(no subject)
For lack of a recent (and substantial) post, and for the fact that I have time on my side, I've decided to actually give notice to the world (e.g. my few friends) as to what I've been up to on this side of the Prime Meridian. I'll break it down into sections, for those who don't want the whole schpiel.
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Since I have been in the Netherlands, I have noticed a few oddities about the culture here, and a few similarities with American culture. As an aside, while typing this entry, I have already accidentally entered a few words in Dutch, so if any Dutch words appear in the text, I apologize and sincerely hope that they are English cognates. Anyways, more to the point. My social life so far has mostly consisted of 1) hanging out with my flat-mates, of whom the most frequently-appearing in my life are Juha (from Finland) and Mukhandha (from Nepal), 2) participating in the weekly Pub Quiz at the Vestingbar with the team I formed (the Red Penguins), 3) spending time at borrels with the Optical Sciences group (with whom I work at least five days a week), and 4) with the various Dutch students from the next flat over. Enumerated below, my activities with each group are,
1) Mostly dinner and house-keeping. Juha is a fantastic Finnish guy who simply cannot express how pleased he is with everything about Mukhandha and myself, and yet simply despises Acasa, our local housing agency. His best friend, Tommi, is also studying at Universiteit Twente, and though he lives in a separate building he is always at my flat, due to the fact that he hates his own living arrangements. Juha is dating a Finnish girl named Miinha who is currently studying in Paderborn, Germany, and as such every weekend they are together, either in Paderborn or here in Enschede. Either way, I don't mind at all; Miinha is a very nice person, and her interactions with Tommi and Juha are hilarious. To boot, Juha can cook a mean Finnish mushroom-cream pasta dish. Mukhandha is a bit of a cryptic fellow; his English isn't very good, but he still appears to be enthusiastic about everything, all the time. I've seen him have one bad day in the month-and-a-half that we've both been here, and aside from him telling me about his hatred of the Maoist rebels in Nepal and the Kenyan guy who almost never cleans up after himself, I've never heard negative out of his mouth. He, like Juha, is a connoisseur of all beverages alcoholic, and the three of us (Juha, Mukhandha, and myself) find ourselves constantly sampling the favorite beers (and occasional wines) of the others. To make matters even better, we clean out communal kitchen at least once per week, and have instituted a schedule whereby each of us will cook dinner for all of us on average once per week, when able. Mukhandha made a fantastic four-part dinner consisting of spicy curry chicken, mild curry vegetables, a peanut-onion sauce, and rice. It was simply delicious; every time I walk into the kitchen while he's cooking, I just want to start eating everything in his pots. It's that good. Trust me.
Both Mukhandha and Juha love football (known to Americans as "soccer"), with Juha spending this weekend in Brussels for the Belgium-Finland Eurocup 2007 Finals qualification round and Mukhandha avidly following the series on television. Whenever I walk in on them in the kitchen, they always have some channel on that's running a football match... it's just fantastic!
2) The weekly Pub Quiz at the Vestingbar saw the Red Penguins (a group of almost entirely international students, including Czechs, Poles, Francs, Finns, Americans, a Guatemalan, a Nepalese, a Croat, and an Italian, among others) win the first three weeks, but the format of the quiz has been changed such that we're at a distinct disadvantage now. Initially, there would be many trivial questions, separated into six or eight rounds of 10 each, with an additional picture-based round and a final round about music. Each round was worth 10 points, and though the Red Penguins sucked it up at the music rounds (mostly because they play really shitty music), we did well enough in the other rounds to smack face on the other teams.
In recent weeks, the numbers of trivia questions has gone down (so that now there are only two rounds of 10 questions), the picture round has remained (another 10 points available), and the music round has been expanded from 10 to 30 points. Now, even though we score very well (generally 1st or 2nd place) on the trivia and picture rounds, the excess of music questions has killed us, and so we've been ending up out of the top places for the past two weeks. Out of all of the music questions, I've been able to answer only one correctly: Christina Aguillera's 'Genie in a Bottle', and that's just because I'm familiar with Weird Al's parody, 'Weenie in a Bottle'.
