Andy went to Croatia this week to attend a conference and returned with several varieties of Croatian chocolate. I asked Jana how she felt the Croatian chocolate compared with the Belgian chocolate we bought in Bruges the week before. Without any hesitation she responded that the Belgian chocolate was better. I would have to agree, but I wonder what Andrej would think....
Conspiracies: October 2005 Archives
For my final full day in the De Pijp neighborhood (I'm going to spend my final night in Amsterdam at the airport hotel tomorrow), we took a side trip the "cheese town" of Alkmaar, a thirty minute train ride from Amsterdam.
Jana had been here earlier but had spent the entire trip, apparently, at an outlet store shopping for clothes. This time, we decided to visit the town proper first (although there was a return to the outlet store later). It is a little out of season, so the cheese market was closed. Instead we walked through the calm streets and canals of town.
Andy and I had lunch at an outdoor cafe while Jana looked after Karsten who had refused to leave toy store filled with toy trains. I ordered a sandwich of raw beef. It was very good, but I am still worried about the foolishness of eating raw meet just before making the long trip back home.
After lunch, Jana headed back to the outlet store while Karsten looked for more toys. I wandered over to the local Media Markt, a sort of Circuit City or Best Buy but twice as big. I may be off on my currency conversions, but even given the extremely weak state of the dollar, prices seemed very reasonable. I passed through rows of plasma televisions, DVD players, computers and computer accessories, movies, and music. Returning to such close proximity to electronic gadgets left me feeling refreshed and energized. An English group (I never did figure out who) played a short live set and then started signing records.
I worked my way through the Top 10 CD list, looking for Dutch names to add to my collection of local music from places I visit. The top slot was occupied by the still inexplicably popular Robbie Williams, whose new album is being featured all over the city at music stores, book stores, even department stores. Andre Hazes's (the statue guy) collection of greatest hits was there, and I made sure to pick it up. The CD in second place, while all in Dutch, sounds like it is a children's CD, so I don't think I will be playing that one very much. The final CD I purchased was an English language album from a singer with a very Dutch name--I think that counts as legitimate addition--but I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet.
After the Anne Frank house, Jana wanted to visit the Our Lord in the Attic church in the heart of the red light district. This is a small church built into a 17th century canal house at a time when the dominant protestant faith forbade the public practice of Catholicism. In addition to the church, the canal house turned museum showcased an authentic recreation of a traditional 17th century home. This was one of the most unusual museums around and also one of the most interesting.
Jana had mysteriously "forgotten" to bring her museum card and didn't want to spend any money on a ticket that she could get for free. So while I wandered through the house, she spent an hour exploring the surrounding neighborhood.
On Friday, Jana ditched the kids and we left for an early morning visit to the Anne Frank house. We had wandered by on the very cold and raining Monday before and found a queue running around the block. We hoped that getting there early would help us avoid the lines.
We were able to walk right up to the ticket counter and enter the museum. It took about an hour to walk through the small, unfurnished rooms. Quotations from the diary painted on the walls gave context to the different rooms while small displays scattered throughout gave more details.
The somewhat forced progression of the tour made it hard to get a full sense of the layout of the building. We proceeded through the main office building, climbing behind the bookcase that concealed the entrance to the secret annex, and then zigzagged through the different rooms where the eight stayed hidden for two years.
At the end of the tour, there was a new exhibit that tried to explore the limits of controls on freedoms and privacy. A short video would introduce some rule or law from around the world. After a brief analysis, the audience was polled for its view on whether the law should be enforced. I noticed that the views of the crowd tended to be fairly liberal--except for questions involving the rights of neo-nazis to protest or for people to be allowed to buy Mein Kampf, for which the audience tended to overwhelming support a ban.
By the time we left, a queue had already formed around the block. Getting there early was a good call.
How can I explain the mystery that is Andre Hazes? Let me begin with my first introduction to the enigmatic Dutch folk singer. Just down the street from the apartment, along the Albert Cuypstraat market is a statue of a man holding a microphone and singing. The statue gets a lot of attention. Every day, people leave flowers at the statues feet and there is almost always someone hanging around, taking photographs of the status.
