Not dead yet
As people are starting to remind me, it’s been a while since I’ve made an update. In fact I am not dead - this slowness is due to a number of very good reasons: laziness, procrastination, too much schoolwork and workwork, and not knowing where to start after so much has changed.
I will solve this problem by summarizing the last few months in a paragraph. ISU ended with a big expensive ceremony and a nearly all night goodbye (and many 0.20 cent Tsing Tao beers, mm!), I left China (after some problems with baggage allowance and unsmiling Russians), I met up with Gio and went with him to a certain Greek island to visit our good friend. The journey was not much fun since we booked a cheap flight out of Bonn which was very early in the morning, so we had to get the train in the evening and sleep in the airport, which was cold and infuriating, due to “Ladies and gentlemen, please do not leave your baggage unattended” on the loudspeaker every 10 minutes. It was worth it though, in Greece we breathed clean air, played in the sea, ate lots of good food, and slept whenever we felt like it. The contrast to Beijing made the Island’s beauty particular impressive this year for me. The day after I returned to the Netherlands, school started.
I am in a programme with 18 other people, half of whom are Dutch and the other half are random internationals. We started with such courses as Introduction to Cognitive Science (mostly philosophy, to understand the basis of our field), Cognition and communication (a bit tricky, if you happen not to be an expert in math), Current Issues (in which we learn how to write and present scientifically and look at new developments in our field), and Psychophiosiological Experimentation (in which we learnt how to measure the body’s electrical signals). Most of those classes have finished now, which means I have a few days to study for exams. After that, I’ll be taking an ugly, ugly statistics class, and “Development and Plasticity of the Nervous System”, which, judging by the amount of pre-reading we had to do (nearly an entire textbook), will be fairly intense.
My average day looks something like this: wake up, bike with Gio to work and come back (well, a couple times a week), do some work for ESA or some reading of school stuff, bike to the train station with my little foldable bike, 30 mins in the train reading scientific journal articles, 5 kilometers of biking in Amsterdam (usually soaking wet and fighting gale-force winds), a couple of hours of class, and then the return journey. I then do some more work or reading, make and eat dinner, then possibly go out with Gio and friends or watch a movie, or just keep working. Two times I have had to go to Cologne for meetings or conferences for ESA, and next weekend I will go to Stockholm with Gio (he has a conference), and a couple of weekends later, to Marseille in the south of France for a study trip to a CogSci lab and to remember what the sun is. So that’s my life at present. Now for a few observations about the Dutch.
After our initially bad impressions, I have to admit I am starting to like them, and even the language, though it makes you sound like you are coughing up a hairball. The bad impressions are always more interesting though, so I’ll focus on them.
Our neighbours are a real pain in the buttocks. We have a house in the middle of strip of five or six row houses. In front, there is a narrow alley. It doesn’t go anywhere and there’s no where to park, so mostly it’s for walking – people only bring in their cars if they need to load or unload something heavy. I am explaining this because our garden is actually on the other side of the little alley, meaning that people walk within 1 metre of our big livingroom window, leading us to have purchased light coloured cotton blinds which permit the entry of light and filter out looks of curious passers-by.
One day, unbeknownst to Gio and I, two of our (female) neighbours laid in ambush in their neatly manicured (mainly brick) garden. As we exited our house, they approached us, and told us we should 1.) leave our blinds open because it is more neighbourly and friendly, and 2.) do something about our weeds and our garden (which basically contains tiles and gravel with a few spontaneous plants along the edges and in the cracks), because they are not neighbourly and friendly. We smiled and nodded a bit and didn’t agree to anything. We do think that our garden is ugly, but in order to fix it three variables have to align perfectly: free time, good weather and the motivation to spend money on someone else’s house. So far it hasn’t happened. As for the blinds…. No. I find it freaky and strange to feel constantly observed, and when out, prudence suggests it is stupid to leave your belongings on display to potential robbers. One day shortly after I caught a movement in our garden and saw one of the neighbours in the back of it, kicking away at a little tree that was trying to grow out of a crack. We had some guests for a while who decided to weed the cracks in the garden, so that solved one problem. For the blinds they can go to hell.
Unfortunately, our lack of blind-compliance has instigated a war. Gio built our nice new garden shed a few weeks ago to house our collection of 4 bicycles (actually the neighbours on the other end helped and lent us power tools!). We decided to put it in the front of the garden, so as to block off view from the rest of it as much as possible and have our own semi-private outdoor space when we do decide to fix our garden. Our landlord told us that some unnamed neighbours had called him to complain that it was too far forward, making the alleyway seem clostrophobic, and they didn’t think it looked good there. Aggg get a hobby!!
For positive impressions, I like Leiden. It is like mini-Amsterdam without the stupid gawking tourists, scummy hippies, and crime. I especially like it at night (see pics
Gio has now woken up and wants attention, since he just got his eyes zapped (laser surgery) and needs help stumbling around the house. Bye for now!