3.) "Borrel" is effectively the Dutch word for "party", but with a more spontaneous flavor and emphasis on drinking just enough to make things entertaining for the other people. The rule about borrels in the lab is... well, there really isn't one. Wait until 5PM, I guess, but even that isn't strictly followed. Generally, if you want to have a borrel, just pop open a beer (there's always at least a full case in the lab's refrigerator), break out the giant sound system, and call the workday over. In the lab's "book o' rules" there's actually a section on borrels, and it basically says exactly what I've written above.
4.) The complex that I live in is arranged into quads, consisting of 6 or 7 rooms per quad. My quad is entirely international, due to the furnished rooms, but the vast majority of students in the complex are Dutch. The master's student on whose project I'm currently working, Phillip, happened to live in the next quad over from me, and so I got to know that group of guys (and their girlfriends) really well. All but one are physicists (the other is an industrial design engineer), and all of their girlfriends are also physicists. All in all, it's a really nerdy quad. During my first month here, I was almost always hanging out with them, but since Phillip left for an internship in Delft (on the other side of the country) and a number of the other guys have moved out for various reasons, I've been over there much less recently. These guys were the ones who originally introduced me to Dutch customs and food, and helped me start learning Dutch by speaking it when I was around and trying to also translate what they were saying into English on the fly.
-------------------------
YES", by the way.) The way to do this is to measure how far each beam has to travel before entering the sample and make sure they're the same. Piece of cake, right? RIGHT! So that's what I mean by "temporal overlap"; the pulses of the two beams are in the same place at the same time. Whew. See, physics isn't that hard!
There's another thing that needs to be considered for the sample though (hey, stop complaining about the sample! It'll be here in just a second, so just cool your jets!): spatial overlap. What the hell? Didn't we just make sure these things were in the same place at the same time? Well, yes, sort of... we made sure that they had traveled the same distance before overlapping. However, that by no means assured that they were going to be in the same place at all! To do this, I needed to make sure that all of the mirrors that I'm using to steer the beams were aligned exactly (read: to within 1 microrad. If you're not sure what that is, look it up), and that takes time. There are essentially five mirrors that need to be in precisely the right places and orientations, and it takes time to get them there. Yay, fun times.
Right. Temporal alignment: check. Spatial alignment: check. Well... maybe. Now comes the real test: second-harmonic-generation with overlapped cross-products. What the deuce? Well, here's the deal. Some materials (potassium triphosphate, or KTP, for example) emit coherent light when a very intense light source is passed through them. Specifically, this light is at twice the frequency (or half the wavelength) of the incident light, so that 1064-nm light will produce 532-nm (green!) light when it comes through, 1192-nm light will produce 596-nm (red!) light, and the inverse of the inverse-sum (trust me on this) of 1064 and 1192 will produce 564-nm (yellow!) light. To be absolutely sure that spatial and temporal overlap are achieved, the yellow output must be maximized. Incidentally, this also ensures that the phase-matching conditions for third-order nonlinear effects are achieved to within an order of magnitude, but that's not important yet... it's just convenient! To make absolutely certain of having overlapping pulses, replace the KTP crystal with a sample of common starch, and instead of just looking for yellow light (because you simply won't see any!) send the output beam through a set of filters and into a photodiode that's connected to a lock-in amplifier modulated at a reference frequency to filter out any noise in the signal, then maximize that signal. It requires some nerves, to say the least, and I've been frustrated for about a month with just this step of the procedure. Trying to even get this signal has forced me to realign my OPO two times, completely rebuild my detection optics five times, reset my filters four times, and in the course of all of this I've found three anomalies with the detector itself. Hooray for easy experiments, huh?
