endings

My favorite book I read on this trip was Olive Kitteredge, a moving picture of what it means to love and be loved in a small community in Maine. How love of all kinds, in all forms, is a gift to be received with care.

The following excerpt from that book seemed a good one to end this blog with. I could blather on and on about how travel constantly makes you see things differently and grow and change and all that jazz, but Olive's words seem so much better.

And I should say thanks for reading this! I hope to be back in a blog space once grad school is finished - I'll keep you updated.

XOXO,

Gretzky



"And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats - then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a surging greediness for life.

She leaned forward, peering out the window: sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water - seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing.

She remembered what hope was, and this was it....that inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed" (168).

"I feel like a dali painting" - Maren

There are very few people I could live in a 10x10 space with and still be civil to. And not just civil, but actually still enjoy their company, this takes real talent.

Which Maren has.

Best.

Traveling.

Roommate.

Ever.

For.

Real.

should you find yourself in rotterdam

please stay at the Hotel Baan. Jan and Gabriella greeted us with champagne and hor d'oerves, gave us lots of extra shampoo, made amazing breakfast every single day, offered us full use of the lobby at all times, gave lots of good restaurant and museum suggestions, and sent us each on our way with chocolate and a ride to the train station. For each one of us. Leaving at different times.

I think it's hard to find truly hospitable people outside of benedictine monastaries (and they have to be hospitable), but this family is amazing.

get thee to kinderdijk

Kinderdijk is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and while I know I think a lot of things are amazing, this is one of the coolest places I've ever been to in my life. It's a bit tricky to get there - you can take a bike and then a water taxi, or a waterbus to the water taxi, and then walk to the windmills. But it's so worth it - it's lovely.

The Kinderdijk windmills still move excess water out today, and the oldest mill was built in 1366. It's pretty amazing that we're still using this technology to get what needs to be done done. Isn't it? The windmills all seem to have distinct personalities. I understood a little bit how Don Quixote could have thought they were giants - they do seem like big lumbering giants waving hi in the wind.

Walking along the Kinderdijk paths, you feel like you're definitely in the typical Dutch pastoral scene - green and green and green goes on forever, with one modern orange building in the distance which looks quite out of place. You can take a tour of a windmill, but we were running out of time before our last group dinner, so we headed back to the ferry dock just as it started to rain. Typical Dutch summer weather.

Then we got onto the ferry dock and saw this perfect ending to the afternoon, a double rainbow.

the tiny little town of delft, in which there are two of the most amazing libraries in the world

I woke up today unsure of where we were going and how it would be helpful, a little cranky, to be honest - and then I was blown away the entire day by the things I saw in Delft.

Highlights include:

Delft TU

• Green roof you can walk up onto and sit on. For REAL. With a conical tower in the middle that allows light into the whole space.
• They built their own search function for their ILS system since they didn't like what patrons were finding.
  
• They got rid of rules like no eating, decided students were going to eat, and they might as well let them, and hired more cleaning staff.

Delft Public Library

• Glass windows of books
• A performance stage
• A lab in which cool apps for all sort of things are developed, including Microsoft's touch table technology
• A cafe in the library
  
• a place for musicians to practice - there's a piano with headphones so as not to disturb anyone else
  
• An art collection you can check out
• Wheels on shelves so they can be easily moved around
  
• A whole room for romances
  
• and so much more

This library absolutely blew my mind and changed how I think about what a library could be. That's all I can really say about it at the moment.

"He was probably telling you he peed on the floor, but at least it's friendly pee." - Molly Riley

This is the view from the Oude Sluis, our favorite place to drink in Rotterdam. It is quite nice and there isn't anything in Seattle quite like it. For the 15th best bar in Europe, it's super un-pretentious. Love that.

The men's bathroom was out of commission, though, and so men have been using the women's bathroom. When I was waiting outside, a huge friendly Dutch guy walked out of the bathroom into the tiny stairwell and started talking to me in Dutch, gesturing at the floor. I tried to get out that I didn't understand, but he kept going on and on, and it is hard to stop a big friendly guy from talking when he keeps talking and talking.

