"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.

"Computers are stupid. They are only as smart as the user using them, or the programmer telling them what to do." - Andrea Scharnhorst.

I wish I could have recorded this lecture.

I have never found physics or biometrics to be interesting before - I mean, I could see how they were valuable fields as a whole, but I have never found them personally interesting - but Andrea Scharnhorst is phenomenal. She is a researcher who started as a physicist and is now thinking about other things, but SHE IS FANTASTIC.

She mentioned Bruno LaTour, whom Joe Tennis was a huge fan of in 530, which makes me think I really need to read more of him. And also Paul Otliet, Bradford's Law of Scattering, Derek de Solla Price, Milgram, and Lotka. Wow, I've got a lot of reading to do.

She talked about indicators, impact factors, number differentials, bibliometric evaluation, and I was hooked. I wish all my math teachers had been as interesting, I might have chosen a different field.

And also, she mentioned that story in Matthew where there's three guys who each get some money, and two bury it and don't do anything, and one uses it and gets more, and how if you start out with something you should use it.

Mostly she went a variety of places, but asked lots and lots of really great questions I am still pondering and probably won't have answers to for a long time.

But I really loved this broad sweeping overview of how things are connected to each other in helping us think about how knowledge emerges, how we evaluate it, and how science helps in that process.

places in the heart

"Man has places in the heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence." - Leon Bloy



Let's be honest, this is a fun trip, not one full of suffering. I am learning a lot and having a good time. But this morning I woke up and felt a little off. Sort of like that sign that means no people. (we think it means no people, but are unsure because there are no words. Although we wouldn't know what it meant anyway if there were words, because they'd be in Dutch. But that sign is what I felt like wearing when I woke up.) And then I read an e-mail from k8 and just wanted to call her, but couldn't because I am not using a phone here and it was not a good time for her to skype, considering it was 3 in the morning her time. And I really missed my friends. Everyone on the trip is pretty great, I really like them. I think if Maren and I don't kill each other in the next three weeks, we'll be bonded for life and able to go just about anywhere together. (Sharing a closet and sharing a bathroom with tourists across the hall who don't know how to flush the toilet or put the lid down are both really good team-building endeavors, just in case you need some good team-building challenges.)

But there's a difference in people you like and have known for ten minutes and people you like and have known for ten years. And know you back.

And then on the way to Coolhaven Metro station I saw a puppy, a little golden ball of fluff I wanted to pick up, and then I found myself telling Scott all about Wallace. How every morning we'd wake up and go out and walk. And how he waited for me at the door. And it made me want to cry, I missed him so much. I still do. It's really odd, because he died in July. Okay, so maybe it's not so odd that I'm still sad. But I spent the first two weeks of July mostly in a state of profound detachment from most of what was going on, crying at inopportune moments like staff meetings.

For a dog.

I am that girl.

So today I was sad in Rotterdam. I missed my friends and my dog and I would also like to let everyone know that I will never take a bathroom for granted again. Just so we're clear.

But we'll be at the Hotel Baan in Rotterdam until September 17th, and if anyone wants to send me a postcard, I would thank you from the bottom of my heart. And perhaps love you a little more. And I'm not above resorting to bribery - if I get a postcard here, I cross my heart I'll bring you something back from the Rotterdam Flea Market.

The address is:

G.B.
Hotel Baan
Room 8
Rochussenstraat 345
3023 DH Rotterdam
Netherlands