Ruth In Amsterdam

Geneva, Amsterdam, Home.

2008-01-22T05:35:00.000+01:00

I’m sitting on a plane flying over the Atlantic Ocean right now, so this will likely be my last entry. I just wanted to give one final update on the end of Yitka and my journey; that being our time spent in Geneva and then one last day in Amsterdam. As I think I mentioned before, in order to get to Geneva from Athens we had a long journey. We started by taking the Greek metro, suburban, and national rail from Athens to Patras (a port town in the Northwest of the country). From Patras we caught a Superfast Ferrylines boat to Ancona, Italy. The boat ride was 22 hours long but it went by quickly; probably because Yitka and I both slept for about 15 of the 22 hours. The ship itself was basically a cruise ship complete with multiple bars, restaurants, and stores, and even an internet cafe. Unfortunately or not... we spent so much time sleeping, we didn’t actually take advantage of any of these things.

We boarded the ferry about an hour before departure and both proceeded to fall asleep and nap until about 5 hours in to the trip. When we woke up it was about 6pm, so we decided to have dinner and even some dessert. After dinner we played a nice game of scrabble (of course) and then after a little reading we both fell asleep on two tiny deck chairs that we pushed together. Despite the sleeping space being probably the most uncomfortable that we encountered on this entire European adventure, we were both able to sleep pretty much straight through until about 10am, just an hour before we were to dock in Ancona. It was pretty great. After arriving in Ancona, we walked about 1.5km to find the train station where we caught a train to Milan, and from Milan we got another train to Geneva. It was about another 12 hours of travel after we had docked and finally at midnight about 41 hours after leaving our hostel in Athens we were picked up by our lovely host at the Geneva train station.

Our host in Geneva was actually a friend of mine that I went to pre-school with who moved to Switzerland with her family when we were about 3 years old. They’ve been living there ever since, but luckily Helen and I are still in touch and her family was happy to take us in to their beautiful house. They don’ actually live in the city of Geneva, but they’re about 30 minutes from the center of the city. Their house is this amazing old farm house with beautiful views of snow capped mountains and vineyards all around. Although we did manage to get in to Geneva for a little bit of touring on one of our days there, we were both happy to simply appreciate the amazing house and countryside that we found ourselves staying in. On both days that we were there we took long walks with Connie (Helen’s mom) and their dog and Matthew and Charles (father and brother of Helen) on the second day. These walks were not only wonderfully relaxing, but we also got to see a bunch of old Swiss villages and of course appreciate the wonderful scenery of their neighborhood. It was definitely an amazing visit and it is now a goal of mine to return to Switzerland for another, longer vacation with the Stevensons.

We left Geneva on Saturday night in order to catch an overnight train that got us in to Amsterdam Centraal at 9:30am on Sunday. That gave me a whole day to appreciate the city that I have come to love so much one more time. I had a whole list of things I wanted to do on my one day in the city, and I think I was pretty successful in getting stuff done. Most of the things I wanted to do involved eating certain things that you can only get in Amsterdam, so for each of my three meals yesterday, I had a different Amsterdam delight. Maoz (falafel), toasties, and frites, it was a good food day. I also picked up a few last minute souvenirs and even went to see a movie!

This morning I had to sell back my cell phone to my program and then I took a cab to Schiphol Airport. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the most relaxing of travel days. My travel plans involved a connecting flight in Frankfurt, but my flight to Frankfurt from Amsterdam was delayed about 45 minutes and so by the time we actually landed in Frankfurt my flight to New York was already in the boarding phases. Also, Frankfurt happens to be the biggest, most annoying airport to make a connection in that I’ve ever been to. Our plane wasn’t taken to a gate, instead we came out on the tarmac and then had to take a bus to the terminal, but the terminal is so huge that by the time we got there I still had to walk/run for about 20 minutes before I actually got to my other flights gate. On top of that, I had to go through Immigration. Luckily I was carrying my Amsterdam Residency Permit on me, otherwise I think I probably would have gotten in trouble because I’ve been in the EU longer than is allowed without a visa or residence permit. Good thing I got my Dutch professor to translate that note for me way back when that told me to come pick up this card. Anyway, after all the hassle, I made it to be gate about 15 minutes before the plane was due to leave and all was well. The flight so far has been alright, a little turbulent at times, but Lufthansa is a pretty great airline so I can’t complain to much. Three more hours and then I’ll be in New York... But likely by the time I post this and any of you get around to reading it, I may be off in Honduras!

Pictures! (prague-athens)

2008-01-19T11:41:00.000+01:00

Well we finally got a good enough internet connection here in Switzerland to upload our pictures through Athens. There are two albums, so here are the links:

http://oberlin.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2028363&l=e6610&id=4302935

http://oberlin.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2028366&l=9c614&id=4302935

We'll be in Geneva for a few more hours and then we're catching an overnight train to Amsterdam! Then one more day in A'Dam before heading back to America! (at least for a couple of hours). Enjoy the photos.

Athens (The city where we met people our own age)

2008-01-15T21:43:00.000+01:00

Well, it’s our last night in Athens and fortunately we’ve been able to pick up some pirated wireless for the time that we’ve been here and therefore we’ve remained quite connected to the outside world. Athens has been beautiful and sunny and warm! I spent the last two and a half days walking around in a t-shirt and my flannel, and I was warm! It was a nice change from the intense winter of Eastern Europe that we had just come from. We did get a bit of rain on our first day here, but it was interspersed with bouts of wonderful sunshine, so we couldn’t complain too much. But let me get to the update, because these things always end up being extremely long anyway, I don’t want to bore you with tons of insights that you don’t care about, so here we go!

DAY ONE

We arrived in Athens on Sunday after a one-night visit to Vienna, which we made solely to get on a really cheap flight to Greece. It seems that the second half of our trip has been quite different from the first half, mostly because we’ve just been meeting so many more people. On our metro ride from the airport to our hostel we ended up talking to these two guys who had been on the same flight as us from Vienna. It turns out that they were brothers who are in their 4th month of a 10-month trip around the world. They’d already been to Central and South America and had made their way around a whole lot of Europe, and their next stop is Africa. We talked for the whole train ride and then decided to have dinner together. Apparently somewhere over the course of their 4 months abroad they developed a tradition of having pizza every Sunday night. Not surprisingly, pizza is a food that they’ve been able to find in every place they’ve been to. Given that it was Sunday, Yitka and I were all for a dinner of Greek pizza. We parted ways in order to check in to our separate hostels and then met back up a few hours later and started walking around the neighborhood that our hostel is in. Within 5 minutes we had already found a pizza place that ended up being a really awesome restaurant, with a wonderful waitress who enjoyed taunting us immensely and who made us laugh over and over again. We liked it so much we actually ended up going back there for lunch the next day.

After enjoying our pizza dinner we decided to go explore the area near the Acropolis. Our hostel was literally 3 blocks from the main archeological site of the Acropolis, which made all the sightseeing we wanted to do extremely convenient. Obviously the actual ruins are closed at night, but we were able to walk around them on the other side of the fence and get some pretty cool views. We ended up climbing some random stairs that we came across, which to our surprise, led us to the top of a rock ledge where we could look out upon the entire city of Athens, it was stunning. You could just look out in front of yourself and see the whole modern city of Athens, and then dispersed within the modern city would be these lit up ruins from Ancient Greece, it was really cool. We explored a bit more before deciding to get back to our hostel so we would be able to get up and go exploring in the daylight the next morning.

DAY TWO

You may have noticed from these blog entries that Yitka and I really aren’t the type to get an extremely early start in the morning. We usually are satisfied with ourselves if we get up around 10am and leave our hostel by 11am, which is exactly what we did on our second day in Athens. After waking up and enjoying the continental breakfast of toast with Nutella, we headed out to explore the ruins. One of the girls staying in the same room as us in our hostel goes to Oregon State and we’ve been spending basically all of our time together for the past two days, so when we headed out to explore, she came with us and was with us on all of the adventures that I am about to impart to you.

Our first stop of the day was the Acropolis, but the Acropolis isn’t just one ruin. It’s actually a whole area of Ancient ruins with six different main attractions. I think we managed to see about 4 of the main attractions (and that still took us 2 days). But we were definitely able to get a feel for it. The first day we went to the Parthenon, which stands atop a massive rock cliff in the center of Athens. From the top, no matter which way you turn you can see the city stretching out for miles, it’s really amazing, and as soon as we have a more steady internet connection we will surely be uploading many pictures of this awesome sight. From the Parthenon we went to explore some ancient caves, but then unfortunately, the rain began and it started coming down pretty hard. The three of us decided it was time to run for cover and so we headed back to our new favorite restaurant for some lunch. Don’t worry though, this wasn’t just a pizza place, it was actually a traditional Greek restaurant and we all ended up getting delicious Greek food for lunch (and let me tell you, Greek food is delicious).

After lunch we were going to try and go to the National Archeological Museum, but it was still raining and I think we were all pretty exhausted, so we ended up just using our pirated internet, and talking in our hostel room for about 6 hours. We also made Kayla (the girl from Oregon State) sit through viewings of our pictures from our travels thus far as well as tons of pictures and videos from Oberlin... I don’t think she was that bored by it, but it made Yitka and me both really nostalgic and excited to get back to Oberlin in a few weeks. After spending a while in the hostel we knew that we’d have to make up for it by having an awesome Greek dinner, and we definitely succeeded in that. We went to a restaurant around the corner that had been recommended by our hostel, and it was delicious! I had Moussaka, I’m not even sure exactly what it’s made of... I know it has potatoes, and meat, and vegetables, and it’s made sort of like lasagna, it was delicious though. We also had some of the most amazing baklava I’ve ever had, which was served with this weird shot of alcohol that I couldn’t quite place the taste of. Well, we enjoyed the food so much, we ended up going back there tonight, and I couldn’t help myself but order the exact same thing! It was just so good! I think my favorite thing about Athens has definitely been the food, hands down.

After dinner we had a laid-back night and came back to the hostel and watched Garden State, which we had learned earlier, was a movie that all three of us absolutely loved. Luckily I thought to bring my movie collection with me on this trip, I knew it would come in handy.

DAY THREE

Today was similar to yesterday. We saw a whole lot of ancient ruins that I don’t think I can really do justice to just by writing about them. Don’t worry though, you will see pictures. Overall though I think it’s just really amazing to be in this city where you can just be walking down the street and all of a sudden a sign will be posted pointing out some ancient ruins right under your nose. And when you walk through the sites like the Ancient Agora, where we were today, you can just think about what it was like in about 200BC and you can actually imagine it because some of the structures are so well preserved and in tact. It’s just amazing and Yitka and I have both fallen in love with this city, it’s ruins, it’s food, and it’s people.

After seeing a lot more ancient ruins we then walked over to the old Olympic Stadium, which is actually the stadium from the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. It’s a massive stadium with huge marble stands that we all just wanted to climb up to the top of. Unfortunately you couldn’t go inside, so we had to take our pictures from the other side of the fence... Oh well. After seeing the stadium we walked over to the National Archeological Museum, but once again, we failed to see it. This time (after about a 30-45 minute walk to get there) we found out that the museum closes at 3pm on Tuesdays, and it happened to be 4pm. It was still sunny out, so we lounged on the steps of the museum for a while taking in the heat from the sun before finally hopping on the metro and heading back to our hostel.

I already told you that we went back to that same restaurant for dinner again tonight and had an amazing meal. Now I think we’d both like to try and get a decent nights sleep because we have to be out of here by 7am tomorrow morning in order to catch our 8am train. For those of you who don’t know yet, our next stop on this journey is Geneva, Switzerland. How are we getting there though? Well that’s the interesting part. We will be traveling from 7am tomorrow morning until about 11pm the day AFTER. Our first leg of the journey is a train ride from Athens to Patras, a port city in Greece. From Patras we will take a boat to Ancona, Italy. From there we have to catch a train to Milan, and from Milan we will be able to catch a train to Geneva. Doesn’t that sound fun? Well, if you read this anytime before the 18th, that’s probably what Yitka and I are currently up to, so now you know!

Alright, just one more city to go before we head back to Amsterdam and then home, 5 more days in Europe! How crazy.

Hanging out with middle aged men in Budapest

2008-01-13T11:00:00.000+01:00

I hope you have all been enjoying my updates, and I hope you haven’t been bored out of your mind by the intricate details that I tend to include. We’re currently in Vienna and although the wireless at the hostel we’re staying at seems to be broken, I was able to get to a Starbucks about 10 minutes away from here in order to post the last two entries. So, I’ll write this now (Saturday night) and hopefully I’ll be able to post it tomorrow from Athens! Our hostel there is supposed to have free internet connections, so we can only hope that theirs wont be broken also, but I guess it’s pointless for me to be saying this because if anyone is reading this post, it means that I finally found some internet and was able to update my blog. Sooooo, on to our crazy adventures in Budapest!

As you heard in my last entry, we chose to stay in a different hostel than the one that we had previously booked. Mom, don’t freak out too much about this, we were very cautious, and really we could either have gone with Ziggy or tried to find our way around Budapest at 11:30pm… our options really weren’t all that great. Our choice to stay at the Locomotive Light Hostel (as it was called) is really the reason that we had almost all of the experiences that we did in Budapest. I’ll start from the beginning though, because I like to stick to chronologies.

DAY ONE

After getting in at 11:30pm and staying up talking to Ziggy for a while on our first night in Budapest, Yitka and I were both pretty tired and so we decided to sleep in a bit instead of rushing out and trying to cram in as much sightseeing as possible. In fact, sightseeing was very low on our agenda for our time in Budapest. The first and most important thing that we did in Budapest was to take a trip to the thermal baths. We had heard before arriving that a trip to the baths was a thing not to be missed if one was going to visit this city and so at 11:30am we followed Ziggy’s directions and took a bus over to the Schezny Baths (I think I spelled that right). We got there at about noon and paid our 2500 fts. (About 15 dollars) each and then headed in. There were a bunch of different baths that one could go into, including one like a hot tub, as well as one with powerful water jets that made the whole bath into the most powerful whirlpool I’ve ever been in. If you just let yourself float in the water you would find yourself being whisked around the entire pool by no effort of your own. There were also two baths that may have had something special about them, but I really don’t know what that something would be… Now that I’ve explained that, I’ll just let you know that Yitka and I stayed there for almost 6 hours. We had left the hostel knowing that we weren’t going to try and do anything else that day, and the time just flew by as we were sitting relaxing in the water. It was extremely refreshing and also very good for us I think. The water supposedly has all these minerals in it that results in your entire system being cleared out just by sitting in it, it was pretty awesome.