I smiled and slid past him into the bathroom, and the toilet seat was up and the floor was wet everywhere. Molly suggested that he was trying to apologize for peeing on the floor.

kaffeehuis

In Seattle, I like to throw a party I call coffeehouse, which is really just an open mic and fun times with friends.

Tonight we did kaffeehuis at the Hotel Baan, and it was just amazing.

The set list:

Human tricks, by a variety of folks including Myria, Nathalie, Sue, and Clare

Card tricks by Nathalie

Poetry written and performed by Karl

"Honey, Won't you Meet Me at the Last Ditch" performed by Trent and a sing-along

Dental floss tricks by Bryan, as well as a recitation of "Invictus"

Song by Cheryl

Loch Lamond by Maggie and a sing-along

This is Just to Say, by Jonathan

Another poem by Karl

The Doorway, Louise Gluck, by Poppy

A song by Myria

A poem by Clare

a Rilke poem by Molly

Bring Me a Boat by Greta (without the chorus, because she forgot it)

Hitchhiker's Galaxy remix by Scott (Scott also gets credit for being the bartender)

A backflip by Marissa

Cool trip pictures by Johanna

Earrings by Pei (she needs to have an etsy store)

Boots n Pants by Stephanie (you've got to ask her to do this, it's pretty awesome)

Poem by Andrew

Blessing the Boats by Greta (Greta likes boats)

Smartlibraries

I am going to start calling Dutch libraries Smartlibraries, because they're just so damn efficient and capable, like smartphones.

Today we went to the Rotterdam library and noticed many things that are helpful and simple.

Note to your right that the bottom shelf is tilted upward, so you can see the spine of the books without having to bend down or get on the floor. Also, no top shelf that collects dust. Also, shelves don't go too high, so you can see everything going on in the library.

Also note the book covers displayed here. Don't you just want to pick them up? You do, you know you do.

Another great tool is the stickers on each book - instead of the call number being displayed so prominently, which really doesn't tell your average person anything about the book, each book here has a sticker, and they're coded according to what genre the book is. Note above left. I blushed while taking the picture, but Nancy Pearl told me this summer I had to take a picture of the erotica genre sticker, and it's just so cute. I also like that it's directly above family stories.

There's also super cool lighting fixtures with quotes on them from various works, a ton of computers accessible for free, study rooms, study caves, a poem jukebox, a kids section that has plush carpet, huge books at kid level, a play space to run around in, and a set of choir-like stairs for story time. Also a teen section with weird stuffed plush cats. Kind of odd, but cool. And there's a radio station, and a cafe where you can eat on the roof and look out at Rotterdam.

The best part of the Rotterdam library is the huge life-size chessboard in the lobby, where every day old men gather to play chess - This library is definitely community space in a way I haven't seen much in the States. Pretty damn cool.

"In real life there are not many heroes." - Stef Scagniola

Today we heard from Stef Scagniola, an Italian researching Dutch military history. Her project is a collection of stories from Dutch veterans from all the conflicts from May 1914 to the Afghanistan war. She noted that since this time, there's actually been "a lot of conflict for people who perceive themselves as peacemakers,” a nation working as mediator between fellow nations.

Stef is collecting stories from all these conflicts, but not using them for research herself. Her interest is in the technical side of things: the database used to store and retrieve and access the stories, on enhancing the possibility for qualitative researchers, who can use the database to do things like: Compare veteran’s experience in various roles during several conflicts, like interviews with mechanics, cooks, or chauffeurs, to see the changes in such roles over time.

A random cool feature of this database is the ability to search for words within video and go straight to the word in a specific video. Amazing.

