18.10.10
Polder piano
9:48 AM | 
Posted by
Maj
I've found three pianos around the city now: one in the Astrophysics Department at Science Park 904, one at the Kriterion café/movie theatre, and one at Polder (a restaurant next to Science Park.) Avi is my duet partner. Adil took this photo of us at Polder on his birthday. :)
22.9.10
...And one more thing, mostly for Loré:
Johan van Bentham and Martin Stokhof, men with rather inviting footsteps:
Long live logic. :)
Bimhuis logic invasion # 38951
Fenner and Kasper. Fenner looks especially pleased because the Bimhuis is so awesome.
Gabriela is incredulous because, yes, the Bimhuis is that awesome.
Not so awesome: forced smiles for Kasper.
Most awesome: Tarek trying and failing at out-classying Maria.
18.9.10
Berlin.
Sylvia and I went to the 2010 Berlin Music Festival last weekend, held at the retired Tempelhof Airport (an amazing venue!) Although the festival ended early both nights it was on, we still had a great time. Some photos:
Something strange: Europeans only know Caribou's latest album (which is alright, but I'm a bigger fan of everything that came before it.) This means they dance like crazy to Swim but stand around like stiffs to Melody Day... lame.
I didn't get to explore Berlin very much, but I plan to go back. (It was nice to be in a German town and understand so much that people were saying around me, but it's a shame my time in the Netherlands dirtied my German. Apparently it happens to native speakers, too: on the train back to Amsterdam, I met a German girl named Lina who worked in an Amsterdam architecture firm for a year, and found that she, too, was mispronouncing all sorts of Dutch words when she got to A'dam, but now mispronounces German words back home. It's worth mentioning that this girl was the bee's knees. She was also coming back from the festival, and she's an architecture student from the Bauhaus design school (how cool is that?!) I'll be showing her around Science Park 904 on Tuesday. :D)
Giant mechanical horse sculpture at the Hauptbahnhof (central station) -- love!
People flying tiny kites in Kreuzberg, near Sylvia's flat. (I'll post a video of them soon.)
Sylvia's bedroom.
Lovely washroom in Sylvia's place.
Sylvia's kitchen.
First night at the show.
Flights!
Sadly, we never got to see Fatboy Slim or 2manydjs perform, but we did catch LCD Soundsystem, Fever Ray, Boys Noize, Soulwax, Caribou, and Hot Chip. Oh, Hot Chip, I love you so.Something strange: Europeans only know Caribou's latest album (which is alright, but I'm a bigger fan of everything that came before it.) This means they dance like crazy to Swim but stand around like stiffs to Melody Day... lame.
I didn't get to explore Berlin very much, but I plan to go back. (It was nice to be in a German town and understand so much that people were saying around me, but it's a shame my time in the Netherlands dirtied my German. Apparently it happens to native speakers, too: on the train back to Amsterdam, I met a German girl named Lina who worked in an Amsterdam architecture firm for a year, and found that she, too, was mispronouncing all sorts of Dutch words when she got to A'dam, but now mispronounces German words back home. It's worth mentioning that this girl was the bee's knees. She was also coming back from the festival, and she's an architecture student from the Bauhaus design school (how cool is that?!) I'll be showing her around Science Park 904 on Tuesday. :D)
6.9.10
Bergen.
What have we here? Health in a bottle? The promise of power levels over 9000? ...Well, only if you can stomach fully fish-flavoured fish oil. NUMMERS.
Sometime in February, I sent Daniel an email to the effect that, despite my weird fascination with Northern Europe, I would never, ever go to Bergen. Sure, Norway may be the land of Nina Twin, gravlax, slashy Os, mountain goats, Notes on Logic and viking secrets, but I swore I'd never visit Erik's city, which is renown for its near-perpetual precipitation. And then -- thank goodness! -- it just sort of happened. After returning to Amsterdam from Dublin for about a day and a half, I was on a plane to Copenhagen and, eventually, to Bergen. :D
Despite our taking a couple of days to do work, Erik and I managed to do quite a bit around the area. The second day I was down, we took a couple of hours to walk around in somewhat groomed wilderness, eating a variety of berries (including blueberries, strawberries and the mysterious ripsbær, which may or may not be red currant), spotting fish, crabs and crayfish, spending quality time with a grey cat reminiscent of Bagheera and assessing the beauty and/or pretentiousness of rose flowers. By the way, roses stink. Ugh.
