Adventure Lady: a million bucks

After our little spat the other night, I left Adventure Lady to drift in the downtown old town. I was not sure I would find her again, but I did. I found her some new parts and got dirty putting them on. My first time was a success, and upon inspection of the old tube found that there were no holes, merely a loose cap... I now have an extra tube for future fiascoes. Next job is finding her a rack.

I believe I have unlocked the key to changing a tire. This was
really a happy accident, since I met new people in the process.

McDonalds

McDonalds is a huge company worth many billions of dollars. It exists in all places, and will likely be the first restaurant in space. I try to go once in every country I visit just to see if I yet like it in that country (I never do!).

Since I didn't take any pictures in McD's I want to
share with you how awful the meat is here. I'm
sorry Holland, but that is not a hamburger.

I used the service on my first day, when I didn't have any food to eat, and found it a different experience than Canada, India, and Germany. As a business mandate the food is never healthy, however whereas in Germany the food is smaller portions (and comes with beer), or India, where you get cholera from the produce (and there is no beef), or Canada, where it feels like you're happy meal is too happy, here it is minimalist and empty feeling (and it tastes like cold bacon grease). At least the place I visited had scant few items on the menu. A they were weird names with weird meat. returning to my norm, I won't be doing it often.

Biked to Pub Crawl and Crawled Home

Last night reconfirmed in my mind that pub crawls are shitty events. Much of the time is spent walking your buzz off, and then waiting for beer at the new place, and not having enough time to really talk to people, like archeologists, who you meet at bars.

A beautiful canal with ancient reflections.

It might not have been so bad if my tire hadn't pooped out on me. Adventure Lady is now sitting somewhere downtown with a flat ass end. I had to walk home this morning to meet up with some professors meaning I'm going to have to walk back down again to find it later. Not impressed with my luck!

Drunk in a Church

The first day of Orientation Week in Leiden (OWL) began today. As with most social gatherings we stood around 95% of the time, and listened to someone speaks 4% of the time and the rest was good fun.

A posse of us left on bikes from our residency and headed down to the central meeting place. After meeting others in group 31 (masters students in natural sciences), we played some silly name games. There were five astronomy, four media technology, three statistics, two mathematics, and two life sciences.

	Top Left: Circles of people. Our group stood/mosied about. Top Right: Our group flag. Bottom Left: Silly name game.

A grand old church.

We walked to a church wherein we found chairs assembled. We heard some speeches from the principal, or some other head figure at Leiden University, who seemed to think China was the Cat's Ass. She also doesn't like how much students drink, and how Dutch students don't travel as much as others. She outright apologized in advance for two things: The Dutch discrimination and blunt directness, claiming it wasn't the Dutch's fault, they merely didn't know better.

We heard from the fire department, who dress fancier than most Generals in the Canadian Military, and who informed us that if we ever get stuck in a fire we will likely die. We watched a video of a room with a candle size flame on the floor turn into a huge fire ball in three minutes!

Lunch: Water, bread, cookie, banana.

We then heard from the police (the Polities - the Polite-ees) who had some more pleasant facts to impart. There are more bikes in the Netherlands than people (I intend to do a whole post on this topic later), and as such people need to STOP RIDING BIKES ON THE MARKET STREETS because it's annoying! Reefer and other soft drugs are only legal to be bought and consumed in coffee shops. Also, Leiden has a municipal by-law of no public drinking. I'm sure he said more stuff but too many people were laughing to hear him. He ran off the stage with his tail between his legs, poor guy.

Censored coffee shopper.

We heard from the ISN who said there are tons of cool things planned this year for University Leiden students, from trips to themed events, and clubs.

We were a little hungry so we headed on to the four hundred year old botanical gardens! We had bread, water and bananas for lunch (that's all our 60EUR OWL fee could afford).

Mayor and Japanese girl. The mayor was out of
line in his mock imitation of her accent.

The problem with these orientation things is that they don't leave any time for yourself so a few of us opted out of the city walk and did our own thing: cafe, coffee shop, and incense shopping.

We met back up at the church where this time drinks started flowing and the mayor talked about how happy he was. I later came upon him talking to a young Japanese girl. He spoke in a slow, completely obscene, imitation Japanese accent to make the girl feel comfortable. She seemed a little shaken by the experience.