Taking note of the name inscribed on the statue, I tried to find information about this person. I found the singer's web site fairly easily, but it was of course in Dutch and completely undecipherable to me.
A little more googling revealed an article in broken English reporting on the unveiling of the statue. Apparently Andre Hazes was a local from the De Pijp neighborhood and at an early age had sung in the Albert Cuyp market, so the placement of the statue was significant. The statue was unveiled just a few weeks ago to commerate the one year anniversary of the singer's death. His funeral was held in a 50,000 seat arena packed with fans and broadcast live on national television.
This was enough local history for me to decide to pick up a CD if I ever ran across one. A few days later in Alkmaar I found a 2 CD compilation of Andre Hazes' greatest hits. After listening to a few of the songs, I can't say that I'm a fan of the music. But this will definitely be a memorable addition to my music collection.
Karsten had been demanding to go see Madagascar all week and Jana finally relented, although I'm not sure that Karsten really understood, or cared, that the movie would be in Dutch. So while Jana took her new bike to the movie theater, I headed to the Museumplein to visit the Van Gogh museum.
The walk to the museum district was much more pleasant this time. After five days of depressing rains, the day before had seen a break in the bad weather and it was actually sunny today. I stopped for a moment to wander through the park in front of the museums and take a few pictures.
The Van Gogh museum was impressive. With over 200 pieces, they have a good overview of the different phases of Van Gogh's life. The audio tour claimed to have commentary on over 90 pieces, which kept me busy for some time.
The first floor of the permanent collection divided his life into half a dozen or so different phases. The other floors contained a smattering of Van Gogh's works along with those of some of his contemporaries. There was also a small collection of pieces by English artists on loan from the Rijksmuseum while it undergoes restoration. There was also a temporary exhibit geared toward children featuring paintings of animals that seemed oddly out of place.
After leaving the museum, I wandered up through the Leidseplein to take some more pictures as I wandered toward the city center. I eventually stumbled upon the main shopping street and followed it out the the Muntplein tram stop, easy enough to find again when I was more in a mood for shopping.
The first wi-fi router burned up in a firestorm of unconverted voltage and burning plastic. The second wi-fi was a proper European model that understood local electrical currents, but failed to stay powered on for more than twenty or thirty seconds at a time. Finally, the third (a replacement for the nonfunctioning previous unit) appears to be working.
I'm severely backlogged on blog entries. More to follow later this evening. If the new wi-fi system lasts through dinner, that is.
Dr. Brain brings up an important point. In examining the differences of products I need to look beyond the size and packaging and also look for differences in ingredients. If I can trust my mastery of Dutch enough to decipher the ingredients list for the Benelux version of Coca Cola, it looks like it does use sugar instead of corn syrup.
Of course, I wouldn't trust my knowledge of Dutch to be able to read signs in English. I was at a one of those take out places that is so popular here where you can buy hamburgers and various related mystery products from vending machines. They didn't have a coke vending machine, so I had to go to the counter to order one. I was pretty happy with my request (very terse, don't say too much or they will notice the incredibly bad accent), but then the guy asked whether I wanted a can or a bottle. These were very long, complicated words that didn't match up to anything recognizable in English. So I just stood there with a blank look on my face until I just clumsily blurted out, "English?".
I'm not sure I can really taste the difference yet. Yes, it does taste different, but I don't know if it is enough of a difference that cannot be explained by differences in the size of the container or the temperature at which it is served (things don't seemed to be chilled as cold as they are in the States). But I will continue to drink until I notice a difference.
About 15 years ago, my parents had one of those old console televisions with basic anolog cable television. The set top box in those days consisted of several rows of clunky push buttons that would still require a little finesse with a sliding wheel to fine tune the channel.
