Amsterdam

Despite the fact that we're home for Christmas now, I still haven't gotten around to putting up the photos from our trip to Amsterdam the weekend of November 20th.  Enjoy... and merry Christmas!

Bikes, Bikes Everywhere

I've been meaning to take a picture of my bike for the last two months, but somehow I've never quite gotten around to it.  So here it is:

And yes, for those of you who think you're funny, it is indeed a children's bike, thank you very much.  The average height for women here is 5'7".  At not quite 5'0", the adult ones were way too high for me to jump up onto the seat.  So I bought a much-cheaper kids' bike inside.  Not that you can really tell, except for my obnoxiously pink seat cover (they only had two patterns, and mysteriously, Stefan didn't want neon pink, but he did want a dry seat in the ever-present rain).

The saddlebags on the back fit a surprising amount.  Each one holds about the contents of a reusable shopping bag: one full shopping basket fills both.  That's about the amount I'd be able to carry on foot, and once it's in the bags and you're going, you can't feel the weight at all.  And I just need to look for the bright green straps to find mine in a long line of them.

I'll admit, before this, I hadn't been on a bike in at least five years.  And I certainly hadn't ridden one regularly since I was maybe 15.  So the first few trips were wobbly and jerky and weaving.  Stefan thought it was hysterically funny.  But it's been two months now, riding pretty much every day, and I'm much more stable, much more comfortable with the bike lanes, and much less likely to panic when pedestrians or mopeds or trucks or small children come down the road.  I even went on the bike in a skirt once, which is somehow both easier and more difficult than it looks.  It's tricky getting on the bike in a ladylike fashion, but once you get going, it's no problem at all.

That being said, there's no possible way I will be attempting any of the following things, all of which I have seen people do on bikes, all of them multiple times:

• Bike while talking on a cell phone
• Bike while texting
• Bike while holding an umbrella
• Bike while smoking (I've seen this with both cigarettes and, yesterday, a pipe)
• Bike while carrying a large plant (I'm not talking little potted plant here, I'm talking four-foot-tall fern)
• Bike while carrying a bookcase (I've seen this done with a flat-packed box and with a fully-built bookcase wrapped around the guy's body)
• Bike with three children perched on my bike
• Bike while pulling another empty bike alongside me
• Perch precariously over the saddlebags, without holding onto anything, while someone else pedals
• Bike while holding a case of beer behind me with one hand (Stefan is determined to learn this)
• Bike while holding hands (I even watched a couple turn a corner without letting go)

I will consider learning to bike in high heels, as it wouldn't really make that much of a difference, except for the on and off part and making sure you don't wedge the pedal in there and snap your heel.  I also really should master the "bike very very slowly in a crowd of pedestrians."  That'll come.  I can now bike very very slowly (without stopping or taking my feet off the pedals) to wait for cars to pass.  Weaving in and out of pedestrians looks much more difficult.

I'm getting used to having my bike as a method of transportation now.  It helps that it's a flat country: it's not Calgary, where I'd be roaring down hills or struggling up them.  There are bike lanes on almost all the roads, except the little side streets, where there are so few cars anyway.  There are bike stands everywhere, and people just lock them up wherever they need to be when there aren't.  There are more bikes than people in the Netherlands, apparently, and you can really tell.  They're everywhere, and it's a pain to get around without one.

Happy Goose Day!

Last weekend, Stefan and I went to visit his aunt and uncle in Speyer, Germany:

We took the train down, in about five hours: it took three transfers in all, including one that required sprinting, and one in Cologne/Koln where everyone was dressed up like Hallowe'en on crack.

On Friday, Stefan's uncle took us to walk around Heidelberg, which is nearby, and see the castle, which is very, very high up, especially now that I'm used to everything being flat.  It was nice to see proper hills again, though.  I miss mountains.  In the evening, after dinner, his 21-year-old cousin took us to the local brewery for a beer, then to an Irish pub (which have apparently invaded the planet, and look the same no matter where you are), then to an after-hours club where they were not so strict on the no-smoking laws (and I'm getting too old for that).  My spoken German is iffy at best, beyond bitte and danke and some simple things, but I retained a fair amount (even with the Dutch confusing it all), and I can understand more than half the conversation at normal speed.  I was quite impressed with myself.

