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.