Erik is inclined to give the cat a gentle scratch; I'm inclined to, uh, give it a swift kick to the face?
The next day, we took a funicular railway up Fløyen, one of the mountains surrounding Bergen. Here's a video I took of us heading up the mountain; you may want to mute it, though, because the soundtrack leaves something to be desired.
Not too shabby.
We walked down Fløyen while eating ice cream, ate hot dogs when we got to the bottom (I had a reindeer sausage, pretty delicious!) and walked around Bryggen (...while eating gelato.) We then visited a couple of university buildings, saw Grieghallen (Bergen is charmingly proud of Grieg) and hit up Nygård Park (Bergen's take on Central Park?) before heading back to the Parmann household in Nesttun, where I passed out in a hammock.
Erik is a sneaky photographer; I am a sappy dolt.
Oh, and hey, d'you know what's better than falling asleep in a hammock? Falling asleep in a hammock AND THEN WAKING UP TO A RIDICULOUS SEAFOOD DINNER. Holy carp.
Ridiculous-like-whoa: three types of fish roe; gravlax, smoked salmon, and some other smoked fish; enough shrimp to feed a small village; eggs, bread, tea, apple juice, sour cream, lemon wedges, sauces and spreads. And finger bowls!
That dinner was not only delicious, but educational. (Come and see me if you need any shrimp shelled in the future.) ;) Actually, nearly every meal we had was great: turkey dinner, improvised beercan chicken, French-style fish soup, moussaka, something like Stephen's couscous salad... and caviar on bread at breakfast. I managed to pick up enough Norwegian to fumble through Erik's mom's recipes and put together some really stupid sentences, usually about fish or target groups (my top language-learning priorities). It was nice to spend some time hanging out with Øyvind (who came to Amsterdam to visit Erik) and Pål (who studied at the ILLC last semester) again, as well as meeting Øystein (another of Erik's friends) and Jonathan (a very, erm, "special" seagull), but above all else, it was great to just spend time around Erik again. ...Even if he dragooned me into buying the larger, fishier bottle of Möller's Tran to prove my manliness. :)
Alright, time for some more photos. Notice that none of these are photos of Bergen in the rain, since it only rained three times while I was in town: on the night of my arrival, on the morning of my departure, and during a short nap I took one afternoon. Indoors. :D
Taken at 6:45am from Anders' (read: my) bedroom window. Lovely everlasting daylight!
Boats near the Parmann boathouse. We started our walk here on my second day in Bergen.
These red Norwegian boathouses have a fancy name I can't recall.
The rose garden we happened upon during our walk.
Cute washrooms at the airport (notice the handicapped person's superhuman bladder... or something.)
5.9.10
Dublin.
Alright, let's do this.
J'ai mon voyage!
After walking down to the Brussels-Midi station with my gigantor suitcase at approximately 3:30 in the morning, I got on a bus which brought me to the "Brussels South" Charleroi Airport (which is about an hour South of Brussels.) I'd never been to an airport which dealt pretty much exclusively with discount flights, nor had I flown RyanAir before. Oh, and hey:
I did something which is (according to Jonas) rather unusual: I paid an extra € 35 to bring a piece of checked luggage with me on a RyanAir flight, since I knew I'd be bringing a load of my own books (along with some from the library) with me to Dublin. Well, it turns out this extra piece of luggage was supposed to be quite light -- 15kg, to be exact (which you make surprisingly quickly when you're lugging around a million philosophy texts, a ton of jewelry (just plain stupid, really...) and the biggest laptop known to man.) When I got to the check-in counter and had my luggage weighed, the woman helping me out was shocked I'd brought -- wait for it -- 24 kilos worth of crap with me, just in my checked luggage. Thankfully, I was able to move some of the heavier stuff from the luggage into my carry-on backpack, but I still ended up being 4 kilos over. That wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that you get charged an extra € 20 per kilo over. So much for my cheap flight!