As you can imagine, this was somewhat inconvenient for channel surfing. To remedy this, we attached the cable box to the television with two 25 foot cables. This was enough to allow us to pull the box over to the sofa. We called this contraption "the remote". When I wanted to change the channel, I would ask my brother, sitting on the other side of the sofa, to pass the remote, and he would attempt to heave the box across the distance that divided us.
There is a similar situation with the wi-fi here. A 50 foot ethernet cable runs from the router in Jana's room, continuing down the hallway, hanging precariously over the railway, draping down stairwell, to finally come to rest in the living room below where it is attached to her laptop. Such is the thing that we now refer to as "the wi-fi".
It's not the ideal situation, but it is probably the best that can be accomplished following the great wi-fi debacle of last week. I did find an SSH client on the computer, so I can log in to the servers for some late night site restarts. However, being unable to connect my own computer to the network means that I don't have access to my work email or instant messenger client. Still, that's probably a good thing....
One of the more frustrating things about traveling in Europe is the small differences that inexplicably seem to make a huge difference. Take the bastion of American commercial imperialism that is Coca Cola, which, despite all of the possibilities of Amsterdam, remains my preferred drug of choice.
Back in the States, you can consume Coke in convenient 12oz cans or 20oz bottles. But here on the continent, the metric system rears its ugly head. Instead, one must choos between 0,33L cans or 0,5L bottles. A quick calculation on Google shows that this corresponds to 11,2oz and 16,9oz. Clearly, I am being cheated every time I drink.
For some strange reason, Americans do seem comfortable buying larger quantities of soda in litres, with 1L and 2L bottles readily available. As far as I can tell, here one must be content with the more modest 1,5L size, which still looks absolutely enormous on the shelf in comparison to the other options.
And these drinks are not cheap. Typical venues frequented by tourists can often command 2 euros or more a 0,5L bottle. I found a take out restaurant that will sell bottles for a slightly more affordable 1,60 euros, but even that is still too high. The local grocery store will sell a single bottle for 1,15 euros. Finally, I just broke down and bought a six-pack of bottles from the store for about 4,50 euros, which finally becomes competitive with convenience store prices.
It's been raining every day for the last five days. This is starting to get depressing. If I had wanted rain, I could have stayed in Seattle, comfortably locked away at home with hundreds of channels of television. I hope it clears up soon. My vacation is running out and I still need a day to wander around the city taking pictures of the scenery.
On Monday Jana tried to give me a little fashion makeover. There were a few interesting ideas, but unfortunately the sleek European sizes just do not fit on my American sized body. As we were wandering through the narrow alleys looking for clothing stores--most of the interesting shops in Amsterdam seem to be located on the side streets rather than the more crowded main roads--I must not have been paying a little too much attention to the posters of fashion models in the windows and not enough on the ground. I put my foot forcefully down into a rather deep puddle of water and had to walk around for the rest of the day with completely wet feet.
Before I visited Italy four years ago, I spent several weeks working my way through a teach yourself Italian course. The language is similar enough to Spanish, French, and Latin (each of which I had studied either in high school or at college) that I thought I would be able to master enough to engage in basic conversations.
How wrong I was. People would ask me the time and I would stare blankly, trying to remember how to say 14--if only the Italians weren't on a 24 hour clock I would have fewer numbers to remember. I tried chatting with an attractive clerk at a record store, asking for her recommendations of current popular music, but only badly formed fragments of Spanish would come out. Spanish may be close to Italian, but for Italians that haven't studied the language for some time it is very much a foreign language.
My trip to The Netherlands was planned rather hastily at the last minute, but I still left myself some time to learn some basic language skills. Once again, I failed miserably. This time, I feel myself starting to formulate phrases in German, which I studied for two years in college. Dutch shares a lot in common with German, but the two languages feel further apart than Italian and Spanish.
At least I've learned most of the letter sounds, although I still get a little confused by the proper pronunciation when three or four vowels strung together with no consonants in sight.
I've been trying to teach Jana how to say "gracht", a common suffix on tram stops--I think it means canal or something. Not that I know how to say it properly, but it's fun to string the guttural sounds together.