Such is the life of an experimentalist, but I love it. Every day that I go into work is guaranteed to present me with a new problem, and there are some that take over a week to solve. Even once I'm able to consistently get real CARS signals, I won't be satisfied; there will always be something that I can optimize, something that can be organized more efficiently, something that yields a more powerful output. It's why I wake up every day at 7:30 at leave work every day as late as possible before getting locked in the building.
END PHYSICS HERE
-------------------------
Sadly, there isn't a whole heck of a lot to talk about here. Because I'm only in the Netherlands for a short period of time, D.R.V.Euros (the rowing club at the university) was unwilling to put me in an experienced competitive boat, so instead I was placed into a novice group for their six-week introductory period. The problem is that everyone else in the group is Dutch, and most of them really don't like speaking English, so it's very difficult for me to be a part of the group... I've ended up skipping all but one of the group dinners, and I haven't been to any of their parties. As compensation the Euros board let me qualify to take a single out basically whenever I feel like it, so I get to go sculling on a semi-regular basis, but due to the combination of my work schedule and the northern latitude my chances go go out are rapidly decreasing. It's also turning out to be really hard to stay in shape when I'm not being motivated by my team, so getting back to Lawrence might be a bit rough for a while.
-------------------------
Being as busy as I have been with settling in and working, I haven't had a lot of opportunities yet to travel around Europe. The best I've been able to do is spend a few days on the other side of the country (about a 2-hour train ride from Enschede) in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. I think I'm love with this country just because people are so fond of their bikes. I have a picture that I took while in Amsterdam that shows a four-story bicycle parking garage. A parking garage. For bikes. My guess is that there were over 2,000 bikes in it when I was there, and it wasn't even completely full. Pretty astonishing.
In addition to bombing around this country a little bit, I'm close enough to the border with Germany that I can ride my bike there in about a half-hour. The nearest town is Gronau, but the nearest German town of any relevance is Rheine (about 35 km east), and the nearest actual German city is Dortmund (about 60 km south). I haven't yet taken my bike there, but I might try some weekend before it gets too cold and too dark to do so.
I have many plans for future travels! The minor things first: a) Utrecht, to visit Renske; b) Amsterdam (at least once more, but more likely 5 or 6 times) because it was so amazing the first time; c) Den Haag [a.k.a. The Hague] to apply for a visa to travel to Egypt; d) Berlin, for my physics GRE, and for some touring and beer-drinking; e) Maastricht [far south of the Netherlands, near the German and Belgian borders] with the optical sciences group for a retreat; f) Brussels at some point to grab some beer and chocolate.
In addition to those couple of minor travels, there are three more (of which two are confirmed and one is being planned hesitantly) about which I am especially excited. Chronologically first, Kate is coming to visit during her Thanksgiving break, and together we're going to Italy for five days. We'll be spending two full days in Venice, taking a morning train to Florence, spending two almost-full days and a night there, then taking a late-evening train back to Venice, spending another full day and night there, and then flying back to the Netherlands. I don't even know yet what we're going to do in Italy (aside from being silly American tourists), but while in the Netherlands we're definitely going to head to Amsterdam for a day. It'll be quite busy, but absolutely worth it. The second definite trip is a week-long excursion at the end of December to visit my brother (and my parents, incidentally) in Cairo, Egypt, where he's currently studying Arabic and economics. Plans there include spending a night in a hotel overlooking the Pyramids, traveling to Luxor to the Valley of the Kings, and spending a while in Alexandria (the modern library there is fantastic, according to the bro). After a week there, I'll be flying from Cairo -> Milan -> Amsterdam -> Minneapolis -> Portland directly, so I'll be really jet-lagged in time for New Years celebrations. The tentative trip is a weekend+1-day trip to Prague or Vienna, and though both look really amazing I'm leaning more towards Vienna at this point, because then I can stay in Bratislava (where housing is CHEAP!) and take public transit to Vienna.