So that was what we did on our first day in Budapest, but one thing that was different about our visit to Budapest than the rest of the cities we’ve been in so far is that we actually went out to some bars both nights. On our first night Ziggy introduced us to Andrew (a 34 year old guy from Idaho who ended up staying in the same room as us in the hostel for the next two nights) and Andrej (that’s Hungarian for Andrew, although I’m unsure of the spelling) a friend of his from Budapest. The five of us went to a nearby bar and had some delicious Hungarian beer and also played pool for a while. When we came back to the hostel, Yitka, Andrew, and I ended up playing poker until about 3:30am when we finally called it a night, all in all it was a fun night.

DAY TWO

On our second day we were determined to get at least a little sightseeing done before we left the city. Since we hadn’t gone to sleep until about 4am the night before we allowed ourselves to sleep until 11am before getting up and heading out to see the sights. Unfortunately, we seemed to have picked the cloudiest, and grayest day of our entire trip, and so none of my pictures really capture Budapest in it’s truest glory, which we fortunately were able to see today as our train pulled away from the city.

Our first sightseeing stop was the Hungarian parliamentary buildings. We took the metro there, and as we emerged from the station we were immediately confronted with the beautiful sight of the parliament complex. Like the dutiful tourists that we are, we took a bunch of pictures of the building and of some of the statues surrounding it. That’s also one thing we noticed about Budapest, there are statues absolutely everywhere! We didn’t know who most of the statues were of, but they fill the entire city, and they’re all large and grand, it was really cool.

After leaving parliament we walked along the bank of the river until we came to a bridge where we could cross into Buda. That’s one thing I learned while in Budapest actually. Buda and Pest are two different places. Buda is on the western side of the river and is more expensive and also home to the castle grounds, while Pest is on the eastern side of the river and is less expensive and more industrial. We were staying in Pest, but we wanted to go walk around the castle grounds so we walked over to Buda. The palace is up on top of a mountain and is surrounded by a variety of other buildings with lots of museums and shops within the grounds. To be quite honest, I’m really not sure which building was actually the palace, but the entire grounds were really beautiful and from the top of the mountain we got a really great view of the rest of the city.

After leaving the palace we were going to try and go to the Statue Park, which is this park where all the statues of former communists leaders have been collected since the fall of communism. Even though I was already exhausted from our days adventures, I was really looking forward to seeing this place because we were told that it was a pretty amazing sight. We needed to take two different buses to get there from our hostel, but unfortunately after we got off the first bus and were trying to figure out where to get on the second bus, we found out that the park was closed. We were in a pretty random part of the city, so there was nothing for us to do besides turn around and take the bus back to our hostel… too bad.

That night we went out to a traditional Hungarian restaurant for dinner and I had the most delicious goulash I’ve ever tasted (sorry Rachel… it was very meaty). The only vegetarian thing on the menu was fried cheese, so Yitka got to enjoy that splendid delicacy. After satiating ourselves, we found ourselves heading to another bar with Ziggy and Andrew. This bar was much smaller and really personal. It was basically me, Yitka, and Andrew (the 3 Americans) and a bunch of 30-40 year old Hungarian guys. Oh yeah, and there was also a guy from Canada, and an older guy from Germany… what a crowd, eh? We spent the night drinking good Hungarian beer and playing a whole lot of foosball… more foosball than I’ve ever played in my life beforehand. What we learned was that, all 3 of us Americans were pretty terrible at foosball, but Andrej, and the German guy were both really awesome at it. After a few hours of foosball, random songs on the jukebox, and the largest pizza I’ve ever seen in my life, we decided to call it a night and head back to the hostel.

So that was Budapest… It was definitely an experience like none I’ve ever had before and I’m sure that I will never forget it. It was also really interesting for me, because I NEVER hang out with 30-40 year old men, and I wouldn’t really expect to have a good time with them, but I guess that would be a bad judgment on my part, because I ended up having a lot of fun, and it was definitely a night, and a city, that I will never forget.

Alright, by the time you read this I assume that I will be in Athens or maybe even on my way to Geneva! I’ve got 9 more days in Europe; I’ll try to make the best of it!

Bratislava (?)

2008-01-12T18:28:00.002+01:00

Well, I’m currently in Vienna, but I haven’t yet had a chance to update about Budapest or our trip there for that matter. We left Prague on Wednesday morning and caught an 11:35 train that should have gotten us to Budapest by about 6:30pm. We knew that our Eurail passes were not valid in the Czech Republic and so we had paid the required fair to get to the Czech border where we believed our passes would once again be valid. Unfortunately, we were unaware that the train would be taking us through Slovakia in order to get to Budapest, and therefore when the ticket taker came around and looked at our tickets as we were approaching Bratislava, we obviously did not have the right ones. Because of this, and because we also didn’t have enough money to pay the fare right on the train, we were forced to disembark our train at the next stop, which fortunately enough happened to be Bratislava and not some little random town in the middle of Slovakia. Since we had no Slovakian currency with us, we couldn’t buy anything at the station once we had paid for our tickets to the Slovakian border. We took a short walk away from the station just to say that we had been to Bratislava. Unfortunately we had to wait about 4 hours until the next train to Budapest came through, so we spent the time reading and playing Scrabble in this sketchy waiting room at the train station.

When we finally did get in to Budapest it was about 11pm and although we had directions to our hostel, we were having a lot of trouble figuring them out. This really sketchy guy with a beard and long hair, who was wearing a big black coat kept coming over to us and offering us a hostel. At first we kept turning him down, but he was extremely persistent and he showed us a flyer and eventually convinced us to go with him to see this hostel. I think we were both pretty terrified seeing as it was 11pm and we had just gotten to Budapest… But he ended up bringing us to a really nice little hostel that was right near the train station. When we got there we were still pretty sketched out because the entranceway had a big metal gate and we were also the only people staying at the hostel that night.

Everything turned out to be fine though and we ended up staying at this place all three nights we were in Budapest, and you’ll be hearing all about those nights in the next entry. I know these have been really behind, but I haven’t been able to get any wireless for a while, hopefully that will change soon.

Prague

2008-01-12T18:28:00.001+01:00

Hello again! I write to you now from a hostel in Budapest. There’s a whole story about our travels between Prague and Budapest, but I think it deserves an entry on its own, so you’ll get that in due time. Prague was really amazing. I think Yitka and I both agreed that it was one of the most beautiful cities we’ve ever been to, all of the architecture is just stunning. It felt like every time we turned around we would find ourselves looking at another amazing building. We’ve been doing so much every day that I feel as though the only way I can manage to recount everything that we’ve done is to give a blow by blow account of each day of our travels as I did in my Berlin update, so here goes.

DAY ONE

We arrived in Prague at about 4pm on Sunday and made our way to our hostel which was pretty centrally located within the city. The hostel was extremely nice. We were in a comfortable room and we had access to free wireless from the hostel. Our roommates on our second and third nights were all from the states and one of them went to SUNY New Paltz, so we even managed to find some common acquaintances through the wonderful world of facebook. After settling down we decided to go explore the city for a little while and grab some dinner. We went over to Wenceslas Square, which isn’t actually a square at all so much as a big avenue that spreads out in front of the National Museum at the top of the hill. We found a traditional Czech restaurant and treated ourselves to a delicious dinner. After eating since we were both exhausted we went back to the hostel in order to take advantage of the free wireless (which is how you were all delivered with my Berlin update and those wonderful pictures on facebook).

DAY TWO

We spent our second day in Prague wandering around the city seeing various sites and of course, numerous beautiful buildings. We made sure to take advantage of our hostels free breakfast every morning of our trip and so after we had enjoyed our hearty corn flakes we were ready to explore for hours. Luckily the day before we had stumbled across some information that said the National Museum was free on the first Monday of every month which happened to be our second day in Prague. Always looking for a bargain, Yitka and I decided to make the museum our first stop of the day. I think the best part of the museum was probably the building itself. It was a massive structure with tons of statues and engravings all over it, we took lots of pictures (which I’ll upload next time I have wireless access on my lap top). We went to two exhibits in the museum, although I’m sure there were many more because it was a humungous museum. The first exhibit we saw was all about aerial archeology. It was about how archeologists use aerial photography in order to discover where ancient civilizations once were. The photos show the differences in landscapes that have formed because of different human uses of the land over the years. There was one picture where you could see the remains of a shipwreck that occurred over a hundred years before the picture was taken, it was really cool.

The other exhibit that we went to in the museum was called “The Human Footprint” and it was literally about the footprint that human beings have left on the earth (and the moon for that matter). The exhibit basically consisted of a bunch of different artifacts that all had something to do with human existence on earth. The most prominent artifacts were various pairs of shoes! There were all different kinds of shoes from all over the world that were prominently displayed… It was a pretty strange exhibit, I must say.

After leaving the museum we continued to wander around the city, we made our way through the Jewish Quarter and then over the river and up to the Prague Castle. The castle was beautiful and it was up on a hill so we were given a brilliant view of the entire city of Prague.

DAY THREE

On our third and final day in Prague we made sure to get an early start on our adventures and were out of our hostel by 10am that morning. Our first stop of the day was the Old Town Square where Prague’s famed Astronomical Clock is located. This clock tells not only the time, but it can also tell you the zodiac and perhaps something about the movement of the planets (?) I’m not entirely sure to tell you the truth. Every hour when the clock strikes the hour all of these figures make an appearance from within the clock. A big crowd gathers every hour and so we made sure to be there when the clock struck 11am. It was pretty exciting I guess… I took a video of it, but it wasn’t really that amazing, but I’m glad we saw it.

After we watched the dance of the clock we walked over to the Old Jewish Cemetery and the Pinkas Synagogue where we forked over the 200 Crowns (about 10 dollars) to go into both places. The Pinkas Synagogue is a really old Jewish Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter where the names of many of the Prague Jews that died in the Holocaust have been recorded on the walls. There are a total of 80,000 names written on the walls. There are literally 4 large rooms where every wall is entirely covered in the names of victims as well as their dates of birth and death. Walking through the synagogue was an extremely moving experience. I found myself overcome with sadness as I calculated the ages of the victims. As I scanned the names I kept seeing my own name as well as the names Anna and Adolf and I felt a true connection to all the victims. When we left the synagogue, we went into the Old Jewish Cemetery that is right next door. This cemetery has been around since the mid 1400’s and there are so many headstones crammed into the tiny plot of land, it is obvious that many of the graves must be right on top of one another.

The rest of our wanderings that day led us to the Charles Bridge and up a funicular to the top of a mountain on the edge of the city. There’s not really much to say about these places, so I’ll let the pictures do all the talking when I get a chance to upload them in a few days.

Our last stop of the day was the Kafka Museum. I’ve never read any Kafka, but this museum really intrigued me and now I definitely want to read a bit of his work. I really liked the museum, especially because it was really focused on Kafkas’ relationship with the city of Prague. So it was really interesting to read about it and see all the old pictures of the city.

Before heading back to our hostel for our last night in Prague we went to this amazing vegetarian restaurant that we had read about on our tourist map. And now here’s the best part, we ran into ANOTHER Obie at this restaurant! We were sitting there waiting for our food and all of a sudden this girl walked in and we both stopped our ramblings (which of course were about Oberlin) to stare at her befuddled and amazed that we were running into another Obie on this short trip!

Anyway, so that’s the story of Prague. More to come about the ride to Budapest and our experiences in Hungary in my next post. Also, I’ll update pictures soon as well.

Berlin (and a little London)

2008-01-07T00:22:00.000+01:00

Hello Again! Well, it has certainly been a long time since I last updated, I’m sorry to keep you all in suspense about what’s been going on in my life, but the dial-up internet connection in London just wasn’t cutting it. Since this entry is mostly about my time in Berlin, I don’t want to spend too much time discussing what I did in London, but I’ll just give a quick overview of my 11 days in London. My mom and I traveled from Amsterdam to London on Saturday December 22nd, where my friend Wendy met us and stayed with us until after Christmas. We proceeded to spend the next few days seeing various family and friends in London. We spent Christmas day with our cousins, and my cousin Rachel cooked a huge feast for us and Wendy as well. Rachel (not my cousin) and her family came to London on the 28th and we all had lunch. By the 31st my mom had left and Rachel, Yitka, Wendy, and her boyfriend Alex had joined me. We all spent New Years Eve together at my grandpas flat. On New Years Day we went on the London Eye, then Rachel left on the 2nd, and the rest of us cleared out of England on the 3rd. Wendy and Alex headed off to Amsterdam and Yitka and I hopped on a plane to Berlin. And so finally, I will tell you about the time I have spent in Berlin.

We arrived in Berlin at 9:30pm on January 3rd after a long day of traveling. We had to leave the flat at about 2pm in order to make sure we were able to get on a bus to Stansted in time for our 6:45pm flight. It seems like a lot of time, but the tube ride to the bus station was about 40 minutes followed by the actual bus ride to the airport, which was at least an hour. Before getting on the bus we had to wait in a line where it felt like we really weren’t going to get seats on the bus we wanted, but luckily we were given the LAST two seats on the bus, lucky us! After that all travel went smoothly. RyanAir treated us well (definitely worth the 20 pounds we paid for those tickets!) and we arrived in Berlin on time. For those of you that don’t know, we’ve been staying with my old au pair (spelling? I’m not so good with the French) from when I was 2-3 years old. She picked us up from the airport along with her son Joschi (short for Joshua, pronounced Yoshi). I don’t really remember Stefanie all that well from when I was a toddler, but the whole time I’ve been here she has been telling me all these wonderful stories about her memories of me and Lindsay when we were babies. She also showed me her four photo albums/scrap books from the year that she was in America and they include tons of pictures of me and Lindsay as 2/4 year olds as well as a bunch of pictures of my house before all the remodeling that we’ve done over the years. It was really fun to look through the pictures and hear stories about what Stefanie remembers from that time in 1989. It sort of felt like I was getting an outsiders perspective on my childhood and my family, and I really appreciated it. On top of all that, Stefanie and her boyfriend Thomas have also been amazing hosts. They’ve fed us breakfast every morning and taken us on walks around Berlin and they even treated us to dinner at a delicious Vietnamese restaurant on Saturday night.