Stef noted that older veterans tended to be conscripted and serve for longer periods of time, so there are notable differences between them and younger veterans, who usually serve for 4 months and who are often professionals. She also talked about adding to the archive things like family photos and other documents you are often given when people tell their stories. The quote about heroes came from her noting that it's often so much easier to talk about stories of heroism as opposed to stories where one has done things one is highly ashamed of, especially in war.

Some people are extremely gifted at framing discussions that draw out a lot of good thoughts, and Stef is one of those people. She started by setting oral histories in a research context, how they might be useful and also how collected and accessed, and then moved into an awesome discussion.

She asked us to share stories of history we'd grown up with and then think about how those stories meshed with what we were taught in school, which spun into discussion on the democratization of history, which we all got into, and then she left us with this fabulous thought about how soldiers immediately after being in a conflict, don't talk about it, nor does society, about how often we need a lapse in time or history to talk about uneasy issues - she said this amazing thing: "...taboos are functional because they put away something dangerous so that people can connect to each other." Whew. I've been thinking about that one ever since she said it.

It felt like this class touched both on the practicality of what technology can do - the accessible database of oral histories - and also the importance of that technology for the people involved, the veterans, the researchers, and for your average Dutch citizen looking for stories.

"If anybody's missing a sandwich and a banana, I have them in my bag." - Karl

"Oooh, me!" - Molly

“You might dress up like a potted plant in the corner. Some of you have the figure for that.” - Trent Hill

Trent did not expand on which of us had the figures to look like potted plants, but he did finish his lectures with us discussing interviewing options and further distinctions between qualitative and quantitative options. I do believe I would like to do qualitative research. Not only because math and I are not best friends, but because I love getting into the depth of things and thinking about the stories and reasons behind the numbers, understanding particular and specific areas. I do think numbers have a lot to tell us, and can paint the broad brushstrokes we need as well as the localized ones, so maybe in my perfect dream study, there would be a mix of words and numbers. Sort of like a Phantom Tollbooth sort of story. Except, you know, in a thorough and complete research project.

(Picture from the National Library, Den Haag, 9.06.)

"Are you for real?" - Molly

Delft looks much like it did when Vermeer painted it in the 1660's. The train station has turrets, and the streets are tiny. They do of course manage to have a bike lane, even in the tiny streets barely wide enough for a car.

I took the train to Delft this morning and hopped off to walk to the Royal Delft factory, where I saw painters painting the ceramics, and the huge warehouse with stacks and stacks of unfinished work. Also, Delft started as a building ceramics company, so the building was full of things like gorgeous ceramic staircases and ceramic trims along the doorways. Or columns like the one you see here. Glorious. Applied art is my favorite - art that also has practical use in everyday life. I just think it's lovely. Also, in the display cases, there were lovely bells, like Christmas ornaments. They reminded me of my grandmother, who had a special cabinet in her house, in which resided bells made of ceramic, silver, and other sorts of breakable material that we were allowed to touch carefully.

I wandered back into the center of town, where there was a market with real strawberries and fishmongers yelling at passerby to buy their wares. Behind the market is the Oude Kerk, where Vermeer is buried. (There's an Old Church in every town over 600 years old. There's also a New Church in every town, and it's usually over 400 years old.), When I wandered in here, I stumbled into an organist practicing for a concert, which meant I got to listen to a really lovely rehearsal concert of this gorgeous ancient organ. Loved it.

Since it was still sunny and I figured I'd have time to make it, I then got on the tram for a ride to Den Haag, and then from Den Haag to Scheveningen, which is sort of like the Dutch version of Coney Island or a smaller Atlantic City...It's the beach at the North Sea, with a promenade and fancy hotels and sunbathing chairs to rent and lots and lots of people. And lots and lots of seashells. I don't know how this works, but there are literally thousands of seashells on the shore. You walk on them, and you don't notice the crunching underneath your feet because there's enough sand to cushion it.