From then on we headed to some place for a sloppy dinner-in-a-box and finally on to a pub where we did a groups' quiz challenge. Our group 31 called the "Malakus 31" came second after "Justice Mother Fuckers". The bike ride home was swift and my only time of solace today.

First Beer

I cooked up a nice shrimp pad thai, popped open a beer and found that they go nicely together. A few broccoli pieces, an onion, a carrot, shrimp, sunflower oil, and rice noodles did the trick. I used my 0,89EUR assorted spices to flavour.

The only problem is that with so much beer for the amount of pad thai I had much left over. The solution is someone to share it with.

Adventure Lady

Yesterday was lost to jet lag. I tried to make sure it would be minimal by sleeping on the plane but I ended up not sleeping until 0500 and not waking up until 1730. The day was shot! I had planned to do so much that day like get a bike, eat something for the first time in a while, kill all the misquitoes in my room (the ceiling and floors are now covered with murder marks), and maybe even have my first beer here.

I attribute my falling asleep to two things, outside of jetlag. Mostly, it was the mosquitoes buzzing around my head. When I would hear one I would quickly flick on the table lamp and peer around, quite owl-like, and look for the bug. Once you catch sight you can't break eye contact, otherwise it flies away! So I would fumble around for my rolled up, blood stained, introduction-to-Leiden booklet while honing in on the bug, and then 60% of the time it would fly away before you could get it. This happened all night until I was too tired to care (at 0500).

The dishes and cutlery from IKEA that the
place comes "furnished" with, had to be washed.

The other annoying thing that kept me up was an unnerving amount of missing people back home. I knew it was inevitable in such an adventure that one would think these things, and I was happy to have them out of the way so soon. So when I finally woke up, and got over my immediate anger, I weeded my mental garden of ill thoughts and summoned up the courage to go exploring in the remaining daylight.

The first thing I did, upon finding the bike stores closed was start walking the 35 minute walk to Leiden Centrum to look for a SIM-kaart kiosk. It was easy to find and along the way I took a few pictures. I purchased the wrong SIM which I realized later that night and rectified earlier today! I got some food in the train station, and picked up a rookwoorst and vorkoopig kase (smoked sausage, and cheap cheese).

Horses, part of a larger farm with Koetjes and
Kalfje. Situated out front the Observatory.

I finally returned home via the 57 Lisse bus. I tidied up, washed some dishes, and snacked on my meat and cheese while I fiddled with my phone and SIM (at which point I realized it was the wrong SIM), etc. until 2am where I fell asleep with considerably less bugs in my room than the night before.

Today thus became a normal day of exploration started at 0700 with a 10km run into the country side, where I discovered the network of trails that criss-cross the Netherlands for bikers and runners.


Now here comes the motivation for the title of this post. Adventure Lady found me in the second second-hand bike store I visited. She's a Koga Miyata probably from the 80's from the looks of her. She drives like a charm and we did some exploring today.

For 95EUR I convinced the shop owner to throw in a pump (for the french valve tires), and the green strap on the German made rack ;)

Now it's time for some adventure time with my Adventure Lady!

A major thing I was on the lookout for were incense sticks, and citronella candels. A mosquitoe net would be a good investment. I found a few odds and ends like shishkabob sticks, a spice dispenser, some candles, and my first beer!

A few things about beer in Europe: tasty, strong, diverse, and inexpensive to boot! I said to hell with looking for the "authentic Dutch beer" and settled for one that caught my eye. The store by the way was situated next to a flower shop and I almost bought Adventure Lady some roses.

Arrival

He was in such a rush, mentally. He would be looking at the sunrise out the airplane glass, or taking his first steps in Amsterdam when the thought would occur to him, "I would have taken a picture of this a year ago", but times have changed. In those brief moments where he debated the idea of taking a photo the chance would slip by. Any attempt to capture what he had just witnessed would only serve to self-justify that he "still had it". What resulted was the realization that a photograph with purpose would say much more.