-------------------------
Living in another country offers unique experiences to learn about the intricacies of another culture, from speech mannerisms to culinary choices to linguistic nuances. I've been trying really hard to pick up as many of these as I can while I'm here, but some of them strike me as very strange, and so I figured that I'd share them with you. Why not? You've made it this far, why stop now?
The Dutch language itself is very interesting because it's so variable. Whereas in the USA the dialect and accent only changes over vast distances, in the Netherlands each state has its own speech mannerisms. Even someone who has only been in the country for a little while can notice the differences, because they're very pronounced; the main ones that I noticed right away (between Amsterdam and Enschede) are that the 'g's, which in the North are generally supposed to be made by pretending you have a throat disease, are more like the 'y' in the Castillian "yo" in the South (there isn't an equivalent sound in English). Likewise, the 'ch', which in the North is very similar to the Scottish "loch", is more akin to the English "Charon" in the South. For reference, anything "above the rivers" (i.e. above the Rhine and Amstel) is considered "North Netherlands"; anything below is "South Netherlands". The really nice thing is that, though the language looks superficially very different from English, it's quite easy to start picking up cognates once the pronunciation distinctions are understood. Another strange set of Dutch phonemes are the dipthongs 'ij', 'uu', 'ee', and 'ui'. None of these really have any counterparts in English, and the best comparisons I can make are the 'i' in "hi", the 'uu' in "vacuum" (though more rounded), the 'ay' in "bay", and the 'ou' in "house". None of those are completely accurate, but it gives you an idea of how weird it is to see the words "een huis" (Dutch for "one house") and hear everyone around you pronounce it very differently.
As for Dutch food: it's mostly delicious. The Netherlands is one of the most profitable agricultural countries in the world, and looking at it from space gives an idea of why: most of the country is farmland. Aside from the flowers grown here (such as the stereotypical tulips, of which I've seen MANY), the Netherlands is also a huge producer of grains, roots, and vegetables. There aren't very many fruits that can be grown locally, so supermarket selections are almost entirely imports, but the vegetables are range from decent to excellent, depending on the week. Actual Dutch food isn't much different from other European food in a lot of ways: they rely heavily on grains in the form of pastas and flours (known literally as "bloem", the same word as "flower"), with a nice mix of vegetables, meats, and dairy in each meal as well. Being a coastal nation there is also abundant fish, of which cod and tuna are particularly popular, and crustaceans are also ubiquitous in the stores and restaurants. However, what sets Dutch food apart from everyone else is the sheer variety of desserts available to them. The most popular is known as vlavlip and consists of equal parts vla (very similar to American pudding) and yogurt with a small amount of concentrated fruit syrup poured between the two components. It's meant to be eaten in this heterogeneous form, so that in each spoonful you get all three parts at once, and it's delicious. Another popular dessert is the stroopwafel, which consists of two very thin waffle-cookies (almost identical in texture and flavor to an American waffle-cone, but thinner and softer) sandwiched around a thin layer of caramel. I have yet to meet someone who doesn't like them. Seasonally, there's a third very popular dessert that generally is sold in late Autumn and early Winter. It's called kruidnoten, and the closest analogy I can make to an American food is gingerbread, though some of the kruidnoten is actually chocoladekruidnoten, which as you probably guessed is covered in chocolate... yum.
Dutch dinner culture differs significantly from American dinner culture. While the Dutch are notoriously less politically correct than Americans, they treat dinner much more formally even when dining solo. There are almost always two different dishes (and when dining in a group, 4 or 5 is common) preceded by beverages and followed by dessert. Dinner will typically last around two or three hours, because even once all of the food is consumed (and it almost always is, no matter how much was made) everyone sits around and just talks. It's not until there's a really long and awkward break in the conversation that someone offers to do dishes, which indicates that dinner is over. It's a really nice tradition that most Americans unfortunately don't have time for.