So I sat on the beach and daydreamed for a while half-listening to the other folks around, and then was wishing there was someone I knew beside me, and also wishing for some cool water to drink. So I started walking back up the promenade to find the water, and heard Jonathan's voice behind me telling Molly something about the bike ride they'd been on, and I turned around and hopped over to them and said "HEY!" and Molly looked up at me and said, "Are you for real?"

It was a perfectly serendipitous moment starting the end of a sweet & sunny day.

"Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character..." - Tennessee Williams

I made a pilgrimage to see Vermeer's Girl with a Peal Earring at the Mauritshuis in Den Haag. I've been wanting to go for a long time, and today felt like the time. I am still not feeling quite up to snuff, so it was my big adventure for the day. I sat and looked at her for a good long while next to an elderly Dutchman who was watching her longingly.

One thing I am learning on this trip is that art is not the same in reprints as it is in real life. In reprints, the girl looks a bit interesting, but in the real life portrait, she looks downright mysterious. She's intriguing, she's got a secret, she loves the painter, perhaps even respects him, but she knows some things he doesn't, and he knows it.

Not much is known about the painting, although there's a lot of speculation about it. I did read the novel of the same name a few years ago. I enjoyed it as a story, but no one really knows what happened.

That's something that keeps coming up in class, actually, how people's memories are notoriously unreliable, yet during research we expect people to remember things exactly. There's this interesting gap between how we perceive ourselves and how we want others to perceive us, and between truth and reality. And what we remember about a certain event is not how others remember it at all. Anyway, I like Tracy Chevalier's interpretation of what might have happened, and I wish there were some others to think about as well. Any budding novelists out there? Get on this one.

"Christopher Hogwood came home on my lap in a shoebox. He was a creature who would prove in many ways to be more human than I am." - Sy Montgomery

I included Sy Montgomery's Spell of the Tiger in an assignment on good man-eating animal books earlier this summer, so when a classmate recommended The Good Good Pig, I put it on my list for this trip and didn't think much about it.

Then I started reading, and was hooked. It's a simple story about a pig, who comes to live in a barn and shows those around him to enjoy life, to love much, and to be exactly who they are. It's lovely. I found myself laughing along with Christopher Hogwood's antics, and missing the animals in my life very much.

In the end, Montgomery details a talk she's giving at a college, talking about unexpected blessings, ones she had in years of doing animal research around the globe. Like when a guide fell through and she ended up with a new amazing guide, or when Jane Goodall didn't come to an established meeting, but she got to do chimp research herself.

Blessings, all. In each case, I hadn't found what I had hoped for or expected. Instead, I'd discovered something far more exciting or profound - an unexpected insight, a surprise gift. "And that's a pretty good definition of a blessing," I said. "So go out into the world where your heart calls you. The blessings will come, I promise you that. I wish for you the insight to recognize blessings as such, and sometimes this is hard...So be ready. There are great souls and teachers everywhere. It is your job to recognize them."

I am re-learning this on this trip. I mean, I suppose it's a lesson we learn and re-learn constantly, to take whatever comes as a gift, and to be awake enough to recognize the gifts.

Visualization with Andrea

Our 2^nd class with Andrea was as awesome as the first one. We discussed visualization projects: taking all the data amassed during research projects and making it real in ways you can see. I loved the sample projects Andrea had posted around the room: a huge map of the most frequently edited Wikipedia articles, a color coded U.N. chart of world poverty levels, a grid of cell phone usage at a train station in Milan over a 24 hour period. (See right.)My favorite – well, let me clarify by saying it is not my favorite in the sense that I liked it, more in the sense that I think it is a super powerful way of seeing what we value as a nation – was the 2007 version of Death and Taxes by Jess Bachman. You can see his 2011 version here. It brings the U.S. budget to light. Go look at it and think about how to vote next time you have the opportunity.

corsendonk communion

Poppy has a gift for getting Dutch men to buy her drinks. Lovely deep Dutch beers so smooth you want to cry just sipping them slowly. We were all at Oude Sluis again, ten of us around the table, and we all passed the chalice of Corsendonk around.