Sometimes I think Google may be a little too smart for its own good. Here in The Netherlands, if you try to go to www.google.com you are instead redirected to the local www.google.nl. Thanks, Google, but that's not what I asked for. Yes, geocoding is cool, but when I want to go to the main English site, I expect to be taken there. If I had wanted a Dutch search engine, I could have found it easily enough.
After about a week of being irritated with this, I stopped to scan through the Google home page. Google pages aren't that busy, of course, but when the words come at you in a language that you don't understand, even a minimalist page can be intimidating.
Finally, I noticed a little link at the bottom for Google in English. Clicking on this restores www.google.com to its normal English self. Only with a bit of a twist. Now there's a link to undo this change and take me back to the Dutch version.
Most of the stores and many of the restaurants in Amsterdam are closed on Sunday. Andy, Jana, Karsten, and Britta wanted to go to the park to break in their new bicycle. I decided to head up to tourist central at Dam square to pass away a few hours.
I walked up and down a many of the side streets between the Dam and Centraal station, grabbing a bite to eat here and there. I didn't have enough time to try some Belgian fries while in Belgium, so I had to settle for the next best things, Flemish fries in Amsterdam. I have to question the thinking of the people who decided to name their food chain "Manneken Pis". For those of you unfamiliar with Dutch, this translates roughly "pissing boy" and is a reference to the infamous statue in Brussels, which also serves as the restaurant's logo. In front of the stand, there is a six foot plastic replica of a cone of fries, which, as it turns out, is fairly close to actual size. I made the mistake earlier in the week of ordering a large, and could barely hold the fries in my hand. I had to throw out the rest of them after eating only about a third of the fries, which was actually much more than I should have eaten. This time I made a much wiser choice and bought a medium.
As I was finishing up my fries, it started to rain. It soon became clear that this would be another heavy rain, so I headed into a souvenir store to pass the time away. At first, I occupied myself with the typical souvenirs, looking at shirts, and wooden shoes, and Delft windmills. This got boring, so I traveled back further in the store to the drug paraphenelia souvenirs. After a while, I briefly passed through the sex souvenirs, but these were rather offensive and I finally decided it was better to walk back out into the rain.
Eventually the rain died down and I made my way to another souvenir shop that I had found earlier in the week. This one had a selection of wooden shoes big enough for me to wear. I spent some time trying to decipher the sizing chart. I wear a slightly unusual size of shoe, so it took me some time to compare the American, British, and European sizes marked on my shoe label to the recommended wooden shoe size. I opted to buy at the upper end of the range, figuring that a wooden shoe wouldn't have quite the same amount of stretch that you would find in a leather shoe. I also picked up a Delft tile painted to look like a Vermeer piece for Jana, who seemed quite interested in the Vermeer paintings at the Rijksmuseum.
This was quite enough adventure for the day. I jumped on a tram and headed back to the apartment, where I was forced to model my new shoes. I expect photos will show up on Jana's Flickr stream any day now. The shoes fit fairly well, I suppose. They were a bit tight to slip on, but a little too loose once my feet were in, but this can probably be corrected with a bit of padding.
It is interesting to note that the French would call these wooden shoes "sabots", and that disgruntled factory workers wearing them, known as saboters, would sometimes express their displeasure by throwing their shoes into the factory machinery, thereby committing sabotage. I am now ready, then, to fully participate in the next revolution.
On Saturday, Jana and I took a day trip to Bruges, which Andrej had recommended. It was a long day. We left at 11:30 a.m. and didn't get back until 12:30 a.m.
The journey was fairly smooth, although there were a few exciting moments. After buying our tickets at the station (and nearly wiping out our combined cash because they don't accept credit cards at the ticket counter), we had to rush to the platform because the next train was scheduled to leave within five minutes. The directions the ticket agent gave us were a little off, and we looped around the station a few times before finally arriving at the platform with no more than a minute to spare.
