Far away...

this was in scotland too. i was faster taking pictures and got back in the car again (on the wrong side!!! hahahaha).

since monday, tim lives in groningen, a 2 hour drive from amsterdam. he started a new job as a doctor in the hospital in groningen (the biggest hospital of the netherlands). so, over the past weeks we furnished a place there. mostly with stuff we found in secondhand shops (often its so much nicer than ikea, and much much cheaper!), combined with some stuff that didnt fit in the apartment in amsterdam, and even quite some stuff we found on the streets in our neighborhood (every wednesday night you can put out "the big trash". quite often people put some really nice stuff out that they dont want anymore. more often than not, it doesnt stay on the street very long.... as we grab it, or more often, because others do so. there are even people driving around on wednesday evening, just to pick up anything that might be usuable...). anyways, i think the place is really nice now....

and me? im still in amsterdam.... in the weekends tim either should come back here, or i go there (its really far!! it feels like a foreign country almost! i know i know, for americans this distance is nothing, but for dutch you need to cross half the country!). not the ideal situation, and unlike anything we planned, but well.... sometimes you cannot choose.....

Canal bank

i showed you a picture of this sculpture before. on the 25th we went to have a look at it again, and now i went up close. weird i never did that before!! it continues to be such a lovely sculpture to look at... biebkriebels informed me of the artist; its burney bavelaar, and the title of the artwork is "waterfront" (now that i went to look at it more closely i saw the plaque mentioning the title etc). the artist works and lives in weesp herself, and there are a few more sculptures in the city! i should go and find them sometime.....

and look how sunny it was!! yesterday and today especially were quite different. lots of rain and wind again.....

Museum square

we went out today and got to take some pictures! it was a really nice day, not cold at all and rather sunny. perfect weather for biking... 

here you see a part of the museum square in amsterdam, which was reconstructed in 1999. this should be a little pond, but i dont know why there is so little water in it right now! in winter it apparently is a skating rink? (i really dont remember ever seeing that. wikipedia just told me... ). there are 3 museums located at the museum square. right behind is the rijksmuseum (which is huge and was just reopened after having been closed for 10 years; its renovation cost just 375 million euros..), and then there are the van gogh museum, and the stedelijk museum. right in front you could see the famous "concertgebouw" (concert building, with its highly regarded acoustics), but that truck is blocking the view. buuhh...

in the usa we visited many museums for free, either because at a dedicated time and day each week there was no entrance fee, or because we could enter for free with our bank card. in the netherlands there is no free entrance, i think... but my parents gave us a "museumjaarkaart", with which you can visit most dutch museums for free (or a small fee) for an entire year (you do pay for the card, but if you go frequent enough, its more than worth it). so.... we went to the rijksmuseum! we saw a lot of interesting things, but not everything, as we can now easily go another time with the card....

Reflections, reflections...

i actually dont even know what kind of building this is, but i assume its apartments (and some businesses on the lower floor). i liked the reflection, and just the simple fact that this was taken well after 9 in the evening, a week or 2 ago. i am still amazed at how long its light out in the evening. its funny how you forget that kind of stuff. as mentioned before, in boston it was totally dark at 9 at the latest. i did always enjoy the long days in the netherlands, but not having had them for 3 years makes me enjoy them even more....

last night we had a LOT of rain. but it didnt cool down that much. today was pretty warm again, but since tim was on call, we couldnt venture out too far (in the end he didnt have to work.. ), and did some home improvement again. frustrating how much there is to clean, even if its just a not too big apartment (i do continue to wonder whether some things have ever been cleaned since this apartment was built... i wih i could sterilize everything, hahahaha)....

