It's my first full day in the Netherlands, and my first chance in some time to relax without any impending packing/preparing/applying hanging over my head. After a 2,300 mile drive from LA to Ohio, a few short days at home, and a transatlantic flight, it's good to be in one place for a bit.
The flight over was not bad at all. A friend who works for the airlines helped me get standby tickets to Amsterdam. I'd never flown standby before - and I'm someone who gets nervous about making flights even when I actually have the ticket - but it worked out fine. I was supposed to fly through Atlanta, but the flights were looking full, so I flew through JFK instead. And better still, I flew business class, which was fantastic. It took incredible willpower not to stay up the entire flight watching movies. At any rate, I fear my father is right - I'll never be satisfied flying coach again...
I took a train from Amsterdam to The Hague, with a transfer in Leiden. Outside of the university in Leiden, I saw more parked bikes than I’ve ever seen – a few thousand – and not terribly many cars. I’m definitely out of the states.
Upon arriving at my new apartment, I had to wait on the street for about an hour before someone let me in. (However, since I took a different flight than expected, I wasn’t too surprised that this happened.) The apartment is nice, and I get the whole third floor to myself. The back of the apartment looks into an enclosed area shared by several other buildings, which looks oddly like the set of “Rear Window.” The only downsides to the apartment are that the stairs to the third floor are absurdly steep (if I don’t kill myself on them, I’ll consider the semester a success) and there’s no bathroom on my floor. Oh, and there’s a loud construction site across the street, where the previous building recently burned down in a massive fire.
I spent today walking around the center of the city, where there are some amazing historical palaces and museums. I went to two museums today: Escher in Het Paleis and the Gevangenpoort. The first museum displayed the works of M.C. Escher, and it was pretty amazing – and besides the drawings, it also had a virtual reality exhibit and a mirror labyrinth that was pretty trippy. The second museum was the old prison, so it’s always fun to see some old torture and execution devices…
Anyway, I’m going to go, as I’m still a bit jetlagged. (I slept 14 hours last night, which may be a new record for me…) My laptop still doesn’t connect to the internet – bah – but I’ll try to post again next week…
3 comments:
How does it feel to be there? Does the Old World feel old?
If you can post pics to your blog, let's have some photo-documentation of "Jordan's Big Adventure." I mean, how do we know you're not really sitting on your parents' couch eating potato chips? Personally, I'd like to see one of all those bicycles.
So what kind of work, in particular, are you going to be doing?
Since I'm having internet troubles, I can't upload pics yet... but someday soon...
The old world feels pretty old, since the bar I went to last night was next to a 13th century knights' hall. It's hard to believe this is where I actually live, though there's enough McDonalds and fashion districts to make you forget you're in on different part of the globe.
As for the work I'm doing, right now I'm just reviewing transcripts, and soon I'll be cite checking. As soon as I've been trained on a few systems, I'm sure I'll move on to something more complex...
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