I want to visit the Abbey where they make it and say hi to the monks. I mean, I know the monks don't make it anymore, but still.

"I remembered how Renee used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs are believable and real life isn't." - Rob Sheffield

I've been reading a lot while I am here, and I loved Rob Sheffield's memoir, Love is a Mix Tape. He's a Rolling Stone journalist, and it's a music memoir about all the mix tapes he's gotten and given, many from his wife, Renee. It was the book I was reading in the Kroller-Muller Museum sculpture garden, when all this loveliness was around me and I just couldn't stand it so I wept.

But really, with words like this about people being kind after the death of his wife, what can you do but cry?

"You lose a certain innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic. You can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know what you know about kindness...People kept showing me unreasonable kindness, inexplicable kindness, indefensible kindness. People were kind when they knew that nobody would ever notice, much less praise them for it. People were even kind when they knew I wouldn't appreciate it.


I had no idea how to live up to that kindness...I was helpless in trying to return people's kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure. Cruelty isn't that hard to understand...Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renee, but we don't burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don't need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can't. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people's psychic hearts.


I was awed and ruined by this knowledge. Renee knew it all the time; I was learning it these days."

(from pages 121-123.)

I have experienced the kindness he speaks of, and I too, am grateful and in awe.

"I'll wake you up for the slut." - Bryan

Actual conversation at dinner:

Myria: "I might fall asleep on you."

Bryan: "I'll wake you up for the slut."

The slut was referring to the chocolate slut, comprised of chocolate mousse cake, chocolate mousse, and chocolate whipped cream. I did not get it because I couldn't taste much. I could taste these lovely tomatoes to your right, though. You can also see a bit of my sketches on my theory about male/female relationships, which I am not going to share because Bryan says I should publish it. So I'll save that theory for another time.

I will tell you that at the Dizzy Jazz cafe, Maren and Sue shelled shrimp, which reminded me of eating shrimp on the porch in Charles Village with neighbors, and also that bar near Fells Point I went to once with Shane where we ate so many shrimp out of the buckets they brought us, we had to call Mike to bring us home because we couldn't walk.

Also at the Dizzy Jazz cafe, we listened to a trumpet player who is the buffest woman ever, a Slovakian guitar player, a Ghanian rapper, and a drummer who was easy on the eyes. I don't remember where the drummer was from. But he had brown hair and soulful eyes. This made me think about a musician friend of mine who once told me to never date guitarists, because they're too into themselves, and drummers are as well. She says bass players are the best. Oh, there was also a bass player.

And the music was beautiful because they were so into it, they loved playing it, and I wished I felt totally well so I could stay all night.

Also it reminded me of that line in that John Mayer song about "you knew the difference between Miles and Coltrane." The song is horrendous, let's be honest, but I've always loved that line. I think it perfectly describes the girl who broke his heart perfectly.

And that's what jazz is at its best, really, broken hearts and despair and hope and sadness and all that feeling just wound up into trumpets and drums and saxophones. Makes you want to cry just listening to it.

sicky mcsickmeister

In addition to the 13 mosquito bites on my left arm - I'm not exaggerating, I promise! I would take pictures but that would be pretty gross - I have now gotten the cold we're all passing around to each other.

On Sunday I was going to go to Kinderdijk. I made it all the way to the waterbus stop, but then I felt like sitting down on the ground and going to sleep, and decided I should probably go home.

So I came home and slept all afternoon and then Maren downloaded Charade for us to watch and it was nice. I love Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Their chemistry comes off the screen. Love it, love it, love it. Also, she is just so damn classy. I want to be like that when I grow up. Best line ever: "You know what's wrong with you?...Nothing."

At breakfast yesterday morning, Sue and Cheryl gave me bug repellent, paracetamol, ricola, tissues, and vicks vaporub. They were girl scouts. And are very sweet. I am thankful I did not have to walk to the pharmacy.