Anyway, on to our activities in Berlin. We had two days of tourist activities, so I’ll just go day by day.

DAY ONE

After a wonderful breakfast with Stefanie and Joschi we made our way via the S-Bahn and the U-Bahn (Berlin public transport) to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. Checkpoint Charlie was one of the main border checkpoints along the Berlin Wall between 1962 and 1989 when the wall was in place. On one side of the Wall at Checkpoint Charlie was Communist East Berlin and on the other side was the American Sector of West Berlin. Outside the museum they have left the Army checkpoint station standing and there is also a replica of the old sign that alerted people to the fact that they were entering or leaving the American Sector. The museum itself was entirely overwhelming. It is dedicated to those people that lost their lives trying to flee East Berlin, but there was just sooooo much stuff inside. There were hundreds of pictures and newspaper articles and models of different methods people had used to try and escape, but there was no cohesive story to tie everything together. I’m obviously glad I went because I think it was good to be able to see all these things, but I wished that there had been a more cohesive story that flowed throughout the entire museum instead of just a slew of hundreds of random artifacts thrown randomly into the museum.

With that said about my opinions of the museum, here’s a small world story for all of you. Just as we were leaving the exhibition a girl grabbed my arm and asked me frantically if I went to Oberlin (I was wearing my sweatshirt of course). We started talking and it turns out that she also went to Oberlin, AND, she was in the museum with 2 of her friends that ALSO went to Oberlin. We ended up knowing the other two girls as acquaintances and so we stood around in the Checkpoint Charlie gift shop and talked about our European travel plans for a while before parting ways. It was just really cool to run in to Oberlin people in Germany! Small world eh?

That evening we met up with Stefanie and after utterly freezing ourselves walking around the city for an hour or so (it was about -8°C), we finally stopped in an Indian restaurant and had a yummy dinner.

DAY TWO

For our second day in Berlin we tried to start the day early, but even though we had set our alarm for 9am we didn’t actually get out of bed until after 10am. Again we were greeted with a lovely German breakfast of bread, cheese, and various meats. After eating we headed into the city on the train prepared for a long day of touring. The first place we went was the Brandenburg Tor (Gate) which, to the best of my knowledge was an old entrance to the city. After wandering around in the area we came across the Jewish Memorial for those that lost their lives during the Holocaust. The memorial consists of a series of big stone boxes which at first don’t really look like much but when you start to walk through them you soon find yourself completely immersed and surrounded by these stone structures. When you look around you can only see the narrow paths that are created by all of the stones. I’m sure there is some profound meaning to why the memorial is set up in this way, but I haven’t yet taken the time to look it up.

After exploring the Jewish Memorial we made our way two blocks over to the Reichstag where you can enter and go up to the Dome at the top of the building for free, just so long as you’re willing to wait in a long line out in the cold. Since it was free we chose to wait not knowing that we would be standing outside in the below freezing air for over an hour. Despite the long, cold wait, it was pretty cool to get inside and have a view of the city and also to see the photo essay history of the building that was presented in the Dome.

Our next stop of the day was the German Historical Museum. This museum was also extremely overwhelming because it attempted to tell the story of German history from around 500BC to the present day. With that being said, it was definitely a lot more organized and easy to follow than the Checkpoint Charlie museum as the story was actually told in a cohesive manner that was easy to follow and interesting to read.

As an end to our time in Berlin, Stefanie and her boyfriend Thomas took us out for a lovely Vietnamese dinner, but not before taking us on an hour long walk across the newly ice slicked streets of Berlin. The walk was very treacherous and all four of us had some pretty close calls to falling right on our butts, but luckily we made it to the restaurant all in one piece.

This morning we caught a train to Prague and that is where I am right now. The train ride was 5 hours, but it passed by rather quickly. After a nap, some reading, and a good deal of time spent staring out the window at the snowy white countryside we found ourselves in Praha (where the snow had finally stopped falling). We’ll be here for three nights and then we head to Budapest. So that’s all for now, and in a few days time I’ll update again with some stories of our time in the Czech Republic.

I won't be uploading photos to my blog this month, but I'll keep facebook as up to date as possible. Here is a combined album of mine and Yitkas' photos from our last few days in London and our time in Berlin:

http://oberlin.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2027970&l=7a9f4&id=4302935

finals... but here's a short update anyway

2007-12-11T11:17:00.000+01:00

Okay, sorry it's been so long since I posted. I'm in the midst of finals, and though they're nowhere near as daunting as Oberlin finals, there is still a bunch of work to do this week so this won't be a long post. I just wanted to give you a quick update, and I'll just let the pictures I have be my explanation of what I've been doing the past 2 weeks.

1. My friends and I went to Hortus Botanicus, the botanical garden a few blocks away from my dorm. They had a butterfly room.

2. We had a party for Sinterklaas on December 5th. Our program directors Hannah and Rudy dressed up as Zwarte Peit. I didn't realize who they actually were until they spoke to me. It was disturbing.

3. Oh yeah, and Hannah's husband dressed up as Sinterklaas.

4. My dad visited for a long weekend (he left this morning). We went to Delft and to the church where Johannes Vermeer is said to be buried.

5. Delft was really pretty, and it DOES have canals (Rachel...).

6. We also stopped in the Hague for an hour... It was not as cool or as pretty as Delft. But there was this cool clock outside central station.

7. Yesterday we went on a canal cruise. It was fun to see the city from the water.

Okay, that's all for the pictures. This morning I took my final exam for my Russia and Europe class, I think it went well... Friday I have a 4,000-5,000 page paper due, and then I'll be basically done with school work. Then my mom gets here on Sunday... I may or may not update again before leaving the city.

So long!

Deltawerken

2007-11-29T13:23:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I went on one final excursion with CIEE. This time I actually managed to wake up on my own and made it easily to the bus by 8:15am, so that puts my success rate at waking up for excursions at 1/3. I guess that ratio could possibly give you some idea of my schedule here. Basically, yesterday was the earliest I've been awake (besides catching flights) all semester. Only two days a week do I have to wake up for an early class, and so on most other days I tend to sleep until about 11am, sometimes later on weekends, it's very enjoyable, and I'm not looking forward to next semester when I will definitely need to be a lot more productive than I am required to be here. Anyway, back to the excursion though.

In Dutch class a few days ago, Bonny (my professor) was telling us about a survey that asked Dutch people what they are most proud of regarding their Dutch identity and the society they come from. The thing that came up as what the most Dutch people are proud of (about 70% of the population) was the so called "battle against the water." As I'm sure many of you are somewhat aware, the Netherlands is full of dykes and dams that work to keep the North Sea from flooding the country. Without these dykes and dams, about half of the country would be under water, including Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam, three of the most important cities in the country. The country has been protected by dykes since the middle ages and maybe even before (I don't know the exact history) but in 1953 there was a major storm that broke past many of the dykes and flooded the coastal area. About 1,800 people were killed during the storm and flood that resulted, the sea level during that disaster was higher than it has ever been recorded in the country prior to or since 1953. After that disaster it became clear that something more was needed to keep the water out, and that is what the Delta Project was.

Shortly after the storm dams began to be constructed throughout teh Zeeland (the area where the damage of 1953 had been the harshest and also the area most vulnerable to the North Sea. The most intense dam that was constructed, and also the one that we visited yesterday, was the Eastern Scheldt dam, which was completed in 1986 and cost about 2.5 billion euros. The entire project, which included 13 different dams cost a total of 6.5 billion euros. I won't try to explain the science behind the dams or how they were able to construct such massive gateways to the North Sea, because although we watched a movie about it and had it explained to us by a guide, I really just dont understand it. Nonetheless, I was extremely impressed by the scientific genius that obviously went into the design and construction of the dams.

We got to walk out onto the main dam and look over at the rushing water, and it was quite a sight. The water was moving so incredibly fast, but we were told that it was a very calm day really. Seeing the strength of the water on a calm day, I can barely imagine what it must be like during a massive storm. The one thing I do know about how the dam works is that the gates are left open until the water level gets to 3m above sea level. At this point a series of 62 huge gates are shut so that no more water can get into the country (that seems like a weird way to put it, but that's essentially what happens). Our guide told us that in the 21 years the dam has been in operation, the gates have only been closed 9 times, and one of those times was just a few weeks ago on November 9th, 2007!

Unfortunately, my camera was out of batteries, so I can't put up a picture of the dam right now. But as soon as I get my hands on someone elses pictures from the day, I'll make sure to post one on here.

On a completely separate note, Shari visited this weekend and we had a splendid time! Also, last night I went to see Taryn's photo exhibition, which was part of her final project for SIT, and it was really great. She's an extremely talented photographer, I expect big things!

Sinterklaas Is Here!

2007-11-22T15:44:00.000+01:00

This weekend the Dutch version of Santa Clause came to town. Sinterklaas arrived in the Amsterdam harbor on a boat from Spain this Sunday morning. I don't feel completely qualified to give the history of Sinterklaas, but I'll try to give an idea of the tradition to the best of my knowledge. Basically Sinterklaas comes from Saint Nicholas, and he is the patron saint of children. Similar to Santa Clause, he is said to keep a list of all children and whether or not they have been good or bad over the year. On December 5th Dutch children get gifts from Sinterklaas, in their shoes (?) I think. If a child has been bad over the year, it is said that he will be sent back to Spain! This threat has a lot of historical significance because the Dutch were under Spanish control for many years in the middle ages. So, that is what my knowledge of Sinterklaas is. One main difference that needs to be talked about between Sinterklaas and Santa Clause, is that of their helpers. As all Americans know, Santa Clause is assisted by hundreds and thousands of elves that work for him in the North Pole. Well, Sinterklaas also has helpers, but his helpers are called Zwarte Piets (black petes). Basically Zwarte Piet is usually portrayed by white Dutch people dressed up in complete black face. This would never fly in America, and I think these pictures will illustrate just why that is.

On Sunday some of my friends and I decided to get a taste of Dutch tradition and so we made our way to Dam Square in order to get a look at Sinterklaas and all the Zwarte Piets running around as he made his way through the city (on a white horse of course). I had hear about Zwarte Piet before going to the parade, but I was in no way prepared to encounter the site that awaited me. There were literally hundreds of people dressed up in what looked like clown outfits, with all of their skin entirely blacked out and with wigs as well! They were all running around interacting with the crowds and acting like fools. Some of them were even scaling a building near the square. A spectacle like this would never fly in America and my friends and I were all made slightly uncomfortable by the sight of it. The arguments that I have heard to justify the continued acceptance of this practice really do not satisfy me. I have been told that "it's just a tradition" and it has also been argued that blackface does not have the same negative connotations in this country that it does in America, but I really don't think that makes it okay. It has also been argued that the Dutch do not have the same history of racism that we have in the States, but this is simply a falsehood. The Dutch played a major role in the slave trade, they held colonies around the globe, and they can also proudly claim to be the ancestors of Afrikaans people in South Africa. When the Dutch arrived on the southern point of Africa, they handled themselves in an entirely racist manner and so I think it is simply ignorant to try and argue that the Dutch do not have a racist history. Apparently there have been attempts to try and get this tradition changed, for instance one group has argued for a new tradition in which the Zwarte Piets are painted in all different colors of the rainbow in order to show diversity, but none of these efforts have been succesful at gaining support within the country, so 600 Zwarte Piets were still found running around the streets of Amsterdam this past Sunday. I'll try not to dwell on that though. It was really cool to get to see Sinterklaas, along with some colonists! (and someone is trying to argue the Dutch aren't historically racist). He rode past us on his big white horse and all the little kids got really excited. It is also a Dutch tradition for the Zwarte Piets to hand out peipernoeten (I think I'm spelling that wrong) and so all the little kids (some of whom were dressed up as Zwarte Piet themselves) were standing along the parade route with bags out waiting to recieve their peipernoeten (which is just little ginger snap cookies, they're pretty tasty).

On another note, I went to the Anne Frank House on Tuesday. I was trying to wait out and go with my mom, but they were supposed to cut down the chestnut tree from the garden that Anne wrote about so much in her diary. My friends and I decided on a whim to go check it out before the cut the tree down the next day. It was a good place to visit, it was just sort of amazing to be in all the same places that she describes so well within the diary. So... to those who are coming to visit me, I recommend that you go, but since I don't want to pay another 7,50 euro to go again, I think I will find a cafe nearby and read a book while you explore it. Well, that's all for now, Shari is coming in two days and I'm super excited!

Vienna! (through rain, hail, and snow)

2007-11-17T14:06:00.001+01:00

Sorry it's taken me so long to get around to writing this entry. Everytime I sit down at my computer with the intention of writing it, it just seems daunting and like too much to do in the time that I have to be writing it. The case is no different right now, but I figure if I at least get started then the next time I am at my computer, I will be able to finish. I've already written a nine page entry on Vienna in my journal, because that's how much there is to say about it! I'm just going to try and give a general overview of everything that we did while we were there.