If you've managed to make it through all of that, I'm impressed both at the amount of free time you have and your patience. I'm sure that there are things that I've forgotten, but there will be future updates.
Groeten uit het Nederlands!
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Since I have been in the Netherlands, I have noticed a few oddities about the culture here, and a few similarities with American culture. As an aside, while typing this entry, I have already accidentally entered a few words in Dutch, so if any Dutch words appear in the text, I apologize and sincerely hope that they are English cognates. Anyways, more to the point. My social life so far has mostly consisted of 1) hanging out with my flat-mates, of whom the most frequently-appearing in my life are Juha (from Finland) and Mukhandha (from Nepal), 2) participating in the weekly Pub Quiz at the Vestingbar with the team I formed (the Red Penguins), 3) spending time at borrels with the Optical Sciences group (with whom I work at least five days a week), and 4) with the various Dutch students from the next flat over. Enumerated below, my activities with each group are,
1) Mostly dinner and house-keeping. Juha is a fantastic Finnish guy who simply cannot express how pleased he is with everything about Mukhandha and myself, and yet simply despises Acasa, our local housing agency. His best friend, Tommi, is also studying at Universiteit Twente, and though he lives in a separate building he is always at my flat, due to the fact that he hates his own living arrangements. Juha is dating a Finnish girl named Miinha who is currently studying in Paderborn, Germany, and as such every weekend they are together, either in Paderborn or here in Enschede. Either way, I don't mind at all; Miinha is a very nice person, and her interactions with Tommi and Juha are hilarious. To boot, Juha can cook a mean Finnish mushroom-cream pasta dish. Mukhandha is a bit of a cryptic fellow; his English isn't very good, but he still appears to be enthusiastic about everything, all the time. I've seen him have one bad day in the month-and-a-half that we've both been here, and aside from him telling me about his hatred of the Maoist rebels in Nepal and the Kenyan guy who almost never cleans up after himself, I've never heard negative out of his mouth. He, like Juha, is a connoisseur of all beverages alcoholic, and the three of us (Juha, Mukhandha, and myself) find ourselves constantly sampling the favorite beers (and occasional wines) of the others. To make matters even better, we clean out communal kitchen at least once per week, and have instituted a schedule whereby each of us will cook dinner for all of us on average once per week, when able. Mukhandha made a fantastic four-part dinner consisting of spicy curry chicken, mild curry vegetables, a peanut-onion sauce, and rice. It was simply delicious; every time I walk into the kitchen while he's cooking, I just want to start eating everything in his pots. It's that good. Trust me.
Both Mukhandha and Juha love football (known to Americans as "soccer"), with Juha spending this weekend in Brussels for the Belgium-Finland Eurocup 2007 Finals qualification round and Mukhandha avidly following the series on television. Whenever I walk in on them in the kitchen, they always have some channel on that's running a football match... it's just fantastic!
2) The weekly Pub Quiz at the Vestingbar saw the Red Penguins (a group of almost entirely international students, including Czechs, Poles, Francs, Finns, Americans, a Guatemalan, a Nepalese, a Croat, and an Italian, among others) win the first three weeks, but the format of the quiz has been changed such that we're at a distinct disadvantage now. Initially, there would be many trivial questions, separated into six or eight rounds of 10 each, with an additional picture-based round and a final round about music. Each round was worth 10 points, and though the Red Penguins sucked it up at the music rounds (mostly because they play really shitty music), we did well enough in the other rounds to smack face on the other teams.
In recent weeks, the numbers of trivia questions has gone down (so that now there are only two rounds of 10 questions), the picture round has remained (another 10 points available), and the music round has been expanded from 10 to 30 points. Now, even though we score very well (generally 1st or 2nd place) on the trivia and picture rounds, the excess of music questions has killed us, and so we've been ending up out of the top places for the past two weeks. Out of all of the music questions, I've been able to answer only one correctly: Christina Aguillera's 'Genie in a Bottle', and that's just because I'm familiar with Weird Al's parody, 'Weenie in a Bottle'.