On Saturday, his uncle wandered around Speyer with us to see the old cathedral and the medieval city.  Eindhoven's nice, but the city is about the same age as Calgary.  The oldest buildings are from about 1900.  The roads are wider than elsewhere in Europe, and while the houses are lovely brick and steep tiled roofs, I'm not turning corners and tripping over thousand-year-old cathedrals.  I love very old cities, where I can walk and think about people walking down the same streets a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago.  Hazard of my profession, I suppose.

In the afternoon, we went to the Historical Museum.  I like museums.  Shocking, I know.  They didn't allow pictures inside, which I hate, so I have no pictures to show you.  I can tell you, though.  The visiting exhibition at the moment was Amazons.  I tell you, it's like they were waiting for me.  I expected a few vases and such, maybe some armour, and the Greek myths.  In the end, it was one of the best-designed exhibits I've ever seen, with a lovely narrative that kept me happy while still being clear if one wasn't a classicist.  It started off with the vases and hoplite armour and everything I expected.  Hercules stealing the girdle, Amazons battling Greeks, etcetera, etcetera.  Then you turned a corner and you were into Scythian grave goods from female cavalry warriors from the steppe past the Black Sea (think the southwestern part of the USSR).  You went further and further back in the Scythian grave goods until there was a burial, clearly a female warrior, that predated any Greek mentions of Amazons.  It was very well-designed.  Start with the myth, then give more and more information, and end with the coup de grace.  Loved it.

We were running out of time, so the only part of the museum we saw besides the Amazons was the part with all the Roman stuff, naturally.  Since Speyer started as a military outpost before becoming a town, it was mostly daily life stuff.  Pots and glassware and axeheads and votive inscriptions and coins and scales and such.  The stuff I love, because it drives it home that they weren't just characters in a book: these were real people who ate and laughed and shopped and lived.

That weekend was the feast of St. Martin (which is why we went on that particular weekend), so we went to a vineyard with Stefan's aunt and uncle, their kids, and some family friends of theirs.  It's traditional to eat goose for St. Martin, so the vineyard had a big goose buffet.  Goose soup, goose pate, roasted goose, the usual potatoes and salads and cabbage and chestnuts.  Neither of us had tried goose before: we highly recommend it, although I suspect that grabbing a Canada goose wouldn't give you such nice meat (also, those things are mean).  It's darker and moister than turkey, but less greasy than duck.  Excellent.

We spent most of the day on Sunday travelling home.  Again, five hours and four trains, plus the walk from the station.  It's a long trip, but it's a much more pleasant way to travel than plane.

Finally, if you want to check them out, the pictures are here.  I don't know what I would have done if I had moved here before digital cameras.  Ordered film in bulk, I suppose.

Light and Glow

Short history lesson: Eindhoven was little more than a village until Philips built a lightbulb factory here at the beginning of the 20th century.  They are, as a result, obsessed with light.  There are offices all over town with front desks that glow, and even change colour (they are particularly fond of colour-changing light).

This week is the Glow Festival.  I don't know what I expected.  Christmas lights, or something like that.  It was something rather different.  They used projectors to play with light and buildings and the city.  I'm not usually a huge fan of this sort of art project, where the city itself becomes the canvas, but this was really awesome.  They've got a movie about Icarus on the side of city hall, using a statue that's attached to the building as part of the show.  They've got walls projected so that you feel like you're inside a television screen, with people sitting on a couch watching you.  They've got windows illuminated so that you can see dancing figures inside tall office buildings.  They've got churches covered in patterns of light.  They've got every building in the old market square illuminated and moving.

We went on a tour on Sunday night, as one of the expat associations was holding a weekend of events for foreign professionals living in Eindhoven.  So we went to a club on Friday night (then an Irish pub when that got too crowded), and to an art museum and dinner on Sunday before our tour of the lights.  Some of the photos are from last night, because we went back to see the light show inside one of the churches.

I took what photos I could, but it's hard to do in the dark with a little point-and-shoot.  You'll have to take my word for it... it's cool.