I traveled with my friend Scott who is one of my closest friends in Amsterdam. At the same time that we were in Vienna though, some other girls from our program were also there, and I was staying at the same hostel as them (Scott stayed with a friend of his who is studying abroad in Vienna this semester). We had an 8:50am flight out of Amsterdam on Thursday morning, and so our weekend adventure started at around 7:00am when we met up at Scott's place to walk over to Central Station together and catch a train to the airport. Travel went very smoothly and our flight was incredibly fast so we landed in Vienna at our scheduled time despite leaving about 30 minutes late. After we landed we made our way to my hostel so I could check in and put my stuff down. After putting everything down we (now joined by Erika, Lena, Riley, and Amanda, who all go to USC and are on my program as well) made our way to Old Town just so that we could walk around and see the city a little bit. The first thing I noticed about Vienna is that all of the buildings are absolutely beautiful. I felt as though everywhere I turned I saw another architecturally stunning building. Apparently Vienna is quite famous for their coffee, so while in Old Town we went to get some delicious coffee, and we also stopped by Cafe Demel to pick up some royally famous cake. Scott and I shared a chocolate truffle cake, and it was delicious.

As all of us were pretty tired from traveling we decided to spend the night at the bar in our hostel instead of out painting the town red. We spent a few hours drinking and eating in the bar joined by Scott's friend Megan, and then eventually at around 1:00am we all decided to go to bed, making plans to meet up at 10am the next morning to start our first day of touring the city. All of us except for Scott were staying at the same hostel, but since the other 4 girls had booked their room together, they had their own room and I was in a different room with three guys from Australia. I had only briefly introduced myself to these guys earlier in the day, and they weren't in the room when I went to bed, but unfortunately they came back about an hour after I put my head down and they were completely trashed. They proceeded to wake me up by yelling my name very loudly and with a very long "u" sound.... "Ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuth!" When it became apparent that I wasn't going to be able to pretend to be asleep, I sat up in bed and acknowledged that I was not asleep. They then proceeded to strip down to their underwear and make me take pictures of them posing in their underwear. One of them also began banging his head into the METAL lockers in the room. Basically they made complete fools of theirselves, but after about 15 minutes they realized how obnoxious they were being and went to bed... I didn't fall asleep for another hour, so it was not a good first night sleeping wise, but I guess that's what happens sometimes when you stay in youth hostels. On Friday morning I woke up and cleared out of the room before my lovely roomates regained consciousness.

My main reason for really wanting to visit Vienna over other European cities was because I wanted to get a chance to see the building that my grandfather lived in when he was growing up in Vienna. The entire weekend I found myself imagining what the city might have been like in the 1930's when my grandpa was here. On Friday morning the first place we visited was Weimarer Strasse 22, my grandpa's old address. I google mapped the location the night before and figured out what train to take. It ended up being only 2 metro stops from where Megan lived, so it was really easy to get to. I took a bunch of pictures of the outside of the building, but I didn't know the apartment number and even if I had, I don't think I would have been bold enough to actually ring the door bell and ask to go inside. At one point however, someone did leave the building and my friends and I caught the door and walked into the entrance hallway for a few minutes. It was really great to get to see the whole neighborhood, and I was strangely reminded of the upper west side. There are more pictures on facebook (link in the previous post) if you want to see more of what I'm talking about here.

After leaving Weimarer Strasse, we all made our way a short bus ride outside of Vienna into the mountains and vinyards surrounding the city. A bus took us to the top of some mountain, from which we could see the entire city of Vienna laid out in front of us. We snapped many pictures before retreating from the cold into a restaurant/hotel that was located on top of the mountain. Just about 5 minutes after we had taken our seats at the restaurant, it started to hail outside! Luckily we had looked at the weather forecast before leaving Amsterdam and so I had my winter coat and a hat and gloves to keep me warm, nevertheless, we were expecting snow, not hail. After some snacks we braved the cold again in order to take a short hike through the nearby vinyards and to experience some more spectacular views of Vienna, albeit at the expense of our warmth.

The rest of our day was spent at the Albertina Art Museum, which had a huge collection of famous artists from the last two-three centuries. And later that night we went to a restaurant called Centimenter VII which gets it's name because it usually serves food "by the centimeter."
We were joined by a bunch of Megan's roomates and friends that were visiting at the same time, so all together there were 12 of us out to dinner. We had the entire basement of the restaurant to ourselves. Our hosts ordered a "wagon" and a "sword" as the main course... There was no way to predict what was about to be served to us. Basically we were given a whole lot of meats, potatoes, pastas, etc. and the whole table served theirselves. It was quite the interesting dining experience, but after one plate I couldn't eat anymore because it was so filling.

The next day we were back to touring, but first we allowed ourselves to sleep in until 11am. We met up at about one and made our way over to the Naschmarkt, which is an outdoor market that sells tons of different foods that all looked absolutely delicious. These dragon fruits were just one of the many food items on display. They also sold warm spiced wine that we all made sure to try, especially since it was just about freezing during the time that we were there. It only got colder as the day went on, and it also started to rain. The cold and the rain was not a good combination, so we tried to avoid being outside as much as possible. But unfortunately the trams were not agreeing with us this day because they kept getting re-routed and making us walk further than we should have had to in order to get to the places we wanted to go. Our next stop after the Naschmarkt was Belvedere Palace which is also an art museum. The building was beautiful as are most all buildings in Vienna and the collection included a bunch of Gustav Klimt pieces that were really awesome.

That night we decided to take advantage of cheap standing room tickets at the Opera and so we paid 2 Euros to go see the opera Arabella at the National Opera House. None of us are really big opera buffs, and it was a 3 hour long show, so we showed up a little bit late and only watched the second half. Unfortunately in the area we were standing none of the monitors were displaying the words in English... It was all in German, and since none of us had ever been to the opera before, we didn't know that all we had to do was press a button to see the English, so we didn't really understand most of the plot, but it was still fun to watch and to listen to. It made me think of all the vocal majors at Oberlin... I wonder if they'll ever end up somewhere like Vienna. I'm sure some of them will. After the opera we went to the most expensive night club I've ever gone to in my life. It cost 13 Euro just to get in and then the cheapest drink on the menu was over 3 Euro... It was NOT my kind of place, nor Scott or Megan's, but our friends were enjoying it, so we made the most of it and even snuck in some of our own sodas from the street vendor outside. The music was good, but it definitely wasn't worht the amount of money that it cost to get in.

The next day was our last day of touring, and it also happened to be the first snow fall of the year for Vienna. I woke up at around 9:30 and left my hostel to find myself covered in fluffy white snow flakes as I walked the one block to the metro station. It was extremely beautiful, despite how wet and cold it made me, and it was definitely really different from the weather I've been expereincing in Amsterdam. In comparison to Oberlin, Amsterdam weather is actually quite nice. It's been in the 40's lately, and it's not supposed to get all that much colder in the time that I'm here. It sucks when it rains and I still have to bike everywhere, but otherwise it's been quite pleasant. But back to Vienna. It was our last day touring the city so we decided to go to the Schonbrunn Palace, which is where the seat of the Habsburg Empire was located. We got a guided audio tour of the palace which took us through the main offices, dining rooms, bed rooms, and other important rooms of the royal family. Schonbrunn Palace is a beautiful building, made even more beautiful by the fact that it was covered with fresh white snow at the time we were there.

After the palace, we went back to Megan's apartment to cook ourselves dinner, and then Megan, Scott, and I went to see the National Orchestra (again, only 6 Euro for standing room). The orchestra was playing Tchaikovsky and it was really cool to get to go see it. Again, it made me think about all the Con students at Oberlin and how this must be what they aspire to. After the orchestra we went back to Megan's apartment to hang out for a while until Scott and I had to make our way to the airport. Our flight wasn't until 6:30am, but because of the public transport schedules we had to take the last train that night and sleep in the airport. Unfortunately we ended up missing the last train because of a mishap with reading the German train schedules, and we ended up taking a cab and getting to the airport at around 2am. We spent the night on a cold marble floor, until 4:30am when we were allowed to check in and go through security. Everytime I sat down in the time between when we checked in and when we boarded the plane, I fell fast asleep and Scott would have to wake me up everytime we had to move somewhere else. When I finally sat down on the plane, I again fell asleep immediately and preceeded to stay asleep until we touched down two hours later in Amsterdam... It was a great flight.

Well, that's all for my Vienna post, finally! This past week I've been pretty lazy, just going to classes and relaxing. Last night my friends and I went out to a club that was playing "steaming soul" and 60's and 70's hits, so that was pretty fun. Then today we went to Foam, the photography museum in Amsterdam, which is probably my favorite museum that I've been to in the city. After going to Foam, Natalie, Mike, and I left our bikes by the museum and just walked around the city for a few hours. I think since we are always on our bikes and are always riding toward set destinations we don't really look around at the wonderful city that we live in as much as we really should. So it was nice this afternoon to be off our bikes and just exploring and appreciating the place that we live.

My time here feels like it is closely approaching it's end. I leave this city in exactly 5 weeks from today, but before that happens I will be getting visits from Shari, Michelle, my dad, and my mom, so there is much to look forward to. Unfortunately, also in those 5 weeks I will have to write two 15 page papers, and take two final exams, but that will all come and go easily... I hope.

Until next time, feel free to email me or just comment and say hi.

-Ruth

long update coming, but for now, pictures!

2007-11-12T23:45:00.000+01:00

I was going to update about my weekend trip to Vienna tonight, but I'm a bit too tired. I spent the night in the airport last night in order to be able to make it to my 6:30am flight back to Amsterdam because public transport in Vienna doesnt run past 12:30am and the first train would have been too late to get us to the airport on time. Scott and I slept on a cold marble floor, and as a result, I'm still pretty exhausted and there's far too much to say to do so in a short entry, so the Vienna entry will follow in the next few days, but I was industrious enough to make a facebook album, so here is the link to pictures of Vienna:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2026256&l=08fc5&id=4302935

Also, I realize I still haven't added a link for more picture of Maastricht and Aachen, so here's that:

http://oberlin.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2025988&l=e7557&id=4302935

Enjoy the pictures!

Maastricht and Aachen!

2007-11-05T15:22:00.000+01:00

This weekend my program organized a trip that took me outside of Amsterdam for the first time since I've been in The Netherlands. As some of you may know if you've been keeping up with my blog, I missed the bus for the last excursion that our group had planned and ended up missing an opportunity to visit Gouda (where the cheese comes from) and Rotterdam, one of the most metropolitan cities in the country. This time I made sure to set my alarm and I checked it many times to make sure it was set correctly (not pm instead of am, etc.). I also made plans to meet my friends outside of our dorm and bike over to the bus together and told them if I wasn't there to ring my buzzer and make sure I woke up and didn't miss the bus again. Well, needless to say... I overslept again! I really don't know why this keeps happening. I'm sure that my alarm was set, I've never overslept or been late to any of my classes this semester, so I really don't know why this keeps happening on days when I need to catch a bus. Anyway, good thing I made those plans with my friends because at 8:40am I woke up to my obnoxious buzzer, realized what time it was, promptly dressed, grabbed my bag and headed outside. We made the bus on time, and so by 9:30am I found myself staring out the window at the Dutch countryside.

The drive to Maastricht was a bit more than two hours and upon arrival we were greeted with a large buffet lunch that we all were more than ready to enjoy, especially since I had overslept and therefore not had time to eat breakfast. After our meal we were met by two tour guides who split up our group and took us on a walking tour of the city of Maastricht. First let me say a little about our tour guide. I didn't catch her name, but she was one crazy lady. She was probably in her mid-late sixties, with hair that was sitting completely still above her head. She was also wearing bright blue eye shadow that was magnified through her powerful glasses. She spoke a mile a minute and gave us some of the most absurd details and information that I've ever heard on a historical tour. Anyway, it was still a fun tour and she was definitely entertaining to listen to.

The city is full of old architecture, a lot of which is made of stone from a local quarry that is now a series of underground tunnels that we were able to explore the next day. One of the highlights of the tour was these sculptures that were located in the main square of the city. The subjects of the sculpture are taking part in the Dutch version of Carnival. Another highlight on the tour is shown in the third picture. This is a picture of what our tour guide called "shit houses." Apparently, many years ago, before the invention of indoor plumbing, people who lived along the canals and the rivers in Maastricht would have their bathrooms built over the canal so that when they did their business, it would just got right into the canal and then float away. Throughout the course of the tour there must have been at least 5 different shit houses pointed out to us by our guide.

After our tour of Maastricht, we had a bit of free time to go shopping in the city and have a cup of coffee. I ended up buying myself some tea and a flannel shirt, which I am currently wearing and which I have decided is my new favorite article of clothing, it's extremely comfortable and comforting to wear and I've worn it every day since I purchased it. When we finished shopping we met up with the
rest of the group and got back on our bus in order to make our way to Drielandenpoint, which is the spot in Europe where The Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium meet. Here's a picture of three of us all standing in different countries!

This place is basically a big tourist trap, but since we didn't get there until it was dark, there was no one else around. We had dinner at a restaurant right next to the point where the countries meet (on the Dutch side I think). The restaurant was this place where they basically put out a bunch of vegetables and meats and pancake batter and eggs out and then you can cook yourself dinner... It was weird to be cooking for ourselves at a restaurant, but we all had fun making fun creations. In one of my trips to the cooking station I made myself a pannekoeken with mushrooms and onions that was absolutely delicious... I'm pretty proud of myself for that one.

After dinner we piled back on the bus in order to make our way to Aachen, Germany where we spent the night. I think the only reason we went there was to say we had spent the night in Germany because we had no planned events in the city and the next morning we all got back into the bus and drove back to the outskirts of Maastricht for our next event. After we checked into the hotel and put all our stuff down we decided to check out the German night life. After walking for probably a mile or so we found a pretty lit up street with a few bars on it and so we picked a place and sat at an outdoor table (even though it was pretty cold). Apparently in Germany they like to put random things in their beers, like banana syrup, or coca cola... Needless to say I ordered a Colaweizen (that's probably spelled wrong). It was basically just a beer with a bit of coca cola in it, it sounds gross, but it actually tasted pretty good. The weirdest part was the foam on top, which was like a mix between soda and beer foam, it was odd.