3.) "Borrel" is effectively the Dutch word for "party", but with a more spontaneous flavor and emphasis on drinking just enough to make things entertaining for the other people. The rule about borrels in the lab is... well, there really isn't one. Wait until 5PM, I guess, but even that isn't strictly followed. Generally, if you want to have a borrel, just pop open a beer (there's always at least a full case in the lab's refrigerator), break out the giant sound system, and call the workday over. In the lab's "book o' rules" there's actually a section on borrels, and it basically says exactly what I've written above.
4.) The complex that I live in is arranged into quads, consisting of 6 or 7 rooms per quad. My quad is entirely international, due to the furnished rooms, but the vast majority of students in the complex are Dutch. The master's student on whose project I'm currently working, Phillip, happened to live in the next quad over from me, and so I got to know that group of guys (and their girlfriends) really well. All but one are physicists (the other is an industrial design engineer), and all of their girlfriends are also physicists. All in all, it's a really nerdy quad. During my first month here, I was almost always hanging out with them, but since Phillip left for an internship in Delft (on the other side of the country) and a number of the other guys have moved out for various reasons, I've been over there much less recently. These guys were the ones who originally introduced me to Dutch customs and food, and helped me start learning Dutch by speaking it when I was around and trying to also translate what they were saying into English on the fly.
-------------------------
YES", by the way.) The way to do this is to measure how far each beam has to travel before entering the sample and make sure they're the same. Piece of cake, right? RIGHT! So that's what I mean by "temporal overlap"; the pulses of the two beams are in the same place at the same time. Whew. See, physics isn't that hard!
There's another thing that needs to be considered for the sample though (hey, stop complaining about the sample! It'll be here in just a second, so just cool your jets!): spatial overlap. What the hell? Didn't we just make sure these things were in the same place at the same time? Well, yes, sort of... we made sure that they had traveled the same distance before overlapping. However, that by no means assured that they were going to be in the same place at all! To do this, I needed to make sure that all of the mirrors that I'm using to steer the beams were aligned exactly (read: to within 1 microrad. If you're not sure what that is, look it up), and that takes time. There are essentially five mirrors that need to be in precisely the right places and orientations, and it takes time to get them there. Yay, fun times.
Right. Temporal alignment: check. Spatial alignment: check. Well... maybe. Now comes the real test: second-harmonic-generation with overlapped cross-products. What the deuce? Well, here's the deal. Some materials (potassium triphosphate, or KTP, for example) emit coherent light when a very intense light source is passed through them. Specifically, this light is at twice the frequency (or half the wavelength) of the incident light, so that 1064-nm light will produce 532-nm (green!) light when it comes through, 1192-nm light will produce 596-nm (red!) light, and the inverse of the inverse-sum (trust me on this) of 1064 and 1192 will produce 564-nm (yellow!) light. To be absolutely sure that spatial and temporal overlap are achieved, the yellow output must be maximized. Incidentally, this also ensures that the phase-matching conditions for third-order nonlinear effects are achieved to within an order of magnitude, but that's not important yet... it's just convenient! To make absolutely certain of having overlapping pulses, replace the KTP crystal with a sample of common starch, and instead of just looking for yellow light (because you simply won't see any!) send the output beam through a set of filters and into a photodiode that's connected to a lock-in amplifier modulated at a reference frequency to filter out any noise in the signal, then maximize that signal. It requires some nerves, to say the least, and I've been frustrated for about a month with just this step of the procedure. Trying to even get this signal has forced me to realign my OPO two times, completely rebuild my detection optics five times, reset my filters four times, and in the course of all of this I've found three anomalies with the detector itself. Hooray for easy experiments, huh?