Maastricht

Just to show you how bad I've been at posting, with moving and everything that we've been doing for the last few weeks, here are the photos from our visit to Maastricht earlier in October.  Stefan had a PhD course there for two weeks, and as the course was paying for his hotel room, I opted to come up and visit for the last couple days so that I could see the city.

And take several hundred photos of buildings, of which I've only posted a small selection.  I've started putting the pictures on Picasa instead of straight on the blog, when there are lots of them: I think it'll be easier for me.  Enjoy!

New Apartment

Wow, I really haven't gotten around to posting in while.  October was a crazy, crazy month.  I do have pictures backlogged, but just haven't had time to post them, with moving and all the related stress.  More this week, I swear.

But we're done now, and settled into our new place, which is far, far bigger than the tiny little box.  Take a look.

Utrecht

Stefan's birthday was the weekend before last, so on Saturday, we took the day and went to Utrecht, which is where he lived the last time he was in the Netherlands.

Check out the impressive quantities of bikes.  As I've now managed to find a bike small enough for me (which was, unsurprisingly, a problem, since the average Dutch woman is 5'7" and I am... not), and successfully ride it without falling off, I've got more things to say about the bikes later this week when I post pictures of it.

Some of the bikes have conveniently been relocated into the canals. 

The tower of Utrecht's cathedral.  I like buildings, the older the better, so there are lots of photos of the cathedral.  Lovely, Gothic architecture.

The cathedral garden.  I've seen quite a few gardens like this, that square, perfectly-planted, English-formal garden style, just going past houses in residential areas here in Eindhoven.

This rock was right outside the cathedral.  I couldn't find any little plaque to give me any more information, but it's got that Celtic feel to it, and the writing, which you can see in the bottom picture, is in runes.

Inside the garden portico, there were inscriptions embedded in the walls.  We tried -- and we fiddled with camera settings -- but all we could make out was the medieval German font, not the language.  The stone they used wasn't all that durable, and you can see how much it's been eaten away by five centuries (or less).

One of the benches in the portico.  The scratch marks are where the French soldiers sharpened their bayonets on the hard stone while they were occupying the Netherlands under Napoleon.  There are a number of Dutch words I've noticed that derive from French roots rather than German, which you would expect from a Germanic language.

The cathedral door.  It's a metal-cast collage of articles relating to St. Martin, after whom the cathedral is named, and really artsy, especially for a cathedral door.

One of the buildings belonging to the university.  This one is attached to the cathedral wall, but they're spread out all over central Utrecht.  Even in Eindhoven, which is barely a century old (an infant, by European standards), lots of the houses are built in red brick with contrasting accents, which makes them look like gingerbread houses to me.  I love it.

Stefan in front of the door leading into the cathedral garden.

It's hard to get a picture of it, but the cathedral and the tower aren't actually attached anymore.  That part of the Netherlands went through the Reformation early (while the south, where we are, still celebrates Carnival before Lent), and the church was finished, but not well enough.  Stefan tells me there was a tornado that swept through, taking out the middle part of the church, so that all that's left of a once-cross-shaped cathedral are the top three points of the cross, still connected, and the tower at the base, with a huge empty square in between.

They have very kindly paved the square in cobblestones, but changed the cobblestones to show where the original Roman fort's columns and foundations once stood, at the height of the Empire.

Enough of the cathedral.  As for the rest of Utrecht...

And yes, the man behind me is wearing a pink fuzzy bear costume.  We don't know why.

I haven't seen any in Eindhoven, but this is indeed one of the infamous coffeeshops, which my mother has now learned don't just serve coffee.  Apparently, she didn't know that marijuana has been legal in the coffeeshops here for decades.

This was right next to that same canal that the bikes were thrown into.  I like the... realism.  That's a cafe table right behind her, so you could have a beer pressed right up against her if you so desired.

Their tagline was so good that I wanted to go buy a laptop case from these people.

Can you spot the reason I took this picture?

These barrel organs are still quite popular in Utrecht, apparently.  We saw quite a few of them.  Stefan wanted one for his birthday, which definitely wouldn't fit in the box.

And that was it for Utrecht, for that day, at least.  I've got several years to explore every museum in the country, which is usually what I do when I travel, so I'll save those for later.