The next morning we went to visit the caves in St. Pietersberg, which is located on the main mountain outside of Maastricht and has a really nice view of the city. The caves used to be a stone quarry, but have for a long time just been a tourist attraction in Maastricht. We had a guided tour through them, but at one point in order to give us an idea of what it would be like to get lost down there, our guide took away our lanterns and had us walk about 100 or so feet in complete darkness in order to get back to our only light source. It got pitch black in there, and it was pretty scary. We had to hold hands and trace the wall in order to find our way. It's crazy to think about, because our guide also told us stories about how people had gotten lost down there and ended up dying because they weren't able to get out. Jews also used these caves as hiding places during World War Two.

Continuing on the WWII theme, after leaving the caves we made our way to our next stop which was the Margratan Cemetery, a United States WWII cemetery located in The Netherlands. The cemetery is home to around 8,000 American men (and 4 women) who lost their lives in Europe during WWII. It was a really well organized cemetery. The first thing you see is a display that outlines the military strategies and actions taken by the Allied forces in the last years of the war and details many of the main battles that a number of the men burried in the cemetery were involved in when they lost their lives. One thing that was really interesting is that a number of the graves have fresh flowers on them, despite the fact that the families of these men still live in the United States. Our guide told us that it has become customary for local Dutch families to adopt one of the graves and care for it as if the soldier were a part of their own family because they are so thankful to the US forces for liberating the area almost a full year before the end of the war. I took a picture of this one headstone because I noticed that the person had died on June 10th, my birthday. When I looked more closely, I noticed the name and realized that I was looking at the grave of one of the 4 women in the entire cemetery, even more reason to have a picture of this particular headstone.

I have many more pictures from this weekend, I'm planning on making a facebook album, so when that's done, I'll make sure to put a link up here for non-facebook users to be able to take a look. That's all for now. I'm going to Vienna on Thursday, so my next post will be a fun filled Austrian adventure (though I hear it's already below freezing there, so it may be a quite cold adventure as well). Thanks for reading!

unofficial fall break and picture updates

2007-10-28T21:02:00.000+01:00

This past week was my unofficial fall break (conveniently the same week as Oberlin's fall break). I say unofficial because classes are not officially cancelled, but most professors choose to cancel class in order to give students a break, or time to prepare for a midterm, or they actually schedule the midterm for that week. Luckily, all but one of my classes all week were cancelled and I only had one paper due. I made sure to finish my paper by Tuesday and I skipped my one class on Thursday in order to ensure that I could spend as much time as possible with Rachel for the 5 days that she was here. It was a very nice week and I took advantage of Rachel being here to actually force myself to visit some of the museums that I've been meaning to get to for a few weeks now.

Over the course of the week we played lots of scrabble and set and also managed to visit The Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art which is currently home to an extensive Andy Warhol exhibit. We also went to Foam, which is a photography museum in Amsterdam that currently has an exhibit dedicated to Amsterdam photographers and portraits. Both exhibits were really awesome and both were also extremely well done and laid out extremely well, etc.

The rest of the week was spent relaxing, visiting markets, watching movies, eating pancakes, and riding bikes, some of my favorite activities in Amsterdam and the world. But in now for some pictures that I've been meaning to put up for a while.

This is a picture of the carnival that was set up in The Dam for some time. Unfortunately I wasn't organized to get myself over there and actually go on any of the rides, but I heard they were ridiculously overpriced anyway... The next picture is from the Albert Cuyp market as are the few following it. Next is a picture of some awesome graffiti that I bike past pretty frequently. Then there are some pictures are of an amazing sunset from last weekend. Natalie took this picture from my window and I really love it. I took the second one on the way home from the market. There's also one from Scott and my romantic candlelit dinner last Monday night. Then some pictures from my week with Rachel, scrabble and many failed attempts to take a good picture of ourselves together. And finally, here are Alanna and Kellan all dressed up for the Halloween party that my dorm threw last night. (Much to Rachel and my dismay given that we had to wake up at 6:30am this morning and the party didn't end until 3am). It's too complicated to try and get the captions to go next to all the pictures, but I'm sure you can all figure out what's what.

I just realized looking out my window that it's raining. Luckily this is the first time it's rained in at least a week.

a fabulous weekend

2007-10-23T11:53:00.000+02:00

Yesterday most of my friends hoped on a plane to Istanbul for the week, but before they left we had a fun weekend together. My friend Scott (who actually doesn't leave for Istanbul until Thursday) had two friends visiting, one of them is studying in Barcelona and the other in Vienna, and since it was Scott's birthday this weekend they decided to come visit. Scott's birthday was on friday and my other friend Owen's birthday was on Monday, so we spent the whole weekend partying in celebration of them both being one year older. On friday night we went out to dinner at this awesome chinese restaurant which Scott's parents were nice enough to treat us to (via their credit card) and then we hung out at Scott and Owen's apartment for a while before going out dancing at You II which is a mixed gay and lesbian club. As Yitka mentioned in her blog, they (unlike most clubs in Amsterdam) actually had a DJ who was playing some really good music and not just mundane techno, and we all enjoyed ourselves so much that we stayed there dancing until 3am.

On Saturday I went to the Albert Cuyp market again with Mike and Natalie. None of us bought anything, but I took some pictures that I wanted to share with you all. This first one is an in motion shot taken while riding down Kerkstraat (I was pretty impressed with myself for the accomplishment of pulling my camera out of my pocket, turning it on, taking this picture, turning it off, and putting it back into my zipped up pocket). We didn't actually end up getting to the market until about 4:30 and they pack up and close most of the stalls around 5, so we weren't there for too long, but we looked at a bunch of things and decided that we would come back when they return from Istanbul and do some real shopping.

After the market we ate at Maoz, which I don't think I've mentioned yet, and therefore I will tell you all about it. Maoz is a vegetarian falafel restaurant chain that was started here in Amsterdam but now has locations in cities all over Europe and also in New York. The way it works is, you get a falafel sandwhich with just the falafel and the pita bread, and then you can go to their salad bar that has numerous toppings and delicious sauces. The best part is, you can go back to the salad bar as many times as you want! I don't even think I want to mention how many times I've been to Maoz in the past week, but it really is wonderful, and also wonderfully cheap!

Yesterday after writing my paper and seeing my friends off to the airport, Scott and I (the only two of our group who are around right now) decided to make ourselves a feast in my kitchen. We headed over to Albert Heijn to pick up all our ingredients and then back to my place to start the preparations. We made a delicious meal of chicken fajitas, with onions and peppers and garlic, and we also had some beans to put inside them, as well as cheese and salsa. Then lit candles and drank pineapple juice out of wine glasses and had a very romantic candle lit dinner. It was pretty fun. Afterwards we watched a movie in my room before calling it a night.

In about twenty minutes I'm heading over to meet Scott at the Jewish Historical Museum which is just a few blocks away from my dorm. And after that I'm getting on a train out to Schiphol to go meet Rachel!

Hmm... I was going to upload lots of pictures right now, but it's being particularly slow at the moment, so I'll just do a big picture update next time I've got some time to spare.

haircuts and ani difranco

2007-10-18T14:04:00.003+02:00

I just got a haircut on Monday and I promised my mother that I would post a picture on my blog. So, here are some pictures. Disregard the wierd faces I'm making. It feels weird to take a picture of myself, so I usually make a face so that I feel less awkward.

Last night I went to see Ani DiFranco live at Melkweg and it was amazing. She was soooo goood. I went with Yitka and a fe other people from her program. She played a two hour set, and even though I didn't know all the songs because I only have 3 of her numerous albums, it was still so good. Yitka and I parted ways knowing that we were both going home to have a night full of continued listening.

In other news, I just got back from my last class before our unofficial midterms break/fall break. I say unofficial because the break is not actually scheduled and professors do not have to give their students the week off, but most of them do so that students will have time to study or write their midterm papers. For international students however, it is the most popular time to travel and so in the next few days most of my friends are taking off for a variety of European destinations including: Denmark, Italy, Turkey, etc. etc. etc. I'm not going anywhere next week though, because Rachel is coming to visit me on Tuesday!

Alright, that's all for now.

parties, animals, picnics, van gogh, frisbee, and middle school throwbacks

2007-10-14T20:42:00.000+02:00

That long title is just to give a short outline of everything that I feel I need to talk about within this post. Since it's been almost a week since my last post, a lot has been going on, namely: parties, animals, picnics, van gogh, frisbee, and middle school throwbacks. That doesn't really make sense by itself though, so let met explain each of these things and in so doing I think I will be able to give you all a somewhat clear picture of what I've been up to for the past week.

PARTIES:
On Tuesday night my friend Alanna and I decided to host a small get together of friends. I volunteered my room as the location, and we created a facebook event inviting everyone we know here (which was only about 20-something people) and we assumed that maybe ten or less of those people would actually show up since we didn't think of this idea until late Monday night. Well, as it happens almost everyone that we invited did show up, and many people brought friends as well. This picture is early in the night when only about 12 people were there, but this doesn't even begin to describe how many people came by the end of the night. At one point there must have been about 25 people within my room and another 10 outside in the kitchen area, it was crazy. I don't plan on hosting anymore parties this semester, but I enjoyed the night and later after everyone had left Alanna helped me clean up so that wasn't too painful either.

ANIMALS:
On Friday my friend Scott and I took advantage of a free trip to the zoo organized by his RA's. The Artis Zoo is located just around the corner from my dorm, so it's extremely convenient, and although I did go to the zoo once quite briefly, I hadn't gotten the opportunity to walk around at all and see all the animals. So when Scott asked if I wanted to go, I jumped at the opportunity. We walked around the zoo for a few hours and saw loads of animals including: baboons, lions, jaguars, elephants, llamas, gorillas, etc. etc. They also have an aquarium within the zoo so we went in there and saw lots of beautiful colorful fish. And then before we left we made sure to catch the penguin feeding and the seal feeding. We both really wanted to see the lion feeding, but apparently Friday is the only day of the week that they don't feed the lions. Unfortunately I didn't bring my camera with me, so I don't have any pictures to share.

PICNICS:
After leaving the zoo Scott and I headed back to my block to meet up with Alanna for a picnic dinner. I don't know if I've talked about the weather here in Amsterdam yet on this page, but I'll say a little bit now. For the most part the past month and a half has been full of overcast and rainy days with a periodic beautiful sunny day every few weeks or so. But this past week the weather has been entirely un-Amsterdamish. As I think back over the last week, I don't think it's rained once, and almost everyday has been sunny and around 65 degrees, it's glorious. It still gets really cold at night and layering is definitely required, but the days have been really beautiful and I've spent most of the weekend outside picnicing, writing, reading, and playing scrabble by the canal. So, as a result of the continued beautiful weather, the three of us decided to walk over to the nearby park and had a nice little picnic with a wonderful pasta-salad concoction made by Alanna, and a nice bacquette with brie and mozerella, it was a delicious meal.

VAN GOGH:
On Friday nights the Van Gogh museum opens up until 10pm and they have a bar and a dj and sometimes some live music as well. With our student museum cards we get into most museums in Amsterdam for no charge, so this Friday I went with a bunch of friends to the Van Gogh museum. I'm slightly ashamed to say, I haven't yet been taking advantage of all the wonderful museums in Amsterdam, but, I plan to visit many more, especially when I have visitors, so don't worry, I will see them all before I leave Europe. After having a drink at the bar when we got to the museum, we all started wandering around the galleries. There are some really amazing pieces in the museum, but unfortunately we only had about an hour to walk around before the museum closed, so I'm going to have to return for another visit, especially to see the current exhibit on Barcelona that is up right now.

FRISBEE:
This is a short one, but yesterday I threw a frisbee around with my friends Scott and Eric out in the park near our dorm and it was really awesome. It reminded me of Oberlin and playing frisbee with Adam out on North Quad when it finally gets warm in the spring.

MIDDLE SCHOOL THROWBACKS:
So, instead of going out to a bar or a club last night, my friends Scott and Eric and I decided to spend the night in Scott's apartment playing a bunch of random games and having a few beers. We had decided on this course of action because we were all pretty tired and didn't feel like staying out too late or anything like that. Well, after attempting to leave and go to sleep at 2:30am, we started listening to a series of wonderful middle school throwback songs. We spent the next two hours listening to everything from What If God Was One Of Us? by Joan Osbourne to Father of Mine by Everclear, and everything inbetween, it was extremely fun and I can't wait to download all of those songs and make myself one of the greatest mixes in history.

Well,that's all my main points, so in other news: I've rearranged my room yet again AND Scott put my tapestry up for me! It looks amazing, and I think my room decorations are finally complete. Here is a picture so you can all appreciate it as much as I do.

a trip to an anarchist sauna

2007-10-09T18:16:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I went with two of my friends to a sauna that is run by anarchists here in Amsterdam. The facility was about a half hour bike ride from my dorm (actually it's just around the corner from Yitka's house). I agreed to go to this place knowing in the back of my mind that this would probably mean a bit of nudity, and although I wasn't completely sure that I would be comfortable in the situation I was getting myself into, I decided that it would be stupid to allow my slight discomfort to stop me from enjoying this wonderful place. After all, I'm naked all the time at Onas, the only real difference with this place was that I didn't really know anyone there, except the two friends I went with. Despite my slight discomfort, I made myself go, and I am extremely glad that I did so, I plan on going back at least a few more times before the semester is through.

At 6pm after my Dutch class ended, my friends Jenna, and Natalie, and I hopped on our bikes and headed over to the sauna. We got there and upon entering were given a locker in which we could put all of our belongings for the time that we were there. We quickly stripped down into towels (which were soon removed) and started to venture into the various rooms that the sauna had to offer. There was a steam room in which I sweated more than I think I've ever sweat in my entire life. A sauna, that was probably the hottest sauna I've ever been in in my life. An outside area with a cold shower, which felt really amazing if you went in right after coming out of the hot sauna. There was also a freezing cold bath (which also felt amazing after coming out of the steam room), and then the upstairs was lined with mats for people to go lie down on and relax between sauana/steam room/cold bath-shower trips.

I stayed at the place for about two hours getting my fill of everything they had to offer, and it was extremely relaxing. It also made my skin feel incredibly smooth, and it still does. Apparently sometimes they have a massuese there, so I definitely want to go back at a time when I can get a massage. It was definitely an awesome experience and I'm really glad that I made myself go, despite my initial discomfort.