So I skipped class and slept a lot and now I'm doing that again, except I'm writing about it. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be back to normal. Mostly for Maren's sake - I'm sure it's no fun to share a room with a sick person blowing their nose every five seconds.

Trent is one of those like-minded people who is frequently reminded of songs, and he played two for us last night, one for Molly, and one for me. I liked Molly's much better, but it's still cool to have a song with your name in it. Molly's was Richard Thompson's 1952 Vincent Black Lightning, which I am including here because it's just so lovely. Mine was the Nield's Gotta Get Over Greta. As soon as it started, Maren said it fit me. I did like the line comparing me to a vampire, but mostly I'm still looking for another good Greta song.

But listen to Thompson. He's so great.

let's be a little more Dutch, shall we?

So the National Library in Holland (the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Den Haag) is right next to the National Archive, and both are pretty sweet. Library of Congress has a ways to go, let me tell you.

I mean, they've got stuff like this Dutch bookkeeper's journal about his sailing to Korea in 1653. And oh, some of Augustine's confessions. And about 50 other amazing documents on display. Along with a huge newspaper archive, tons and tons of books, and everything that's ever been published in the Netherlands. That you can look at. If you want.

Last weekend coming home from Hogue Veluwe on the bus that was winding around forest roads, we met a man named Harrie who had just come from the Boom Festival in Portugal. Harrie happens to be the programmer who made the medieval texts in the National Library searchable online. Amazing, right?

Harrie said he started out in Internet security, but then realized people couldn't find anything they needed on the web, so he started working on search and retrieval. Be still my heart. So he just wrote a little old program that lets you look at medieval text images and search within them. Wow, there's some fantastic people in the world who do cool stuff. You can try this feature on the KB website, and you can also try it in English, just to make it super easy for you.

"Do you want to go see the fireworks at the Swan bridge?" - Maren and Molly and Jonathan

I love that I have been here so briefly and in yet in the time I have been here, I have seen two fantastic fireworks displays. We should do them more often at home.

Rotterdam is the port of all ports - seriously, it's the biggest port in Europe, and only Shanghai is busier in the world.

We're here during the harbor festival, and last night there were fireworks. Lovely, huge, blasting ones that were reflected in the silvery windows of a skyscraper off the port, and it was amazing.

Maren and I saved rail seats while Scott and Molly and Lisa and Jonathan went to get a beer, and it was the perfect spot.

"Please tell me that's not Michael Bolton." - Poppy

Here are a few reasons I am growing to love the people I am traveling with:

• Poppy's ability to take any situation and make it funny.
• Stefanie's groundedness and intentional care for others.
• Molly's steadfast resolve to have alone time and long bike rides.
• Jonathan's joy in whatever we are doing.
• Maren's great ability to happily share a bathroom one must walk into before one gets into our room. This is tricky at best.
• Scott's go-with-the-flow-ness and ability to jump groups and interact with everyone.
• Bryan's work ethic and absolute goodness. Colville, Washington, ladies and gentlemen. Who knew?
  

But mostly what I love is because of conversations like this, which occurred at approximately 8:45 in the morning during breakfast:


Discussion about songs easily stuck in one's head.

Greta: You could wake up with the Indiana Jones song stuck in your head.


Scott: You mean this one? Duh du du duh, du du du du..... (Poppy, Myria, Jonathan, Molly, and several others join in. Clare looks askance, as do I. It is a bit too early to be singing in our world.)

Also, we hear a lot of 80s and 90s American pop music here. Apparently it's well-liked by the Dutch. And I can guarantee that when we hear it, approximately 4 or 5 of us will start singing loudly. I would normally be embarrassed by this, but for some reason I don't care here. Probably because I want to be in Glee in real life.

In any case, I like these people. A lot.

"Is that what it is? I thought somebody hit you." - Jonathan

I got what I thought was a spider bite in Amsterdam approximately a week ago, and you can still faintly see the red-fading-to-purple-and-brown on my right arm.