Camden
Food is also stupidly expensive in Dublin. Consider: David came into town one night. We went to Temple Bar (the entertainment, errr... square?) He bought a shitty hotdog (and I mean shitty. We're talking a-Red-Hot-in-a-bun, $1-IKEA-hotdog shitty) for € 5. I couldn't believe it. I actually had to walk away from the vendor's stand as David was waiting for his food because I couldn't stop laughing. Who the hell pays €5 for a hotdog? No wonder Ireland's a mystery to economists.
Finally, I was super pumped to see there's Tim Hortons coffee in Ireland but THEY DO NOT HAVE FRENCH VANILLA WTF. Nor do they carry Timbits. They do, however, have weird crap which isn't served in Canada. (I can't recall what sort of crap it was, probably because the whole Irish Tim Hortons experience was traumatizing.)
Friends
I'd chosen to go to Ireland largely because I thought I'd be reuniting with Buggle and Pierce (they'd agreed to come visit, after all), so I became more and more bummed out that they were not likely going to make it to Dublin. Thankfully, it wasn't all bad. For those of you who remember that insane story about Kofman and I in Montreal (if you haven't heard the story, remind me to tell you!!)... well, now, it looks like things are totally normal between us. We got along super well despite the fact that we were sharing a room only slightly larger than my container, which came as a huge surprise. And as always, it was nice to really shoot the philosophical shit with him. I even got to contribute to the paper he was presenting (a bit of ethical-political philosophy concerning the West's moral obligations (or the lack thereof) to religious Filipino single mothers), which was uplifting. :) I'm also glad I got to spend some time with David, who turned out to be a decent, likeable guy. It's nice to learn something new. ;)
J'ai mon voyage!
After walking down to the Brussels-Midi station with my gigantor suitcase at approximately 3:30 in the morning, I got on a bus which brought me to the "Brussels South" Charleroi Airport (which is about an hour South of Brussels.) I'd never been to an airport which dealt pretty much exclusively with discount flights, nor had I flown RyanAir before. Oh, and hey:
Do NOT fly RyanAir with sizeable luggage.
REALLY.
I did something which is (according to Jonas) rather unusual: I paid an extra € 35 to bring a piece of checked luggage with me on a RyanAir flight, since I knew I'd be bringing a load of my own books (along with some from the library) with me to Dublin. Well, it turns out this extra piece of luggage was supposed to be quite light -- 15kg, to be exact (which you make surprisingly quickly when you're lugging around a million philosophy texts, a ton of jewelry (just plain stupid, really...) and the biggest laptop known to man.) When I got to the check-in counter and had my luggage weighed, the woman helping me out was shocked I'd brought -- wait for it -- 24 kilos worth of crap with me, just in my checked luggage. Thankfully, I was able to move some of the heavier stuff from the luggage into my carry-on backpack, but I still ended up being 4 kilos over. That wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that you get charged an extra € 20 per kilo over. So much for my cheap flight!
I felt better once I'd arrived in Dublin, though. Since I'd spent the night before sweltering in Jonas' apartment, alternating between avoiding heatstroke (by opening the windows) and insomnia ('cause when those windows are open, downtown Brussels light and noise pours into the room...), it was relieving to disembark in sunny, 12° weather. That, combined with the fact that there were maple trees and English signs everywhere, made me feel right at home. :D
Camden
I decided to go to Dublin party because Daniel Kofman would be there for a conference, and we'd spoken about meeting up in Europe many times before. I hadn't planned on staying with him originally, but since I was exhausted and out € 80, I decided to take him up on his offer to stay with him at his hotel room on Lower Camden Street, in Southern downtown Dublin. The situation was bittersweet: I didn't pay for accommodations while I hung out there, but no one could know I was there. (Upon my arrival at Daniel's hotel, he told me that the previous night, some staff member had kicked out some couple who were trying to pull exactly what we were trying to pull... yikes.) So I had to sneak out whenever I left, avoiding eye contact with the various people who worked there for days. And be back in the hotel room by around 7pm -- or earlier, if Daniel had to be gone again by then. Not the greatest, but it did force me to get a whole lot of reading done (several papers and the Gorgias!)