Well, that's all for now, hope all is well with everyone reading.

-Ruth

October Begins!

2007-10-07T19:49:00.000+02:00

As I look at the date I continue to be amazed that I've already been here for almost six weeks. It's really crazy to think about it, but just this afternoon I was going through the weekends here and it seems like there's barely enough time to fit in all the things that I have planned for the next 2 months. At least half of my weekends from now until December are already booked with various trips to Vienna, Lille, and other parts of the Netherlands. And on those weekends that aren't spent leaving Amsterdam, I feel like I will still find myself with so many things to do, because that seems to be what always happens in this city. I'm really enjoying that about living here. There is almost always something exciting going on in this city and rather than searching for something to do, I find myself trying to decide what to do from a multitude of options.

The first week in October has gone by quickly with a few exciting highlights. First of all, on Wednesday night, I got together with a group of my friends from my program, and we had an italian themed pot luck. My friends Mike, and Natalie, and I attempted to make a pizza, but since we didn't have a baking pan to bake it on, it ended up getting turned into a calzone, which was actually quite delicious. This is a picture of Natalie, Erika, and Scott enjoying the pot luck... Not a very good photo, but I was trying to get a candid shot.... I failed slightly. The rest of the week was extremely exciting because Wendy (a friend from camp who is living in France until April) visited me for the weekend.

On Thursday night I made my way to Centraal Station to pick Wendy up (her train got in at 11:05pm). Unfortunately, Centraal Station is extremely large and although we had picked a meeting point, since Wendy had never been to the station before, we had a lot of trouble actually finding each other. Also, since Wendy's French cell phone didn't work in the Netherlands, we couldn't even call each other. Eventually Wendy went to an information desk and they let her borrow their cell phone so we got in contact with each other and finally managed to find each other, which was pretty miraculous. We were going to go out dancing that night, but by the time we got to the place it was almost 1am and they were closing up for the night, so we decided to just head home and ended up talking for a few hours in bed before actually going to sleep. It was really awesome to have such a close friend from home here just to talk to and reminisce about the summer and so forth.

We spent the next two days enjoying the (unusual) warm weather and cloudless sky by visiting both the Turkish Market near my dorm and the Waterlooplein market, which is also quite close to my dorm. Wendy purchased a few random articles and I got myself a big cloth hanging to put
up in my room. Now all I have to do is figure out how to hang it up. Unfortunately my walls are concrete, so I don't know if I'll be able to hammer anything into them... But I'm going to try. This picture was a warning by the hemp bracelets that a vendor at the Waterlooplein Market was selling... priceless. When we got back from the market I decided to rearrange my room to make it a little more comfy and homey, and also to create a good spot to put my new wall hanging. I plan to put it over in the corner by the bed is I can ever manage to get it into the wall. Otherwise I'll just have to save it for my room in Oberlin next semester. Here is a picture of both my room as it is now, and the wall hanging, so you can imagine the wall hanging going into the empty corner over my bed. I hope it actually happens.

Later that night Wendy and I went over to Yitka's house and cooked dinner for all of us and also for Taryn (the girl Yitka lives in her homestay with). It was a delicious meal with Couscous and stirfry vegetables. All in all a pretty laid back night, but also very enjoyable. Today Wendy and I got up slightly earlier (for me at least... It was about 10:30). After puttering around for a little while we headed over to Centraal Station and sat by the water chatting for a while before Wendy had to get on her train back to France.

I spent the rest of the day doing homework and napping, and then this evening my dorm had a "Neighborhood Potluck." Each floor was supposed to cook a dish from a different country and we all got together at 5pm and had a delightful dinner together. I was a little skeptical that anything would actually happen, because the RA's had just put up these posters randomly advertising this event in the middle of this past week, but no one from my floor had spoken about what we were going to cook or anything like that. But two people on my floor ended up being wonderful and getting it all organized so that we didn't seem like the moochers floor that didnt contribute anything to the dinner. There was lots of good foods from all over the world, including Vietnam, Romania, Italy, Camaroon, and many more that I just can't recall right now. I ate a whole lot and got nice and full and then spent a few hours sitting on our terrace by the canal and talking to friends, lots of fun.

Tonight my floor is throwing another party so within the next hour or two there will probably be a large number of international students roaming my hall and kitchen area with lots of alcohol and loud music... It should be a grand old time. That's all for now, I'll be sure to update if there's anything exciting to tell you all about, and as always, I would love to hear from all of you. You can also write me letters, as I have recently purchased stamps and will be sure to write back to you (eventually) in either letter or postcard form, just make sure you include your address somewhere on the letter. My address is:

Ruth Allanbrook
c/o ISHSS
P.O. Box 26
1000 AA Amsterdam
The Netherlands

I look forward to hearing from anyone motivated enough to write to me!

-Ruth

a long entry for a long week

2007-09-30T15:26:00.001+02:00

Wow, I guess it's been almost a week since I updated on what all's been going on in this part of the world. Where to begin? Well, obviously I've been going to classes. A little bit on that note: My classes are all really interesting. For those that don't yet know, I'm taking Beginning Dutch, Russia and Europe (a history class), Intro to Sexual Studies, and Social Trends, Social Problems, and Social Policy of the Netherlands. My Dutch class meets twice a week and the others all meet once a week for three hours each time. As of now I would probably say that my Russia and Europe class is the most interesting to me. The class is basically Russian history since about 1900. Last year I took a history class on Central European history from around the same period, so it's nice to take this class with that background because I already have some knowledge of the subject and it's really interesting to get more of a European perspective on the historical era. We're about to start discussing the Cold War, so that will definitely be nice to learn about in a classroom outside of the United States. That's also my only class that assigns anywhere near as much reading as my classes at Oberlin ussually do. Until this week we were reading about 150-200 dense pages for each class, this week it's only 60. My other classes are all pretty interesting as well, but I don't want to go into detail aout them, so if you have any questions just feel free to email me and ask.

So, what's happened in the past week...? On Monday night it happened to be one of my floormates birthdays, so I got together with my whole floor (there are 9 of us, well, technically 10... but I'll explain that in a minute). We had some birthday cake and then all decided that it would be cool for our floor to host a party later that week. The floor I live on is the biggest in the building I'm in and we also have the largest kitchen/lounge area, so with that we have the ability to host parties. As a result of this conversation, on Wednesday night my floor got together again for a marvelous dinner party followed by a pretty crazy late night party that went way into the morning (which was slightly unfortunate since I had a 10am class the next morning). So, that party was my Wednesday night activity (along with some homework of course).

But now about the extra person on my floor. This is actually my neighbor. I live in room G3, and the room next door to me, G4, does have someone who lives there, BUT I have only actually seen him once, and after talking to my floor mates it appears that most people have never even seen him at all. The one time I did see him was when we were both entering our rooms at the same time, this was about a month ago, shortly after moving in. Since I hadn't met him yet I took the liberty of introducing myself by saying, "Hi, I'm Ruth, I live next door to you!" He stared at me blankly for a few seconds before nodding and entering his room. No introductions, no hellos, just a nod, it was strange. Since then I havent actually seen him at all. I hear him in his room sometimes, and I see a light under his door when I go to the bathroom at night, so I know that he's there, but he manages to avoid all contact with everyone who lives here. No one has ever seen him in our communal kitchen, so we're not sure what he eats, I've never had the problem of him being in the shower when I wanted to use it... so I really just dont know what to make of the whole situation. I think he will just remain the infamous G4. Oh and one more thing, we looked through the mail that comes to our floor as a whole and of the three things addressed to him, one was a letter from the university, and the other two were from the police! We're not sure what to make of it.

In other news, the last few days have been filled with a mix of scrabble, late nights, and lots of dancing. On Friday I started out the day by going with my friend Mike to the nearby Turkish market. I wanted to get some cheese for cheap! We walked around the whole market, I bought some yummy cheese (I'm not sure what kind) and I also got a new bike lock because my old one was starting to rust beyond the point of being useable. Mike bought some apples and a beard trimmer. I think that short list of purchases can give you an idea of just how much you can get at this market. After we left the market my bike got a flat tire! My second flat tire of the week actually. Bikes are extremely convenient in this city, but also a real hastle when you continuously have to get them fixed. So, right now my bike is currently in the shop getting a new tire. I'm bikeless and it's unfortunate.

After the market Mike and I walked through the city in order to meet up with Scott and Claire (these are all people from my program, I dont know if I've mentioned them yet... Mike is from New York State and goes to Pace, Scott is from Minessota but goes to U of Santa Clara, and Claire is from Seatle, but goes to Vassar... Scott and Claire are in the picture). We were going to go check out NEMO which is the kids science museum, but we realized
it was closing soon and wanted to wait until a day where we would have more time to explore the museum since we were going to have to pay for it. Instead we decided to play scrabble! If you know me at all, then you know that scrabble is probably my favorite game in the world. We went to a nearby cafe and got some cappucinos and sat around for a few hours playing that wonderful game.

Later that night I went out to a club called You II. Alanna and I ended up staying there dancing until about 4:30am, it was quite fun, and they actually played some pretty good music... Not just techno. I find that a lot of the places we end up going play a lot of techno music, and I really dont like techno that much... It's too repetative, and I find myself getting bored dancing to it. The next day Alanna and I went on an all female boat cruise, which was a very interesting experience. The crowd on the boat was a range of women from as young as us, to as old as 50. We spent the night dancing and trying not to feel too sea sick, but I think we both were glad to have gone, because how often do you get the opportunity to go on a boat cruise in the North Sea? Let alone an all female one.

Since I've been on foot for the past few days, I had the opportunity to take some pictures of all the bikers. I got held up at one of the canal bridges that was up to let a boat through, so I took some pictures of all the bikers waiting to cross. Maybe it's just me, but I just find it really cool to see about 20 bicyclists waiting at a red light and then zooming off as soon as it turns green. They're just like cars, except better, and more environmentally friendly!

Alright, that's all for now... My plans for the rest of the day include more Scrabble! And of course homework, the Sunday afternoon activity of college students everywhere.

one reason why the netherlands is amazing

2007-09-26T13:06:00.000+02:00

Government takes a stand - against cars
21 September 2007

THE HAGUE (AFP) - The Dutch government has taken a trend to promote eco-friendly cities a step further than its European neighbours by announcing firm measures to discourage cars and driving.

The plan was outlined in the 2008 budget presented this week, and the capital Amsterdam -- a leader in the drive -- and other Dutch cities will use a "no car" day on Sunday, an annual event, to press home the message.

In the traditional address from the throne read out by Queen Beatrix, the centre-left cabinet said it would raise taxes on diesel fuel and vehicles using it. Laws are also being drawn up to make taxes dependent on how much pollution a vehicle emits: the more polluting, the higher the fee.

Unhappy, the Dutch car industry association RAi is trying to rally car owners to protest plans, which are sure to have majority support in the country's coalition system. RAi says the government measures will cost drivers EUR 500 million more per year.

But a number of cities, like Amsterdam, want even stricter action against cars. Among these are Eindhoven, The Hague and Leiden which have ignored drivers' complaints and joined Sunday's "no car" day.

On Sunday, streets inside the ring road that circles Amsterdam will be closed for incoming cars and open only to cyclists and pedestrians between 9 am and 5 pm.

The capital hopes to show out-of-towners that they can leave their cars outside the city and travel in via public transport or taxis, which will still be running Sunday.

Amsterdam, where half the residents do not even have a car, is also hatching other plans to clean up the air and unblock congested roads, including a tax on sports utility vehicles (SUVs), Jeeps and other big cars that run on diesel fuel.

Parking meters will be connected to vehicle tax records and drivers will have to punch in their license plate numbers. The price of a space will be calculated on how much pollution the car creates.

"The technology is available," Tjeerd Herrema, Amsterdam city council member in charge of transport, told the Het Parool daily. He wants to introduce the system in the course of next year.

To back the measures, Amsterdam will build large car parks inside the city for residents and just outside the ring road for visitors, linked to the city's "park-and-ride" public transport system. Plans call for doubling spaces in the outside lots to 2,300. At the moment, visitors pay EUR 5.50 per day to park and get two free public transport tickets, which the municipality wants to increase to five per car.

Inside Amsterdam it now costs EUR 3.90 an hour to park in the city centre from 7 am to midnight everyday, except Sunday morning during church service hours, but prices are set to go up.

The city also wants to improve public transport and increase the number of green spaces in the centre, and Herrema is pushing for trams and buses -- which now stop around 1 am -- to run all night.

The move to go "greener" has seen several European cities like Paris and Lyons in France, Barcelona, Geneva, Oslo, Stockholm and Vienna stock the streets with city-owned bicycles for cheap rental -- a step behind bike-friendly Netherlands which pioneered the idea of bicycle sharing in the late 1960s.

But Amsterdam has not forgotten its numerous cyclists, who are almost as much of a tourist attraction as the 17th-century canal houses. The city is setting aside EUR 70 million for the capital's bicycle riders over the next four years to pay for improving bike lanes, creating more bicycle parking spaces and cracking down on bicycle theft. [Copyright AFP 2007]

I just read this article and had to post it. I wish the US could make some steps even remotely close to this in order to cut down our pollution. I can't wait until no car Sunday!

remembering

2007-09-25T19:13:00.000+02:00

My mom just sent me this article from the Mills College newspaper, I put it on my wall, and I'm putting it up here because I think everyone should get to see it. I hope it's somewhat clear.

pannekoeken escapades

2007-09-24T10:58:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I went on a very exciting journey with Alanna, Yitka, Taryn, Martina, and Rebecca (those last 3 people are Yitka's SIT friends). We had heard from Yitka's host mom that the best pancake house in Amsterdam was located in the Amsterdam Woods which areon the very edge of the city, right near Schiphol Airport. It was a beautiful sunny day so we decided to venture out into the wilderness on our bikes in order to find and enjoy these delicious pancakes. It wasn't long before we really knew we were in the woods, because shortly after our bike ride began we ran into a Bison! (or some animal of that sort, none of us were quite sure). Yitka spotted it from her bike and so we all hopped off so that we could get a few pictures of the wild animal. We kept biking and eventually reached the ferry that would take us over closer to the pancake house. (We found out on the way back that it's actually much faster to just bike the whole way and avoid the ferry, but I think we all wanted a fun boat ride. Unfortunately, Alanna, Martina, and myself made it onto the first ferry and then there wasn't enough room for Yitka, Taryn, and Rebecca. We decided that we would just wait for them on the other side before continuing our bike ride. The ferry was really cool... It's a medium size boat that can hold up to 100 person and also a fair number of bikes. One of these pictures is of all the bikes packed onto the ferry. Everyone just stands in line to get on the ferry and the driver piles the bikes on one by one. Because of this, everyone has to exit the ferry in the same order that they got on, we were the last people on, so we got to get off first. The ride itself was probably only about 7 minutes accross the water, but I think it was more about the experience of being on a boat in Amsterdam than anything else, and we all really enjoyed that.