Maren freaked me out because her aunt got bitten by a brown recluse spider once and had to have necrotic tissue removed from her arm. She said I should go to the Dutch doctor. I said I would closely monitor the bite and see if it got worse. Then of course I freaked out and researched Dutch spiders. There are two deaths a year in Holland attributable to spiders. I thought it would be just my luck to be one of those two.

But turns out it's just mosquitoes. Who would have thought Holland would be plagued by mosquitoes? Not me.

I learned that Trent's wife Melinda, is also loved by mosquitoes, and she gave me this great stuff, After Bite, earlier this week. I love it. It made the bite stop itching and mostly I forgot about it and mosquitoes.

But at the Hoge Veluwe Park yesterday, I got a line of mosquito bites down my left arm, from the top of my shoulder to my elbow, and I apparently scratched all eight of them in my sleep, because this morning I went down to breakfast, and it looked like a bunch of bruises.

It's highly attractive, let me tell you. I am a dermatologist's dream patient right now. Maybe I could take a picture and be published in some medical journal about mosquito bites in developed countries.

in the middle of nowhere, or as far as you can be in the middle of nowhere in Holland

Yesterday I biked 10.8 kilometers in de Hoge Veluwe National Park, in order to get to the Kroller Muller Museum to see Vincent van Gogh. And Picasso. Oh yeah, and a Rodin sculpture. And a few other amazing artworks in a colossal sculpture garden that makes the Olympic Sculpture Park look puny.

In the middle of a huge park. With bike trails like the one you see here. Leading to deer, campgrounds, or a castle that was supposedly just a hunting lodge for the Kroller Mullers.

It was pretty amazing, let me tell you. I think it was the best day here so far, although it was very long.

To get to de Hoge Veluwe from Rotterdam, you must take a train to Uttrecht. Then from Uttrecht, take a train to Ede-Wageningen. Then from here, take a bus to Hoenderloo. Then get a chocolate croissant at the bakery since you are hungry. Now you can walk into the park and on your right, will be approximately 200 white bikes. You can take any one you'd like and bike to the museum.

I don't know which was better, the scuplture park or the museum.

I walked through the museum looking for Picasso and found him in an adorable owl made of metal.

And then I walked through the Van Gogh rooms and here is what I absolutely loved about this museum. Normally in museums I have been to before, you get to look at one van Gogh. And you think, wow, that's amazing, I love it, but you move on to something else. But here, Helene Kroller Muller collected enough Van Goghs that you could actually see his progression as an artist - he started out a little dark, but you see this great progression to brilliant color that's just spectacular. And I would never have known that unless I had seen them all together.

Also, my favorite, favorite, favorite painting is here: It's a Pisarro, and I looked at it 4 times. I went back right before closing to see it again.

And the scuplture park has this Rodin that just blew me away - I love his lines. And there were so many other sculptures. Amazing. I followed one trail around and it led to a bench where I sat and looked at Rodin and finished reading Love is a Mix Tape. I cried a lot when I got to the end. You know, that awkward sort of crying when your shoulders shake a little. It wasn't the part where she died, but in the part where he takes her hats to Central Park after her death. He puts notes on the hats that say "Free," but really he wants to write notes on them about how amazing their former owner was, and how much she would have loved cool people to have them, and I just couldn't take it anymore, all the art and beauty and sadness was too much to bear, so I sat in this gorgeous park and cried about how we just get to know people and start to love them just a little bit and then it feels like they get taken away from us too quickly.

Jonathan came over because he was following the trail around to the end. He said, "Oh, it ends here." I said "I'm crying because a main character just died." He said, "That's pretty sad. Are you okay?" I said yes, and then we briefly talked about how amazing this place was and then he left me to finish the book. This is something I appreciate about Jonathan: he is good at giving one space when one needs it. Also, he lent me his scarf when we got back to Rotterdam and were waiting for the metro and it was freezing. It is good to have kind people to travel with.