Such is the life of an experimentalist, but I love it. Every day that I go into work is guaranteed to present me with a new problem, and there are some that take over a week to solve. Even once I'm able to consistently get real CARS signals, I won't be satisfied; there will always be something that I can optimize, something that can be organized more efficiently, something that yields a more powerful output. It's why I wake up every day at 7:30 at leave work every day as late as possible before getting locked in the building.
END PHYSICS HERE
-------------------------
Sadly, there isn't a whole heck of a lot to talk about here. Because I'm only in the Netherlands for a short period of time, D.R.V.Euros (the rowing club at the university) was unwilling to put me in an experienced competitive boat, so instead I was placed into a novice group for their six-week introductory period. The problem is that everyone else in the group is Dutch, and most of them really don't like speaking English, so it's very difficult for me to be a part of the group... I've ended up skipping all but one of the group dinners, and I haven't been to any of their parties. As compensation the Euros board let me qualify to take a single out basically whenever I feel like it, so I get to go sculling on a semi-regular basis, but due to the combination of my work schedule and the northern latitude my chances go go out are rapidly decreasing. It's also turning out to be really hard to stay in shape when I'm not being motivated by my team, so getting back to Lawrence might be a bit rough for a while.
-------------------------
Being as busy as I have been with settling in and working, I haven't had a lot of opportunities yet to travel around Europe. The best I've been able to do is spend a few days on the other side of the country (about a 2-hour train ride from Enschede) in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. I think I'm love with this country just because people are so fond of their bikes. I have a picture that I took while in Amsterdam that shows a four-story bicycle parking garage. A parking garage. For bikes. My guess is that there were over 2,000 bikes in it when I was there, and it wasn't even completely full. Pretty astonishing.
In addition to bombing around this country a little bit, I'm close enough to the border with Germany that I can ride my bike there in about a half-hour. The nearest town is Gronau, but the nearest German town of any relevance is Rheine (about 35 km east), and the nearest actual German city is Dortmund (about 60 km south). I haven't yet taken my bike there, but I might try some weekend before it gets too cold and too dark to do so.
I have many plans for future travels! The minor things first: a) Utrecht, to visit Renske; b) Amsterdam (at least once more, but more likely 5 or 6 times) because it was so amazing the first time; c) Den Haag [a.k.a. The Hague] to apply for a visa to travel to Egypt; d) Berlin, for my physics GRE, and for some touring and beer-drinking; e) Maastricht [far south of the Netherlands, near the German and Belgian borders] with the optical sciences group for a retreat; f) Brussels at some point to grab some beer and chocolate.
In addition to those couple of minor travels, there are three more (of which two are confirmed and one is being planned hesitantly) about which I am especially excited. Chronologically first, Kate is coming to visit during her Thanksgiving break, and together we're going to Italy for five days. We'll be spending two full days in Venice, taking a morning train to Florence, spending two almost-full days and a night there, then taking a late-evening train back to Venice, spending another full day and night there, and then flying back to the Netherlands. I don't even know yet what we're going to do in Italy (aside from being silly American tourists), but while in the Netherlands we're definitely going to head to Amsterdam for a day. It'll be quite busy, but absolutely worth it. The second definite trip is a week-long excursion at the end of December to visit my brother (and my parents, incidentally) in Cairo, Egypt, where he's currently studying Arabic and economics. Plans there include spending a night in a hotel overlooking the Pyramids, traveling to Luxor to the Valley of the Kings, and spending a while in Alexandria (the modern library there is fantastic, according to the bro). After a week there, I'll be flying from Cairo -> Milan -> Amsterdam -> Minneapolis -> Portland directly, so I'll be really jet-lagged in time for New Years celebrations. The tentative trip is a weekend+1-day trip to Prague or Vienna, and though both look really amazing I'm leaning more towards Vienna at this point, because then I can stay in Bratislava (where housing is CHEAP!) and take public transit to Vienna.
