Miscellanea, Methodology

Okay. I know it's been a while. I've been slightly distracted. So, this post is going to be sort of a random conglomeration of all I've been doing over the past week and a half or so. I'm also going to explain how I make this blog, in order to give you all more of a picture of what it is I do. Okay, I carry my backpack around all the time. I basically don't leave the dorm without it. I'll go into this in more detail at a later time, but for now that's what you need to know. I generally have my camera in the backpack. Whenever I do something significant or interesting or see anything cool, I take pictures of it. I have a whole directory of photos on my PC. Whenever I sit down to make a blog post, I make a new folder in that directory, and upload all the new photos to there. They're automatically deleted from my camera when I do this.

The way I make the post itself is by going through that directory. All the photos I'll have taken since the last update are in chronological order. They kick-start my memory. I only upload the ones that I think are interesting, but sometimes even the ones I don't upload spark something worth writing about. This creates a feedback loop with my activity. If I'm doing or seeing something I want to remember to write about later, I snap a photo of it. Even if it's not a good picture, it functions to remind me to post later.

For example, this beer:
See, that's to remind me of the Final I had last Thursday. I need to write a more extensive post about my classes sometime [which will probably include a disclaimer that it's not especially worth reading for most people], but for now, what you need to know is that I get six credit-hours for being over here. Two classes, three weeks long, three credit-hours apiece. I finished the first class, which was about comparative legal systems. That was taught by Professor Alaka from Washburn, and Professor Soeharno from here. Currently, I'm being taught Comparative Constitutional Government & Human Rights Enforcement Professor Merkel from Washburn, and (mostly) Professor Essen from here. Our classes run from Monday-Thursday, four hours a day. So, last Thursday we had a final. It was solid essay, as law school finals tend to be. Afterward, we all retired to Hofman's, the pub that's like fifty feet from our classroom. The above is the giant Grolsch beer that I drank in order to assuage my jangled nerves.

The beers are badass over here. They all come in their own glasses, for one thing. The brand of beer sells glasses to the bars, which are all different shapes and sizes. They won't serve you beer in a generic glass. The great big Grolsch pictured above is very popular with my colleagues, so you must order it quickly - we've run them out of glasses a couple times, and then you have to order a different beer, or perhaps only a smaller size of Grolsch. My thumbs-up sign there is to both indicate approval toward the quality of the beer, and to give you a reference for the size of the glass.


After the beer, and some Falafel (man, I need to talk about the Falafel stand, too), I went to go see The Dark Knight. It's easy to watch foreign films over here, because The Netherlands is small and so they can't make all their own movies. Also, they divide the movies into grown-up movies and children's movies. Grown-up movies are subtitled, so I can watch American films in the theatre without learning Dutch. Children's movies are dubbed, because little kids can't read that fast. So, I can watch The Dark Knight and Hancock in the theatre, but Wall*E would be incomprehensible. Incidentally, go see Wall*E if you haven't. It's so cute it hurts. Also see The Dark Knight. Heath Ledger was every bit as good as they say he was. I hope there's an extended-edition DVD, or a director's cut, or something. The above photo, if you haven't puzzled it out, is the ratings system over here. You'll note that instead of giving movies a single rating along a continuum of "badness," they split up potentially objectionable content into categories. You should be able to puzzle out the meanings of those little icons yourself. I approve of this, because I disagree with a lot of the US rating system. For one thing, I think that depiction of healthy sexual relationships are far less damaging to children than teaching them to solve their problems with violence. Why shootings are more acceptable than boobs, I will never understand.

Dutch food blows. This is why I essentially never eat it. All the little walkup places are various brands of ethnic food anyway. However, the grocery stores, in some sort of misplaced national pride, insist on carrying TV dinners that I guess are classic home cooking for the Dutch folk. This is a serious mistake, as you can see above.