Battling the bottle

One of the best parts about being in Europe is the cheap wine.  What would easily cost us $20 at home (and require a separate trip to a liquor store) is in the grocery store, for about four or five euros.  So Friday, we picked up a bottle to have with dinner.

And then the corkscrew broke.

I don't know precisely what happened: I wasn't paying attention.  But this is the aftermath.  The screw part started unwinding, as you can see on the left, and when Stefan tried to open the bottle with it anyway, it snapped off entirely.

And since his stubbornness outweighs his patience, and he considers an incredibly diverse group of items to be "kitchen utensils" (did you know that a hammer and a butter knife can be used to chisel rock-hard brown sugar?), Stefan was determined to defeat the cork.  Any guesses as to how long it took to open the wine bottle?

First, since I had seen this video on YouTube earlier in the summer (and sent it to him because of his propensity to use odd kitchen utensils), he decided to attempt opening the wine bottle with his shoe.

Supposedly, you can nest the bottle in the heel of the shoe and tap it against a wall, and gradually, the cork will work itself out far enough that you can grab it with your fingers.  It looks pretty fast in the video, but he worked at it for quite a few minutes, with two different shoes, and nothing happened.  On to Plan C.

As you can see, Plan C was pliers.  Followed by pliers plus the screw part of the broken corkscrew.  This resulted in extensive cork carnage, cursing, and me standing far enough away that I wouldn't get hit by anything metal or glass if something gave unexpectedly.  It also didn't work, and the remaining two-thirds of the cork worked itself further and further into the bottle neck.

I was still Googling ways of opening wine bottles with corkscrews.  We didn't have a screw and hammer, so he attempted a steak knife, which he hammered into the cork using his wrench.  Shockingly, that didn't work either.  And neither did the screwdriver/wrench combination.  Again, just more cork carnage, and increasingly worrisome splintering sounds coming from the bottle glass.  I'm not so fond of drinking glass shards, I must say.

He then determined that it was going to be easiest to push the cork all the way down into the bottle and live with the tiny cork bits that we'd get in the wine. 

But his only real option was to carefully break part off of the already-breaking bottle neck, so that he could reach the cork.  Hopefully staining as little as possible with red wine (of course it was red).

It worked, though!  Of course, the bottle was useless for those of us who prefer not to drink glass pieces, and since we aren't buying any non-essentials until we find somewhere new to live, we don't own a decanter or anything that would reasonably hold the wine.

Mixing bowl it was.  Of course, we had to finish the bottle that night, because I doubt red would keep well in a mixing bowl... what a terrible sacrifice to make.

In the end, it took a little more than half an hour to get into the wine bottle, with my "assistance," which mainly involved taking these photos (and Googling "champagne bottle" and "sword").

Here you can see the aftermath.  His tools (never thought I'd have to wash red wine off of a wrench), the cork bits (none of which ended up in the wine, amazingly), and the mixing bowl.

Here's what was left of the cork, at the bottom of the bottle.  I really am surprised that we didn't get any little bits of cork in the wine itself, but it tasted very good.

Victorious, in a shirt not sprayed with red wine :)

Livin' in a box

Posting's been sparse this week for a couple of reasons.  First of all, we've both managed to acquire some sort of cold, and second, we're looking for a new apartment, which is much more difficult than it sounds, when you can't read most of the listings, don't know where any of the streets are located, and the real estate system is entirely different than the one you know.  Hopefully, we'll find something soon.

Currently, we're living in the temporary housing on campus.  They gave us a one-year lease, and you can see below why we fought to get out of it.  These are called spaceboxes, and they look like this:

We have two of the little units, because there are two of us (although we think there's a couple down the hall who live together in just one unit).  Each one's about 17 square metres, so we have a total of 34 square metres right now.  That's about 365 square feet, for two people.  It's a touch cramped, to say the least.

And classy, as well.  All the units open directly outside, onto a lovely metal grating.  I'm trying to decide whether it looks more like a Soviet asylum or a Nazi bunker.  Isn't it lovely?

It's not much better inside, as it turns out.  So far as I can determine, every piece of furniture is the absolute cheapest thing they could buy at Ikea.  Definitely student quarters.