-------------------------
Living in another country offers unique experiences to learn about the intricacies of another culture, from speech mannerisms to culinary choices to linguistic nuances. I've been trying really hard to pick up as many of these as I can while I'm here, but some of them strike me as very strange, and so I figured that I'd share them with you. Why not? You've made it this far, why stop now?
The Dutch language itself is very interesting because it's so variable. Whereas in the USA the dialect and accent only changes over vast distances, in the Netherlands each state has its own speech mannerisms. Even someone who has only been in the country for a little while can notice the differences, because they're very pronounced; the main ones that I noticed right away (between Amsterdam and Enschede) are that the 'g's, which in the North are generally supposed to be made by pretending you have a throat disease, are more like the 'y' in the Castillian "yo" in the South (there isn't an equivalent sound in English). Likewise, the 'ch', which in the North is very similar to the Scottish "loch", is more akin to the English "Charon" in the South. For reference, anything "above the rivers" (i.e. above the Rhine and Amstel) is considered "North Netherlands"; anything below is "South Netherlands". The really nice thing is that, though the language looks superficially very different from English, it's quite easy to start picking up cognates once the pronunciation distinctions are understood. Another strange set of Dutch phonemes are the dipthongs 'ij', 'uu', 'ee', and 'ui'. None of these really have any counterparts in English, and the best comparisons I can make are the 'i' in "hi", the 'uu' in "vacuum" (though more rounded), the 'ay' in "bay", and the 'ou' in "house". None of those are completely accurate, but it gives you an idea of how weird it is to see the words "een huis" (Dutch for "one house") and hear everyone around you pronounce it very differently.
As for Dutch food: it's mostly delicious. The Netherlands is one of the most profitable agricultural countries in the world, and looking at it from space gives an idea of why: most of the country is farmland. Aside from the flowers grown here (such as the stereotypical tulips, of which I've seen MANY), the Netherlands is also a huge producer of grains, roots, and vegetables. There aren't very many fruits that can be grown locally, so supermarket selections are almost entirely imports, but the vegetables are range from decent to excellent, depending on the week. Actual Dutch food isn't much different from other European food in a lot of ways: they rely heavily on grains in the form of pastas and flours (known literally as "bloem", the same word as "flower"), with a nice mix of vegetables, meats, and dairy in each meal as well. Being a coastal nation there is also abundant fish, of which cod and tuna are particularly popular, and crustaceans are also ubiquitous in the stores and restaurants. However, what sets Dutch food apart from everyone else is the sheer variety of desserts available to them. The most popular is known as vlavlip and consists of equal parts vla (very similar to American pudding) and yogurt with a small amount of concentrated fruit syrup poured between the two components. It's meant to be eaten in this heterogeneous form, so that in each spoonful you get all three parts at once, and it's delicious. Another popular dessert is the stroopwafel, which consists of two very thin waffle-cookies (almost identical in texture and flavor to an American waffle-cone, but thinner and softer) sandwiched around a thin layer of caramel. I have yet to meet someone who doesn't like them. Seasonally, there's a third very popular dessert that generally is sold in late Autumn and early Winter. It's called kruidnoten, and the closest analogy I can make to an American food is gingerbread, though some of the kruidnoten is actually chocoladekruidnoten, which as you probably guessed is covered in chocolate... yum.
Dutch dinner culture differs significantly from American dinner culture. While the Dutch are notoriously less politically correct than Americans, they treat dinner much more formally even when dining solo. There are almost always two different dishes (and when dining in a group, 4 or 5 is common) preceded by beverages and followed by dessert. Dinner will typically last around two or three hours, because even once all of the food is consumed (and it almost always is, no matter how much was made) everyone sits around and just talks. It's not until there's a really long and awkward break in the conversation that someone offers to do dishes, which indicates that dinner is over. It's a really nice tradition that most Americans unfortunately don't have time for.
If you've managed to make it through all of that, I'm impressed both at the amount of free time you have and your patience. I'm sure that there are things that I've forgotten, but there will be future updates.
Groeten uit het Nederlands!