That's some kind of a salisbury-steak-like meatball thing. It's accompanied by probably 3/4 of a pound of mashed potatoes, which are turned green by adding a LOT of spinach to them. This probably does benefit their nutritional profile, but it doesn't add a lot of flavor. They don't have salt/pepper/butter in them like you'd be used to here, so they could have used some extra flavor. I had that for dinner Friday night. Fortunately, I was chemically enhanced at the time, so I didn't care too much.


That's a bunch of sheep. There's a big veterinary program at the University here, so that's why there's so much livestock around. They put them out in the pasture right next to my dorm the other night, so I was awakened around Six AM by a bunch of sheep happily bleating at the rising sun. I was less enthused about it than they were.

Incidentally, I'm sure a lot of you have occasionally compared the adorable livestock seen in children's cartoons or represented in stuffed animals, and thought the real thing was less cute. Well, the sheep and cows actually are really, uhh, happy-looking over here. Like, they're plumper and more animated or something. I was actually kind of freaked out about it for a while, because they seriously look like something you'd see in a stuffed animal shop, instead of the usual Midwestern reality of farm animals. Turns out there's a reason for that. The weather here is really mild, so there's plenty of grass on the ground for them to be out grazing for like ten months of the year. Even during the two-month off season, their diet is only supplemented, they can still graze. So, I guess they're better fed and pastured. That's why they're not as dirty and they don't ever have the bony aspect you'll see if you drive past a cow field in Missouri.

Seriously.


The Netherlands is like the world's leading exporter of Flowers. So, having flowers is a sort of national holiday. I pass at least one regular flower-shop every day, there's another at the mall, and every Market Day there's a huge open-air flower market right near the building where my class is. A bunch of merchants selling various kinds of flowers (and related items like honeysuckle, vases, shrubbery, etc.) all congregate behind the Janskerkhof (some kind of church) and set up their stands. I don't have a lot of room for that stuff in my dorm, but apparently having a vase of fresh flowers is a standard part of any Dutch home.


Anyway, last Sunday I went to Amsterdam. The trip was, to put it lightly, kind of a fucking Disaster. My friend Karen (who I've known over the Internet for like a decade) picked me up a the Train Station and off we went. I didn't have a lot of cash on me, so I went straight to the ATM once we arrived. The ATM ate my debit card. Without any sort of provocation, even. It had some kind of internal error. The local bank completely refused to help me out. Liz attempted to wire me money, bless her heart. However, when I got to the Western Union place, they wanted my Passport, rather than any other form of ID. Since I wasn't crossing a national border, I hadn't wanted to risk carrying it around, and so of course it was back here in Utrecht. Fuck. So, I ended up not doing much in Amsterdam, because I was broke. Also, completely infurated. But, Karen was okay with fronting me some funds until we got back to Utrecht and I could pay her back. Once we got here, she refused to let me reimburse her - I think she imagined my situation was a lot worse than it actually has turned out to be.
This is a shot of the house-boats that line the canal. Due to the space shortage of a few decades ago, this became a very popular way of living. Many of them have permanent power and water hookups, and could only theoretically move. Much like trailer homes in the US.

Okay. These Northern European types are crazy into design. There are cool buildings everywhere. Two of the buildings on my campus have won Nobel Prizes in architecture. I should really shoot more photos of "awesome buildings," but I sort of suspect most people don't care that much.





This is a (bad) picture of some cows I took from the window in the train. I'll try to get more of a close-up of some soon. I seriously want to back up my assertion that the livestock is happier-looking here. Also, I suspect Liz will appreciate that, because she's into cute animals or something.


Totally Tangential Note: I tried to get another tattoo right before I left, but ended up not being able to get an appointment at the tattoo parlor in time. I could have got it the day before I left, but I didn't want to fly with my whole chest sore. My plan was to get a Sacred Heart, right over my heart. For those of you not into the whole inking thing, that is going to be immensely painful, due to how close to the surface the breastbone is. And so, that will be my next tattoo when I return home. However, I think I just ran into the one I want to get right after that:
I'll probably have to get the artist to modify it a little for color, contrast, backdrop, etc...but I can't even tell you how much I am in love with that image.