After everyone had gotten over the crossing we hoped back on our bikes and really got into the woods. We followed a few more bike paths before coming accross a big field with horses and goats and other animals roaming around, and then the pancake house was right next to this field. At first the whole establishment was a bit overwhelming. None of us could figure out where to order or what to order because there were so many different pancake options. We finally figured it all out and placed our orders. After a few minutes our numbers appeared on the screen and we found ourselves with 6 amazing pannekoeken, Heerlijk! (That means Delicious!). After we all thoroughly enjoyed our pancakes (we finished everything on every plate) we decided to get some ice cream for dessert.
At this point we were all thoroughly stuffed and we decided it was time to head back to the central city, but before we did so we made sure to stop and see the deer! Martina bought some feed and fed one of them, it was very exciting. This place would definitely have been really amazing to visit as a little kid. They had deer to pet, and playgrounds, and all these cool toys to play with, I know I would've loved it even more than I loved it today.

Our day didnt end after our bikeride back to the city though... For those who I haven't told yet, I got my eyebrow pierced yesterday! (I hope you like it mom). Anyway, Yitka, Taryn, and Alanna were nice enough to come with me, and Yitka held my hand while Taryn and Alanna documented the whole thing on film. I don't have any of their pictures yet, but I do have a picture of the final product.

Later that night we all went to this place called Trut, which is a gay and lesbian underground party that only happens on Sundays. We all had a blast and there was a lot of SIT-CIEE mixing which was lots of fun. Now I'm up because I was planning on doing some homework, but instead I'm posting this entry. Now to work!

The Decemberists! (and other happenings)

2007-09-22T23:46:00.000+02:00

Tonight I had the pleasure of going to see The Decemberists playing live. The show was at Paradiso which is a nice concert venue in central Amsterdam. Kellan and I made sure to get there a bit early so that when the doors opened at 7 we were able to get to the front of the concert hall and secure ourselves a spot FRONT ROW CENTER! It was really awesome. For the entire show I was looking right into the lead singers /face (I would say Colin, but I always think it sounds wierd to refer to band members by their first name when I obviously dont actually know them). They played an awesome show including many songs from The Crane Wife and then a few from random other albums. At one point they divided the audience into teams and Colin leaned down and asked me and Kellan and the people around us to come up with a good name for our side of the audience... Kellan came up with "The Deceptacons." Oh yeah, and she also got his pic when he threw it into the crowd, she was pretty excited about that. I also really liked the opening band that played. They were called Land of Talk and I wanted to buy their album but by the time I got to the merch stand it was sold out... I'll have to find it somewhere else. All in all it was a pretty amazing show and I think Kellan and I were very pleased that we went.

In other news, last night I had a few more adventures to tell you all about. To start the night, I went over to SIT where Yitka's program was having an event so that all the students could show their photo essays about different Dutch cities that they had visited on solo excursions last weekend. Yitka invited me to come see the projects and also so that I could finally meet the rest of the SIT folk, so I went and had a great time drinking wine and eating snacks and meeting new people. The night moved on and me, Yitka, Alanna, and Taryn and Ellen (Yitka's friends from SIT) went out and met a bunch more people from CIEE. First we went to this bar called Vive La Vie where Alanna immediately made friends with a table of older South African lesbians. Somehow they got to talking and we ended up spending the rest of the night with these three women. In the hour or so that we were sitting outside of Vive La Vie, about 10-15 police officers formed a sort of blockade of the road we were on. They started stopping every person that walked by in order to pat them all down. The one person that was actually from Amsterdam in the group we were sitting with told us that they were most likely searching for weapons. What was most interesting about observing all of this though was that no one seemed particularly annoyed or even felt that they were being violated in any way. In America, any type of attempt at a random search on a public street would cause an uproar because of the violation of constitutional rights that would occur. Here, many of the Dutch that were being stopped found it almost exciting. We heard more than one person exclaim in Dutch, "Oh, what fun!" when they found out what was going to happen to them. After the blockade had been in place for about twenty minutes a large group of about 20-30 people marched through in an obvious form of protest because they made it so the police would have no way of searching all of them at once. But even these protesters didnt seem particularly upset, in fact they seemed rather light hearted and excited about their night. It was interesting to observe such a thing, and just another thing to add to my list of extreme differences between this culture and the one I am accustomed to.

After we had been at Vive La Vie for awhile we decided to head over to Cafe Sappho where it was womens night. We spent the next hour dancing at Sappho until the bar closed and we had to leave. At that point we were all really hungry so we decided to go get some falafel before calling it a night and heading home around 4am. Another night full of adventure! It seems that spending time with Alanna is a sure way to meet a bunch of random people who she finds herself randomly talking to at all the bars we go to, I enjoy it.

Tomorrow Yitka and I and some other friends are going to try and take a long bike ride to a pannekoeken house on the outskirts of the city that you have to take a ferry to! I'm really excited because Yitka's host mom, Cinta, said that they're the best pancakes in Amsterdam and it's supposed to be really beautiful out tomorrow, so it'll be a nice long bike ride on a wonderful sunny day (or so we're hoping). Well, I'll write about that adventure in my next post I'm sure. As always, I'd love to hear from anyone who's been reading!

-Ruth

the library! (and other adventures)

2007-09-19T13:23:00.000+02:00

As promised, I will now tell you all a little bit about why I love the central public library in Amsterdam. Well, on Monday after my Dutch class I realized that I still had a whole lot of reading to do for my Tuesday classes, and I really don't enjoy reading in my room (I don't get that much done because I end up writing blog entries, etc.) so I decided to bike over to the library. It's actually only about a one minute bike ride from where all of my classes meet (which are only about a 5 minute bike ride from my dorm) so it's very close and convenient, and I'm planning on spending a lot more time there because I enjoyed studying there. People have been telling me for a few weeks now that the library has the best views in the city. Not only is it one of the tallest buildings in the entire city (it's probably about 6-5 stories) but it's right on the edge of the city in the harbor and so you can stand on the top floor and look out over all of Amsterdam. Although my main intention in going to the library was to get some work done, the first thing I had to do was go see the view. It was a rainy day, so I'm sure on a clear day I would have been able to see more, but even so, it was a wonderful view. Also, on the top floor there is a nice cafe (which is probably out of my price range, but it's nice nonetheless). The library also has a huge selection of DVDs and CDs, so I'm planning on opening up an account there so that I can start to take advantage of this collection. Another thing I found really cool is that the way all the lighting is set up, all the books sort of glow... Maybe I'll take a picture of it next time so you guys will know what I mean... It's pretty cool though. Oh yeah, and this last picture is of my bike with groceries... Yummy ice cream, don't worry though, that's not all I'm eating, I just happened to be bringing dessert over to Kellan's because she cooked me a wonderful dinner a few nights ago.

In other news, since I got back from Paris on Sunday night, life in Amsterdam has been quite lovely. Despite the rain, which is common and cold and annoying, but I'm getting used to it, life here is good. Last night Yitka and her friend Taryn came over to my dorm to hang out with me and some friends and then we all went out to a few bars and had a bunch of fun playing darts and such. In a little while actually I'm supposed to go over to Yitka's homestay for tea time! Then later we're getting dinner before our skype date with Adam and Seyeon. But now I must shower, I'll update again when there's more to say.

-Ruth

Paris!

2007-09-18T13:12:00.001+02:00

Ahh, the (long awaited?) Paris update is finally here! Well, as I'm sure all that are reading this probably know, last weekend I went to Paris for the first time in my life, and it was a wonderful experience. I'll give you the break down of all that I did, because man did I do a lot in a short period of time. I was quite exhausted by the end of the trip, and was more than happy to get back to my room at Plantage Muidergracht 20.

Well, my trip began way too early on Friday morning. I had an 8:50am flight out of Schiphol Airport and so I awoke at 5:30am in order to catch the first tram to central station just after 6am. Luckily I was able to figure out what train to get on that would take me to Schiphol and I got to the airport with plenty of time to check in and go through security and then grab some starbucks (Amsterdam doesnt have starbucks except in the airport, and I really needed caffeine, so I figured what the hell). My flight to Paris was on time and went very smoothly. After deplaning at Charles De Gaulle Airport, I followed the wonderful directions given to me by Amanda Miller and made my way via the RER and the Metro to the 16th arrondissement where I was staying with Alanna and her friends from high school, who are currently studying in Paris.

I forgot to mention a few of my first impressions upon arriving in Paris. At this point I was still carrying my backpack around and I wrote down a few things that happened to me that I wanted to remember. First of all, I saw soldiers carrying guns in Charles De Gaulle right after I deplaned. If I had been coming straight from New York, I probably wouldn't have taken any notice of this at all, but after being in Amsterdam for almost 3 weeks, it was a weird site to me. In Amsterdam I don't think that I have seen one gun the whole time that I've been here. Policemen don't carry guns around with them, so where else would I see them? It was definitely the first thing I saw in France that made it clear to me that I was in a different country, and also reminded me how amazing the social policies in Amsterdam really are. I'm really excited to learn much more about them in my Social Trends, Problems, and Policies of the Netherlands class. The next thing I noticed was that I saw a bunch of tall buildings from my window seat on the train approaching the center of Paris. Amsterdam has very few tall buildings, and even the tall buildings really aren't that tall. I live on the 5th floor of my dorm, and there aren't many buildings that go much higher than that.

The next two things that I wrote down were about encounters that I had with two Parisians. First, while I was waiting for my metro train, I went to get myself a chocolate bar because I was getting really hungry. Right after I had purchased my chocolate, a 30-something year old woman who may or may not have been a gypsie came up to me and asked for some money... I gave her one euro (which she basically took right out of my wallet) because I didnt really know how to get out of the situation, especially since I don't speak French. I thought that was it, but then she came and sat next to me on a bench and when I pulled out my chocolate she asked for a piece and practically grabbed it out of my hand! I was very taken aback and didn't really know what to make of the experience. The next encounter was a lot more pleasant. After I exited the metro, a nice old Parisian man came up and started speaking to me in French. I said in English that I did not speak French and he quickly switched over to English and started asking me how I liked Paris and why I was there and many other nice questions. We had a nice little conversation and it seemed like a better way to be introduced to the Parisian population than my first experience had been.

Okay, now moving on... After walking around and getting lunch with Alanna and her friends, I figured out the metro and made my way over to where Michelle takes classes. When I got there I ran into a few other Oberlin kids who happen to also be studying in Paris on the same program as Michelle, so that was pretty fun. Obies are all over the world! Michelle and I spent the rest of the day together. We went and saw the apartment she's staying in, and then went over to the Bastille, then to the Museum of Erotica, and then finally to the Eiffel Tower where we shared a lovely bottle of wine and had a great time talking about life and being abroad and Oberlin and softball. It was a very fun night indeed. When I finally decided to make my way back to the apartment I was staying in, it was too late to take the metro, so I took a cab. The taxi driver was a woman, which I also found very interesting. I don't think I've ever had a female taxi driver in New York, and I wonder if it is a more acceptable job for a woman to have in Paris than it is in New York City, or if it was unussual that I had a female driver.

The next day I slept in and then met up with Michelle again, and with her we walked for a while in order to meet up with my friend Amanda, who went to Beacon with me. Amanda happens to be studying abroad in Paris this semester and through facebook and instant messenger we managed to get together and see each other for the first time in two years! After we all met up, we grabbed some lunch and then headed over to the Catacombs! The Catacombs are these crazy underground tunnels filled with bones from old Paris cemeteries. Sometime in the mid-19th century the city decided to get rid of many of the cemeteries in the area, but they also decided to relocate all of the bones to these underground tunnels. And they didnt just throw them down there, they organized them in a very systematic and artistic way. It was really cool and also really creepy. Just getting down there requires you to walk down what seems like a neverending spiral staircase (which made me really dizzy) and then at the end you have to walk back up! The Catacombs is not for the weak of heart! I thoroughly enjoyed myself though, and highly recomend it to anyone visiting Paris.

Michelle and I spent the rest of the night with Amanda and her roomate Chloe (who I apparently have a lot of mutual friends with, because she is from Brooklyn too).
It was a fun night, we walked around Paris a whole lot and I treated myself to a crepe with nutella and bananas, HEAVEN. Michelle's host family had gone out of town for the night, so I decided to spend my second night in Paris at her place.

The next morning, we slept in again and then made our way to the Louvre. This must be the largest museum I have ever visited in my entire life. We were there for almost three hours and probably saw less than a quarter of the entire museum. Dont worry though, we made sure to get a look at the Monna Lisa, and all of the rest of the galleries we were able to get to were really beautiful and we both had a great time just looking at all the artwork. I have a bunch more pictures of the Louvre in my facebook album, so if you want to see more, you should definitely check it out.

After the Louvre, we walked accross the street and into Notre Dame, which is absolutely beautiful. We only stayed for a little while because there was a mass going on, and I think that we both felt a little bit intrusive being so touristy when people were trying to be spiritual. But we did get a good look at the architecture and the stained glass, and it was a wonderful sight. We also sat around outside until six when I had to catch my train back to the airport, and so we got to hear the bells tolling. There were so many different bells! We didnt know what they all meant, but it was fun to listen to.