Overall, the plane ride had been a smooth affair with little reason to complain, which he was glad about. At one point restlessness overcame him as he struggled to adjust to the natural timezone of his destination. Coming prepared he had had his boots off, earplugs in, head in U-pillow, eyes shut and legs stretched out into the emergency exit, sleeping as a Dutch person would be on the other side of the Atlantic. With only the occasional elbow-jostle, turbulence, and garbled muttering through the earplugs his mind was left to pursue sleep in near-silence. Tending to his garden, he weeded out thoughts of tomorrow and slowed his breathing.

In this near tranquility he ignored any broaches in the silence and only got up when the person behind him needed to eat. He ate none, but drank the red wine. Never finding sleep, he lasted until a voice announced they would serve a continental breakfast before landing in and hour and a half. He saw the sunrise then.

Waiting for his luggage, he realized that he was quite hungry and decided to wait until he arrived at his new home. Thus, he took the train to Leiden from the Amsterdam Airport which cost 5,90EUR. Making a few friends along the way, and with very sore muscles, he found his way home. The house was a mess, as he expected.

Taking in his environment he inspected the house, the rooms furnished by IKEA, in dismay until at one point a roommate returned home for lunch. Phillipe was leaving the following Monday and incidentally studied astronomy. In the mood for further adventure, before crashing, he accompanied Phillipe to the observatory and got a tour, listened to Phillipe's final presentation, and made friends with some shady cats.

Stumbling home on foot he wished he had a bike, and slowly a schedule assembled itself before him. The next day would see solutions to many problems.

Some sort of heron standing on a smack of land in the moor.

Takes flight at the scratch of my sleeve on some bark.

Hello, here I am again returning to the blogosphere to share yet another amazing adventure. This time I travel to The Netherlands to do my masters in astronomy at the University of Leiden. The unknown awaits and beckons like a beggar's crooked hand! I am recently graduated from the University of Toronto, having taken an extra fifth year to complete my physics specialist. In the last five years I have found reasons to travel.

In the summer of 2010, after completing a research project on proto-planetery formation simulation using parallel computing, I did my first bit of traveling. I ran away to southern France with a girl and caught the bug (not la tourista - I mean the travel bug!). I got it bad enough that the following summer of 2011 I did a summer research project in India, where I kept a blog - my first - on my experiences. I began learning German soon after France happened so that I could do an exchange semester in Germany, which happened in the summer of 2012 and where I popped out a shorter blog on my time there.

Abby being adorable at my cottage, where I found
some final peace before my departure.

After a worrisome and anxiety-stricken grad school application period I finally arrived at the University of Leiden as my preferred destination of torture - the torture being to my mind as I search out the answers to the universe. With acceptance to the school came a confetti of paperwork and maze-like procedure with an ever mounting todo list.

High on that list was to find money. For that I found it difficult to find acceptable employment, until I settled with the most brutal of summer jobs. I became the hated door-to-door salesman - 100% commission based - selling water heats, furnaces, and A/C's. You see, while I must deal with roughly three hundred furious, hateful, strikingly retarded people on a daily basis (six days a week!), a rare few are kind enough to let me into their homes, and furthermore down into their basements. I won't describe the licentious scenes I have seen in some people basements, but you can be sure I have been surprised quite a few times by what I see in peoples' basements. The short of it is that, while I must endure verbal abuse consistently throughout the day, the sale of just one appliance would bring me anywhere from $170 to $550 in commission - and I averaged three sales per day. Mind you, the working hours, 10:00-23:00, were in stark contrast to any notion of a social life.

Summer in Toronto.

I was still in a monetary pickle until I received a gift of about 15,000EUR from the university, at which point I was able to quit and spend time with loved ones (you know who you are). It is a thing of regret that I am nearing the end on my summer - only ten days from my flight out on 21 August - and I fear I will not be able to see all of you!

I would like to mention happy retirement to Linda! I'm sorry I couldn't be at your surprise tea party, I hope it was an elegant affair!

The woodwork shop finally see some action. This is as we
left it after six days of toil.

Lastly, and most important I wish I could have finished my woodworking project with my dad. We spent some quality time working at our cottage on a beautifully complex replication of Edwin Lutyen's century old garden bench. So far much of the base is formed with the crest and much of the joinery (mortice and fixed tenon) to be done.

It is ten days until I leave, in which time I must renew my passport and driver's license, get proper health insurance, do some medical checks, get final paychecks, move out of my apartment, and arrange affairs. See you soon.