Lower Camden's a nice part of the city; it's proximate to St. Stephen's Green park and Grafton Street (which is something like Sparks Street on steroids.) Some photos:
A house on St. Stephen's Green.
A park map.
Old trees.
The St. Stephen's Mall. It's so bright it burns.
A poor night-time shot of a Thin Lizzy statue in the rain, just off Grafton.
Trinity College. Pretty but useless to visiting students: no access whatsoever to the library.
Captive photography: photos out of Daniel's hotel room window. (Notice the rooftop vegetation!)
Expedia
Daniel is a typical scatterbrained philosopher. The type of guy who, you know, books his return ticket with Expedia for a month later than he wanted. (Once we realized this was the case, I started feeling a whole lot less stupid for having skimmed over the fine print concerning my RyanAir luggage limits...) So while we'd planned to go to Galway and spend some time in the Irish countryside, our prospects were waning. Once his conference was over, Daniel began spending day after day on the phone with a bunch of fools from airlines, travel agencies and airports, trying to find a way of getting back to Canada within a reasonable time frame but without paying an $800 penalty. (He eventually managed to reach someone who got him back to Ottawa for something like $100, but only after I'd left Ireland. Originally, he was planning on leaving a few days before I did.) Since (among other things) it seemed like we'd be staying in town and I was getting tired of creeping around the hotel, I booked a room at a hotel down the street for the rest of my time in Ireland.
The Portobello Hotel is perfect: cheap (the hanging 'B' and nearby graffiti say it all), serving free full Irish breakfast, and most importantly, on the Portobello Road.
The Portobello was conveniently located near Mocha Café (see arrow), where I read plenty of essays on Wittgenstein.
Dublin feels a lot like a Canadian city, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Recently, Maria mentioned she (she'd been living in France) and Alex Viau (he'd been living in Germany) were experiencing "reverse culture-shock" upon their returns to Canada (from semesters abroad), and I suspect I was going through something similar in Ireland. There's something commercial and anglo and blah about Dublin, but I can't quite put my finger on it. The squareness and drabness of the buildings (along with there being so many perfectly normal looking brick houses), the straightforward street signs, the fact that nearly everyone dressed like a North American... it not only felt uninteresting, but stifling, especially after seeing Brussels for all of two glorious minutes. I felt like I had to get out.
At this point, it's perhaps worth saying a bit more about David the Angry Badger. David and I didn't really get along in Amsterdam until everyone else moved out of Zuiderzeeweg. (He's an angry badger for a reason, after all.) When I got to Dublin, however, David kindly invited me to go out with his friends to see a comedy show, which ended up being far more enjoyable than I was expecting. And since he knew I was excited to visit the countryside and get out of Dublin, he invited me to go to Rush (his town) for dinner with his parents.
Though I'd never thought to visit Rush before ending up on a bus bound for the town, that night in Rush was hands-down the best time I'd had in Ireland. In my (very limited) experience, the Irish are a ton of fun to be around. Indeed, going to dinner at David's instantly brought me back to 96N: crowding around a table, telling stories and laughing loudly over bottomless tea and biscuits. David's family was lively, friendly, helpful and caring. And also unusually talented: David's brother Stephen illustrated an Irish sign language kids' book, his mom is into fine arts (her paintings are on display all over the house), and his dad's brother is apparently a relatively famous Irish painter.
Though I'd never thought to visit Rush before ending up on a bus bound for the town, that night in Rush was hands-down the best time I'd had in Ireland. In my (very limited) experience, the Irish are a ton of fun to be around. Indeed, going to dinner at David's instantly brought me back to 96N: crowding around a table, telling stories and laughing loudly over bottomless tea and biscuits. David's family was lively, friendly, helpful and caring. And also unusually talented: David's brother Stephen illustrated an Irish sign language kids' book, his mom is into fine arts (her paintings are on display all over the house), and his dad's brother is apparently a relatively famous Irish painter.