Finally it was time for me to head back to the airport to catch my flight back to Amsterdam. It was a fun filled, and completely packed weekend, and I hope you enjoyed reading about it... More updates on life in Amsterdam to come! I already have some new pictures to post, and yesterday I went to the public library for the first time, it's so wonderful it might merit a post of it's own!

Also, I've posted all of my Paris pictures on facebook, so if you want to see more than those that are included in this entry, you can go to my facebook profile or just copy and paste the URL below:

http://oberlin.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2024342&l=066cd&id=4302935

Thanks for reading!
-Ruth

fietsen en pannekoeken! (bikes and pancakes!)

2007-09-13T21:16:00.000+02:00

So, I've been meaning to write an update about all of the bikes in this city since the day I arrived. I think I've mentioned before that they are by far my favorite thing about this city, and more specifically, the bike traffic lights are probably even higher on my list of coolest things in Amsterdam. This first picture is from just a block away from my dorm where bikers can press this button when they are stuck at a red light. As I was saying, I love the bikes in this city. There are so many of them. I think that it would be entirely impossible to walk down a single street in this city and not see at least 20-30 bikes parked and locked up on some part of the block. This town is definitely a bikers city. We were told on the second day that we were here, if anything happens between a motorist and a biker, it will always be the motorists fault, in other words, "the biker is always right." I'm starting to get much more used to riding around the city. At first I was petrified everytime I came to a busy intersection, but I guess that can be scary on foot as well as on a bike. There are just so many things to look out for in this city. Not only are there bikes and pedestrians in mass numbers. There are also numerous mopeds, cars, and trams! Sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming to navigate around everything and I find myself hopping off my bike and walking it through the busiest of intersections. Luckily, there are all these bike traffic lights so that you always know when you can go and not be scared of getting run over by some other biker/mopeder/automobiler. I think it's really amazing that biking is so huge here. Not only do college kids ride bikes to get everywhere, throughout the day I constantly see: elementary school kids riding to/from school, businessmen riding to/from the office, old men and women riding anywhere they need to get to, parents riding around with their kids (sometimes up to 3 at a time) on their same bike. The parents who ride their kids around are numerous and there are numerous aproaches to where to put the kids. Of course there are the seats on the back which I know my parents used to use to ride me around when I was younger, but then there are also seats on the front, and sometimes there are big basket-type things on the front that I've seen up to 3 kids sitting in at once. Unfortunately I dont have any pictures of these things, but I hope you can imagine it from my description. Sometimes they just have the small child sitting on the handlebars and leaning back into their chest. I'm extremely impressed by this, and at the same time rather terrified that the child might fall off and crack their skull. And that reminds me of another thing, no one, and I mean absolutely NO ONE wears a helmet here. I dont think I've seen one person wearing one, not even little kids, given the conditions people often ride around in, it seems completely obsurd not to wear one, but that's just how it is I guess.

There are also bike lanes all over the city. Every major street has a bike lane on both sides so you are ussually supposed to bike on the right side of the road in the same way that cars do. But also most smaller streets have bike lanes as well, and those that dont, the biker still has the right of way basically all of the time. Another thing about biking in this city is that everyone has a bell on their bike (including me). So for pedestrians, if you ever find yourself walking in the bike lane where you're not supposed to be, it wont be very long before a little ding will tell you to clear out of the way. At first I found myself making this mistake constantly, especially during the first few days when I didnt have a bike of my own, but now I find myself on the other end of the spectrum and I am now the one dinging my bell at pedestrians in my way! Okay, I think that's about all I have to say about bikes for now, so we can move on to the second focus of this entry, pannekoeken (pancakes).

After a few failed attempts to meet up for lunch at a restaurant called Pancakes! Yitka and I finally succeeded in meeting up and having a delicious meal today. We ate it about 9 hours ago, and I'm honestly still not hungry. Pancakes in the Netherlands are on a whole other level than pancakes in the states. First of all, they dont have to be sweet, in fact, we (me, Yitka, and her friend Rebecca) all got different variations of the more savory pancakes and they were all absolutely delicious. I got a pannekoeken with spinach, onions, and cheese (just like what I like in my eggs at Black River), Yitka got a mushroom pannekoeken, and Rebecca got tomatos, onions, spinach, and cheese. These are some pictures of them, despite how huge they are, we managed to finish all of them in their entirety. I do really want to try a sweet pannekoeken, because I'm sure that would taste amazing as well. We're planning on making lunch at Pancakes! a weekly tradition, so I'm sure I'll get around to it soon.

Alright, well that's all I've got on Pancakes and Bikes, in other news, on Tuesday night Alanna, Kellan, Alisha, and I had a pretty great night at a few different bars around the city. We met some new people and made some new friends. Here's a picture of me with a cute lesbian couple we met and a funny old man that Alanna made friends with at this bar that we went to to listen to some live music.

To bring it back to bikes for a moment, we were getting around on our bikes all night, but Alisha's bike was broken so she was riding on the back of mine. We were doing great all night and then we stopped to take some pictures and in the process we both managed to fall off. Luckily we caught it all on film thanks to Alanna Beroiza, photographer extraordinaire. I like to call this series: Fuck, we fell off our bike. I hope you guys enjoyed this incredibly long post. I'm heading to Paris for the weekend to see the sites and visit Michelle (aka Cupcake)!!!. I leave tomorrow morning and will be there until Sunday night, so my next update will be about that I'm sure. As always, feel free to send me an email and say hey.

time for an update

2007-09-11T21:17:00.000+02:00

Hello again!

I have been told by someone, I won't name names, that its been too long since my last update, and that I'm due. So, now I have a little bit of free time, and since I dont have class tomorrow, plenty of time to procrastinate, so why not update? Since my last update on Saturday I cant report all that much that has happened. On Saturday night I decided to stay in because I realized that out of the 9 days I had at that point been in Amsterdam, I had gone out in some form or another on all but 2 of those evenings. So, instead, on Saturday night I went over to the abode of my friends Alanna and Kellan and Alanna cooked an awesome meal for us. I stayed there for a while, but then decided to call it a night... As I said, not too much to report, which is probably why I havent been doing so. On Sunday I spent the day doing homework and laundry. Doing laundry was a fun experience... but not really. There are 3 washing machines and 2 dryers in my building that houses about 40-50 students. It wouldnt be terrible, except the washing machine cycle is literally 2 hours long, and so after bringing my first load down at around 2pm, waiting for a machine to open up, and drying, the entire process finally ended at around 10pm when my laundry was finally all done. It definitely is an all day affair, luckily my only plans for the day were laundry and homework, so it worked out well.

On Sunday nights the RA's in my dorm show a weekly movie. This week they were showing a Dutch film called Blackbook, which is about Amsterdam during WWII. It was extremely sad, but a really good film, and I highly recommend it for anyone who hasnt seen it. After the movie, my friend Alisha (who lives one floor below me) and I were both feeling a little sick with a cold so we decided to have tea time together, which was really fun.

Monday I went to class and then to dinner over at Alanna and Kellan's again, also with Alisha, and today I did the same thing, class and dinner down the street at Alanna and Kellan's. Tonight we're heading out to attend a Drag Bingo event at a gay bar in the Red Light District, so I'm sure I'll write about that in my next post.

I dont have too many new pictures to show, but here are two from random times when I saw something I decided I needed to take a picture of. Both times I hopped off my bike and pulled out my camera right on the side of the road.

This first one is of a draw bridge by one of the main canals near my dorm. I was totally amazed by it because I had absolutely no idea that it was a draw bridge at all until I rode up and saw it looming above me, you really cant tell when its not up. Check out everyone on their bikes and on foot, all on their daily commute home after work.

The second photo is of this random guy I saw in on the canal today. I just thought he looked really cool and wanted a picture of his boat.

Soon to come: an update about bikes, my favorite thing about this city by far.

albert cuyp market; red light district tour; and more pictures

2007-09-08T14:00:00.000+02:00

Well, the past few days have been quite eventful. I've now had all of my classes at least once and I think that they're all going to be very interesting, especially Intro to Sexual Studies. Yesterday our professor took us on a guided tour of the Red Light District, making sure to point out all of the good gay bars and leather stores in case we had any desire to purchase some new leather gear during our stay in Amsterdam. The tour definitely had a gay vibe to it, but nonetheless it was very interesting to walk around the area for two hours. This was my first time in the district, so I guess I wasnt really sure what to expect when I went into it, but I was struck by how blatant everything is. I guess I've been told that it is before, but I'd never actually seen it for myself. I watched a few different men just turn on their step and walk into a prostitutes room with such great intention in their stride. I was also struck by the close proximity of churches and schools to the prostitutes windows. We walked down one block that had a row of about 10 red light windows, followed by a pre school, followed by 10 more windows, and accross the street was a huge church. Obviously something like that would never fly in the US, people would be up in arms and it would be all over the news, but here it's completely acceptable.

Anyway, before I went on the Red Light District tour I met up with Yitka and some of her SIT friends at the Albert Cuyp market. We got some cheap lunch and then wandered around the market for a while. It's an outdoor market not far from my dorm that's open six days a week and sells a large variety of things. Some of the highlights that I took pictures of include fresh strobwaffle (i dont know how to spell that, sorry) which is this delicious thing they have in the Netherlands that basically consists of two pancake type cookies, with caramel in the middle, theyre fabulous.. Anyone who visits me, make sure I take you to get fresh ones when you're here. The other highlight was a chocolate stand that sold all sorts of erotic chocolates. We didnt purchase any, but I took some pictures.
Needless to say, we had a good time at the market, oh yeah, and we also were followed for a little while by this music playing vehicle with a guy asking for money.

It even followed me after I left the market and headed to the Red Light District... I also took a few pictures in the Red Light District, pictures of any of the prostitutes is strictly prohibited and there are cameras all around the district to make sure everything runs smoothly, but I just snapped a few shots of signs I found interesting or funny or ironic.

Isnt it wonderful? You can get all the things you need from the sex shop, and then rent a bike!

Today I somehow woke up at 9AM on a saturday in order to go on a bike tour of the city. We went all around, I had already been to most places, but it was nice to hear a little bit more about the history of the city. And we also went over to the Vondelpark, which I hadnt been to yet, so that was really nice, and apparently Yitka is going to be living somewhere near there, so I now know basically how to get there, which is good. So, here are a few pictures from this morning.

Okay, well that's all for now. Feel free to write me an email or call me on skype, I'd love to know how all of you are doing.

exploring

2007-09-06T13:34:00.000+02:00

I took there pictures while I was lost looking for a book store:

This is a Green Wheels car, which I've seen a bunch of all over the city.

Another Bike!

A Canal!

The ridiculously overpriced bookstore that stole my money and took me forever to find.

A cool little alley/street I was lost on.

My Bike!

And... I finally decorated my room a little bit more adequately so the blank white walls are gone:

amsterdam at night

2007-09-05T00:33:00.000+02:00

Alanna and I stopped to take some pictures on the way home from a bar.

Academic Update

2007-09-04T11:55:00.000+02:00

I'm sitting in my room right now having a sandwhich for lunch between my two classes today. For those who I havent told yet, I only have classes 3 days a week here. One class on Mondays, two on Tuesdays, and two on Thursdays. The way the Dutch system works classes ussually meet only once a week but for a 3 hour block of time at each of those meetings, so its really about the same amount of actual in class time as at Oberlin, but it is just all combined into one session, which leaves many more large blocks of open time for students to do independent study, or just party a lot. One thing I've noticed since being here is that the Dutch, especially students at UvA, love to party. It seems as though every night there is some sort of party happening that is connected to the University in some way, it's a little bit wierd for me because I really dont consider myself too much of a partier, so it's something that will take a little getting used to.

At first I was a little frightened of the long blocks of classes, and especially of having two 3 hour classes in one day, but after sitting through my first one, I dont think it will be that horrible. I think most professors keep the classes going for just under an hour at a time before giving a 10 minute coffee or cigarette break (everyone here smokes cigarettes, another thing to get used to after coming from NYC where you can no longer smoke in any establishment) and then the class resumes for another 50 minutes or so before another break is called. My professor for my morning class today, Russia and Europe is slightly different in that he keeps class going for just over an hour, then gives us a 20 minute break, then resumes for another hour and a bit, so that class is only 2.5 hours of our 3 hours block. After just one class meeting, I think it seems like a fairly good system.

So far I've had two classes, Russia and Europe, and Beginning Dutch. I really like both of the professors and I think that they are both going to be great courses. This afternoon I have my first session of Intro to Sexual Studies, and then on Thursday I have Social Trends, Social Policy, and Social Problems of the Netherlands for the first time, so I'm looking forward to both of those classes as well.

I really love the city so far, its small enough that you can bike anywhere (and I have a bike here also) and you can also walk to most places within the center of the city. I'm living on a street called Plantage Muidergracht, which is very residential and not very touristy at all, so that's really nice, as is my room and my view which you can see from my earlier post. I live about two blocks away from the zoo and about 5-10 minutes on bike from the city center. I'm starting to get used to living alone, which is something I've never ever done before, last night I cooked myself dinner for the first time instead of settling for cereal and some fruit, it was actually pretty yummy considering I had no spices or anything to flavor it with besides olive oil and salt. I made myself some chicken and peppers with some delicious avocado which I ate all together sort of like a salad, but it no lettuce.

Alright, I hope I haven't bored any of you too much.

This is a picture of me with Kellan (left) and Alanna (right) at the zoo.

pictures from around the city

2007-09-02T04:22:00.000+02:00

I took these while walking around the city today in search of a bookstore to buy my Concise Dutch Grammar book. Note the insane number of bikes everywhere, and also, the public urinal, one of many to be found throughout the city.

my beautiful room

2007-09-01T14:24:00.000+02:00

Here are some pictures of my room, I havent really taken any other pictures yet, but when I do, I'll put some up.