"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.