The tiny, tiny kitchen.  That's a hot-plate stovetop, which actually seems to be quite common: you can buy the stovetop and the oven separately at the appliance store.  We have no oven, though, so we're very restricted in what we can cook.  Those cabinets, incidentally, are so high up that I can barely grab anything on the bottom shelf, let alone on the top shelves.  And the fridge is just a bar fridge (despite the fact that there's plenty of space for a larger one), so we're grocery shopping about three times a week, because that's about all we can fit in the fridge.  No freezer, of course.

This gives you an idea of how long the apartment is.  The kitchen table would actually seat four comfortably, if you had enough space and chairs.  The bookcase is still mostly empty because our book-filled boxes are stuck in Customs (I estimate that at least half the contents of the boxes are books).  The couch is only a loveseat: even I can't lie down on it.

As for the oranges, they came with the apartment.  From glancing into some of the other units through open windows, they all have fruit art like this.  I've seen other oranges, strawberries, and apples so far.

And this is how narrow the place is.  Enough room for a couch and a desk, and that's all.  That's not actually a computer on the desk: it's our TV hooked up to my desktop to give me a bigger screen, with an external keyboard.  I'm working from home, after all, so I need as nice an environment as possible (i.e., not this).  At least the desk is nice and big, which wouldn't be what I would expect.

Without paying for cable, we automatically get about thirty channels.  This includes two BBCs, CNN, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, National Geographic, two French channels, three German channels, and a bunch of Dutch channels.  Some of the Dutch channels show American programming, subtitled and in the original English (I've got The Big Bang Theory on as I type this).  For free, I'm certainly not complaining about the selection.

Please note the oranges in the bedroom as well.  These are two twin beds pushed together, with the ugliest duvet covers I've ever seen.  There are a couple of wardrobes, and then the bathroom, which is very sad.  The shower's nice and big, which is the only redeeming factor.  There's no bathroom storage at all, which means I got here and immediately spread bottles of hair stuff, contact lens solutions, and other girly bathroom items all over the place.

And that would be the reason why we're looking for a new, less sad apartment that we can actually live in for the full three years.

Mmm... food...

For two reasons, I'm going to start my random thoughts with food.  First, we seem to spend an awful lot of time either talking about food or acquiring food.  Second, those are always the first words I learn in a language while travelling, and Dutch has been no exception.  I swear, I know several hundred words that refer to types of food, but nothing of any practical importance (like "I don't speak Dutch, do you speak English?", which might be useful).  Fortunately, though, much of what's produced for the Netherlands is intended for distribution in Belgium as well, and so lots of the packages have both French and Dutch on them.  Language barrier solved!

The grocery store is small, by my standards.  It's got everything a Canadian grocery store would have, but less selection.  Plus beer and wine, which is far, far cheaper than in Canada (less than a euro for a bottle of beer, and three or four euros for a bottle of wine).  Mostly generics, too, which is fine.  A few things are brand names...

... that we can't get in Canada.  Mmm, orange Fanta.

And brands we can get, but in flavours that are truly bizarre.  These chips do indeed taste like what the label claims.  The pizza one is remarkably addictive, but the ham one is just odd.

The nutritional labels are much clearer, even without speaking the language, and I've seen several with percentages...

Please note that the bacon consists of 96% bacon.  The rest is apparently salt.

But this juice contained 8 oranges (I think) and exactly 46 raspberries.  Or at least I really hope it did.  Otherwise they'll get a strongly worded letter, if I only got 45 raspberries...

Not technically food (as this is the packaging that came with the TV), but check out the "do not suffocate oneself" and "do not put bag on baby's head" symbols.  The man on the left seems to be enjoying himself...

Back to actual food.  This is a stroopwafel.  It consists of two thin waffle cookies with some sort of syrup in between, and it's spectacular.  I would eat them as breakfast every day if I could (because certain people insist that stroopwafels aren't breakfast).  Everything seems to contain copious amounts of butter and/or cheese, which I think is just wonderful.

But I don't see why this is considered breakfast if the stroopwafels aren't.  This is a box of bread sprinkles, as you can tell by the label.  You put butter on your bread, then chocolate sprinkles.  This is apparently both breakfast and lunch.  I promised that I'd try them, but haven't worked myself up to it yet.

I'll just go eat a stroopwafel instead.