With the rush to get to the train, we didn't have enough time to find any travel guides or even understand our itenary enough to know when we were supposed to transfer. The tickets said the journey was via Roosendaal, but when the conductor checked our tickets, she told us to get off at Antwerp and then take the train on the other side of the platform. So we nervously let Roosendaal fade into the distance before pulling up to the Antwerp Centraal satation. There was in fact another train waiting on the other side of the platform when we arrived, but the signs made no mention of Bruges. We stepped on board to see if anyone knew where the train was going. Luckily, there was an electronic sign on board that listed out the stops. This was an intercity train, and would make 8 of its 9 stops before ariving at Bruges.
There was an older couple from Bellingham sitting next to us on the train. Jana was able to reminisce about her time in Bellingham, while I tried to pass the time reading through a borrowed guide book.
We arrived in Bruges at about 2 p.m., bought a map from the information desk, and walked the 20 minutes into the center of town, stopping for lunch at a small cafe along the way. After walking around the main square, we decided to climb up the belfry.
The signs warn that there will be 363 steps to the top. Numbers like that never make much sense to me. The first few dozen steps are no problem at all. They are even easier to climb than the stairs leading up to Jana's apartment. But after a while my smug thoughts turned to despair, as the steps continue going up, and up, and up, and up.
There are a few places along the stairs where a placard shows your current position and far left your have to climb. Fortunately, I didn't notice any of these until we had made it to 300 steps. By then I felt we had gone too far to return. Had I noticed one of these signs at around 150, I might have just given up and turned back around right there.
The view from the top was pretty spectacular. It had started to rain, so there was a nice cool, wet breeze flowing through the tower that helped refresh me. After finally regaining my breath and fully checking out the scenery of town far below, we turned to begin the long trek down the stairs. As we turned to leave, the bells behind began a deafening and quite unexpected ringing.
By the time we reached the bottom, it was late enough in the day that all the museums were just about closed. We had time to check out a Rodin exhibit that featured reproductions of the work of the arist as well as information on the techniques used to create brass moldings.
After this, we wandered around the town, stopping in the occasional shop, and pausing to take pictures of the scenery. Jana played art director, identifying scenes and angles for me to photograph. We found an interesting looking restaurant that didn't open until 6 p.m.
To kill the the last half hour or so before the restaurant opened, Jana would pop into the odd shop to check something or another out, I didn't really understand most of it. I made my way to a take out stand and ordered a Belgian waffle smothered in Nutella. This was maybe not the best thing to do before dinner, but it was very tasty.
After dinner, we walked back to the train station and began the ride home. The train ride back was just as smooth as the one coming in, although the first train was packed with people for the first few stops. We couldn't find two seats next to each other until about half way back to Antwerp.
Jana wanted to see the photographs I had taken and finally demanded that I hand over the camera when we boarded the train for Amsterdam. Fortunately, I think most of the shots turned out fairly well.
With nearly seven hours on the train, an hour and a half for dinner, and wandering around for the afternoon, there was plenty of time for talking. Maybe a little too much time. I think my mouth is still a little dry from all the talking, and I'm worried that I may have accidentally revealed a few too many of my dark secrets.
On Friday Jana and I went to the Rijksmuseum. I think she felt compelled to make sure that I got a little bit of culture while on vacation.
The museum was close enough to walk to. However, not long after we left it began to rain fairly hard. We took shelter for a few minutes in a cafe to let the rain to die down a little. This helped, but even sharing a small umbrella, we arrived at the museum fairly wet.
The Rijksmuseum is currently undergoing a multiyear renovation that has closed most of the museum. One wing remains open with a sort of "best of" collection of pieces. This was probably the best way to experience the museum, just the classics without all of the fluff.
The museum felt a little too specialized, featuring mostly paintings and artwork from the Dutch and Flemish masters of the 17th century. In my mind, however, this is when art was art and artists had talent.