Then we biked back to the Hoenderloo entrance and since Poppy was staying at this place with a fantastic menu, we ate there. It might have been the nicest place I've ever eaten at. It was the sort of place where you want to take pictures of the food, but don't because that might not be appropriate. Also, you feel very underdressed in jeans. But Poppy reminded me that they are a b&b and see lots of travelers, so I shouldn't worry about it.

Dinner involved extremely mellow red wine, avocado mousse under tomato confit, tomatoes with goat cheese and red onions and basil, lamb, beet sauce, zucchini, Molly's duck, Maren's risotto, some sort of lentil that was pretty sweet, and perhaps the best potatoes I have ever eaten in my life. I am not a huge potato fan, but these were pretty good. Every single one of us had an empty plate at the end of dinner.

Then we waited for the bus at the Hoenderloo bus stop, and got on at 8:43, met a programmer named Harry who had just come back from the Boom festival, and then went on our way to Rotterdam. We did have an awkward interaction involving a train conductor and Molly's and my shared ticket, but this is par for the course. When we got to Rotterdam Central around 11:30 p.m., I wondered why the heck so many people were out and about at the station - it was just as busy as it is on a Friday at 5 p.m...

All in all, a pretty good day.

"It's okay if a leg falls off, as long as we still have it." - Marieke van Erp, on specimens

First of all, I would like to say that the majority of Dutch people I have had interactions with are hilarious. Deadpan and hilarious.

For example: At a tapas place we went to, when our waiter had disappeared and we wanted to leave, I went up to the bartender and said, "May I pay you?" He said, completely straightfaced, "Well, of course, if you had something to eat, you should pay." 20 seconds later, he smiled. I don't think I am translating the humor well, but it was p.d. funny.

Anyway, this lecture was on text mining and cultural heritage, and it was also AMAZING. Apparently all the smart people in the world are in Holland, and they are not only smart, they are researching cool things and are blond and beautiful as well.

Marieke van Erp is a computer scientist using linguistics and things like the k nearest neighbor classifier. If you want to know what that is, I will find the youtube link that was awesome in explaining it. It's a little tricky and I don't want to mess up anyone's understanding by butchering an explanation.

Anyway, the informatics undergrads were all looking at Marieke like she was a goddess the whole time, and asked more questions than ever, which I was super glad about because sometimes I worry that they are bored with libraries discussion. But this was more about building effective databases and search and retrieval and it was AWESOME. Her recent major research project was around helping scientists at the Leiden Naturalis Museum. Apparently there is a 20 story tower there full of dead specimens important to scientists around the globe, that needed cataloguing and easy accessibility for said scientists. She talked about building that database and what you do with things like "special remarks."

She's currently working on combining access to heterogenous collections from different institutions (like the Rijksmuseum and the NISV), in an easy to search, high-precision catalog. How cool is that?

class at cafe o

In class at a cafe that had amazing fresh-squeezed grapegruit juice - I mean, really, don't you wish you had fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice in all your classes? Wouldn't it help you concentrate more? - we talked about reliability and validity and a bunch of potential variables for a given research project. It was actually more fun than it sounds. Bryan, Molly, and I came up with lots of potential ways to measure how people perceive us in conversation...I'm thinking of trying a few with people I know when I come home.

cubes

Cubism is big here. The yellow boxes you see here are sort of dizziness-inducing. We went in one and it felt a bit like being in a treehouse. If a treehouse were in a city, surrounded by lots of concrete and noise.

Then we walked to the bookstore so Molly could get a bike map, and enjoyed the Dutch picture books. I bought one to send to Catie, but I am coveting it myself.

We also went to the grocery store to get green things for dinner, and came back to Baan to eat dinner, and play cribbage or uno. There’s several games going - kind of like a retirement home. Actually it’s pretty sweet.

But I am sucking at cribbage. Maybe by the end of the trip I’ll be better.