Food
Oh, Irish dishes... totally sick, in both senses of the word. Take Irish breakfast, for instance. (I didn't take a photo of the full Irish breakfast I ate nearly every day, but here's its wiki page.) The version I had came with a fried egg, rashers (back bacon), sausages, hash brown, white and black pudding, beans and a fried tomato. (Holy crap, black and white pudding are amaaaaaazing.) Thankfully, there's some delicious healthy food, too: Irish soda bread (which they call "brown bread") has a beautifully crumbly, cake-like texture. Highly recommended. :)
I decided to try out the fish and chips, too, since I figured they'd probably be pretty good. I don't think I'd ever had cod before, and I thought I'd go with the smoked option. I was not disappointed at all -- best fish and chips I'd ever had for sure, despite the lack of tartar sauce. I couldn't even eat half of it, though, since the meal was intensely greasy and salty. Sadly, that isn't fully captured by this photo:
I decided to try out the fish and chips, too, since I figured they'd probably be pretty good. I don't think I'd ever had cod before, and I thought I'd go with the smoked option. I was not disappointed at all -- best fish and chips I'd ever had for sure, despite the lack of tartar sauce. I couldn't even eat half of it, though, since the meal was intensely greasy and salty. Sadly, that isn't fully captured by this photo:
A delicious way to stop your heart: smoked and battered cod with chips, ketchup and garlic sauce. (I'm so confused. I mean, I can see the photo is disgusting, so why is it making me hungry?!)
Food is also stupidly expensive in Dublin. Consider: David came into town one night. We went to Temple Bar (the entertainment, errr... square?) He bought a shitty hotdog (and I mean shitty. We're talking a-Red-Hot-in-a-bun, $1-IKEA-hotdog shitty) for € 5. I couldn't believe it. I actually had to walk away from the vendor's stand as David was waiting for his food because I couldn't stop laughing. Who the hell pays €5 for a hotdog? No wonder Ireland's a mystery to economists.
Finally, I was super pumped to see there's Tim Hortons coffee in Ireland but THEY DO NOT HAVE FRENCH VANILLA WTF. Nor do they carry Timbits. They do, however, have weird crap which isn't served in Canada. (I can't recall what sort of crap it was, probably because the whole Irish Tim Hortons experience was traumatizing.)
Friends
I'd chosen to go to Ireland largely because I thought I'd be reuniting with Buggle and Pierce (they'd agreed to come visit, after all), so I became more and more bummed out that they were not likely going to make it to Dublin. Thankfully, it wasn't all bad. For those of you who remember that insane story about Kofman and I in Montreal (if you haven't heard the story, remind me to tell you!!)... well, now, it looks like things are totally normal between us. We got along super well despite the fact that we were sharing a room only slightly larger than my container, which came as a huge surprise. And as always, it was nice to really shoot the philosophical shit with him. I even got to contribute to the paper he was presenting (a bit of ethical-political philosophy concerning the West's moral obligations (or the lack thereof) to religious Filipino single mothers), which was uplifting. :) I'm also glad I got to spend some time with David, who turned out to be a decent, likeable guy. It's nice to learn something new. ;)
27.8.10
Miriam's visit
I'm going to cheat yet again by posting photos from earlier in the week... but the Dublin and Bergen posts are forthcoming, promise! :)
Miriam left for Ottawa this morning after staying in the Netherlands for just under a week. While I don't have that many photos to post, we managed to see a lot, despite Miriam's jet lag.
Going to Den Haag. Miriaru was one classy traveller by train.
Den Haag had freakishly beautiful weather that day.
Near the Mauritshuis, Den Haag.
We visited Spinoza's house in the Hague. Sadly, it was closed for renovations.
Pretty neat. (Den Haag.)
We went on a canal cruise in Amsterdam. Amsterdam weather sucks right now.
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