color options were: black, brown, red, modern Russian flag (red, white, and blue stripes), and pink.  I’m still unclear on which divisions of the Soviet army wore pink hats.

If you’re interested, there are more stories in the captions of the pictures.

Signing Off,

Stefan