I was flipping through the channels on the television and stumbled across some sort of disaster movie, I think. There had just been an earthquake in Yellowstone, and reporters were grilling the officials about whether the earthquake had been induced by a volcano. I'm sure Erik knows all about the consequences of a volcanic eruption in Yellowstone.
I didn't get to watch much more than a minute or two of the movie. Karsten came downstairs to watch some more Harry Potter, and Andy wanted to go out to an, uhm, internet cafe to check email.
Jana finally did get an internet connection installed earlier this week, but it seems to be tied to the MAC address of her laptop, so my laptop remains a useless heap of very stylish metal.
I was going to try to configure a wi-fi access point to get around this, but the router was accidentally plugged into the wall without a voltage converter (I guess there are still some electronics devices that are shipped with power supplies capable of running anywhere in the world). A quick flash of sparks and the lingering smell of burning plastic put a quick end to this plan.
I signed up for O'Reilly's EuroOSCON conference on a whim, but ended up having a really great time there. Well, I got a lot out of the conference sessions. Not being a supercelebrity internet personality like Erik, I mostly just sulked in the hallways like a lost puppy instead of taking advantage of the opportunity to network with some of the great names in the open source community. But there were a lot of excellent presentations and I left with a lot of things to think about.
Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeir Hansson recognized me and we spent a little time chatting--when he wasn't interrupted by others wanting to talk to him--about the soon to be released 1.0 version of Rails and some ideas of things that I could contribute to the framework if I ever stopped being lazy and decided to do something positive with my life.
David was nice enough to feature screenshots of our three websites as part of his keynote presentation on Thursday. I wonder if we got any traffic from the mention.
I attended the conference as a sort of post modern geek. While everyone else seemed to be crammed in the halls, leaching off the free wi-fi or exchanging snide comments about the presenters over IRC, I came without electronics of any kind. Not even my watch was digital.
I really intended to write a series of blog entries about the sessions, and kept pretty detailed notes for the first day or so. But then I just got lazy and gave up. So this is all you will get.
Yay. I just checked my email and saw that my new 60 GB video iPod shipped on Monday. There's a good chance it has arrived by now, only I'm 5,000 miles away and can't really enjoy it.
Two hours left before I leave for the airport. It's finally time to take a shower, empty the dryer, and dig through through the (hopefully dry) laundry to find some shirts and a few pairs of matching socks to pack.
My brother has already emailed me back expressing his extreme displeasure with the iPod situation. Not that I'm any happier. This is my first trip in years that I will travel without my trusted iPod by my side.
This is perhaps the least planned trip I've been on. I have no idea what to expect, and I don't really have enough time to think about it right now.
I hate packing for trips. I have been coping with this problem by packing less and less and time goes on. There's really very little that I need that can't be easily purchased at the destination. Mostly I just make sure that all of my electronics are charged.
It's almost 10 p.m. now. The shuttle will be picking me up in just over 12 hours.
I have not yet begun to pack. For the past four hours I have been trying to psyche myself into the mood but without success. I have managed to do a little housekeeping. The dishes have been washed (I wonder how long they have been sitting out dirty because, really, I never eat at home), a final load of laundry is in the dryer, and I have managed to uncover a bit of counter space that hasn't been visible for several months now.
I'm just too tired now to go on. I think I'll just throw whatever I can find into a suitcase tomorrow morning and let that be that.
I was just preparing for my trip tomorrow by ripping the last few CDs I purchased and downloading them to my iPod. Things were going great until a message popped up saying that some songs couldn't be downloaded because the software version was too old.
I fired up the iPod updater, and sure enough, there was an iPod software update available. Foolishly, I decided to upgrade. The upgrade completed, but then nothing. I frantically push on buttons, spin wheels, but the think is lifeless.
All is not lost. I have a new video iPod on the way, and the iTunes phone (complete with airplane mode) will ensure that I have at least a litle music with me. But the 100 song limit on the phone means I won't be able to copy over the Teach Yourself Dutch CDs I've been listening to.
My brother is going to be so disappointed. He thought he was going to be getting my old iPod when I returned. I guess that won't happen now.