Boston laundromat

a laundromat somewhere in boston. i dared to take only one picture... isnt this what you always see in movies? people waiting in the laudromat, or folding their freshly washed clothes. here, many apartments dont have their own washer or dryer. some complexes do have them in the basement (then you usually have to bring your own detergent and a lot of quarters to make the machines do their job), but the most unfortunate ones have to bring all their clothes to a laundromat. such a weird thing for dutch people that all have their own washer! i was one of the few weirdos who didnt, and brought my clothes home every weekend for a very long time (also, i was afraid of washing machines, they spin so fast and i thought one day the spinning would get out of control. so even when i had a washer, i took a while before i dared using it). there are hardly laudromats in the netherlands, but here they are on every corner, more or less. in our first apartment we had a coin-op washer in the basement, but clothes came out dirtier than when they went in.... luckily, we now have our own washer/dryer... (which makes an apartment immediately considerably more expensive). unfortunately, it looks similar like this one. not much fits in, and somehow the lint that comes off the clothes is later nicely distributed on the black clothes again, making them look... dirty... :( the machine is also much harsher than the dutch ones, even though (or perhaps because) it takes only 30 minutes or so, against 2 hours in a dutch one! so... clothes get worn out much much faster and several shirts already have tiny holes... :( but at least i can do my laundry whenever i feel like...

Vanity plate

saw this a few weeks ago when we were driving to some place, or another (i forgot). i saw it at the last moment, so even though he was stopping here at the toll booth, i did not have time to take a more decent picture...

Walking home..

or rather.. walking from charlestown to north station. i normally take the shuttle, but tonight i was shown the scenic route... so pretty!! i was disappointed that the times i walked instead of taking the shuttle (perhaps 3 times, haha) i always took the route alongside the road; not much fun. too bad  i didnt have my fancy camera just now. but isnt it pretty? the zakim bridge by night, and behind it the TD garden. and as a bonus their reflection... :)

A party

no post last night; we went to a party to celebrate my institute's second anniversary. it was in the kennedy library. i was very curious how it would look at night, but actually i was more impressed by it during the day. still, it was a very cool location for a party! there were so many people, and everyone was dressed up. always fun to see your colleagues in a party setting.... :)  americans dress up quite differently from the dutch, i would say; much more extravagant. there was food, music, and a lot of wine....

unfortunately, my fancy camera is bigger than the fancy purse i have, so i only had my small camera. the place was rather dark; thus no pictures from last night... :( instead this shopwindow in utrecht, the netherlands, from last december. 

its so sunny here right now, and at 1 the st patrick's day parade starts... we will go there and perhaps there will be some nice photo opportunities.....

American restrooms

the bad guy or poor woman in "on the run"-type of hollywood movies almost invariably have a scene where the main character is hiding in a toilet. they then always have to hoist themselves onto the seat, carefully balancing themselves without making a single noise, as to make sure nothing can be seen from underneath the doors (or heard, since the divides are so poorly constructed). i always thought it funny that in movies they have such weird open toilets, surely it makes it more exciting as almost impossible to hide there, but i hadnt given it much thought that these are just the actual american restrooms... where you have no privacy whatsoever! no moment for yourself, nothing..... whatever you do, the person next to you will know its you, by just looking down and recognizing your shoes...  how i miss the entirely closed dutch toilets..... :) also the word "restroom" i find entirely misplaced, the US kind of toilets are not... a place to rest.....(i should once find out the origin of the word restroom)

i was just googling around, and found that i am not the only one with this concern. apparently there is an "american restroom association" that advocates for better public restrooms since some people prefer working at home solely due to the restrooms at work. and... because europeans can form a bad impression of the USA as a country because of their poor restroom privacy... :) (i myself hadnt gone that far...).

anyways, the toilet above i found charming. did they take the no-privacy to another level with these faces all over the toilet walls? :) this was in the museum of art of the rhode island school of design in providence, where we went last sunday. the entrance was free since it was a sunday and we came in early...... and the museum was huge, very diverse and interesting! even their restrooms... ;)

Native speaker

i am not a native speaker in american, and i notice that every day... funny, i have always worked in international labs; english was the everyday language and talking about my work is difficult for me in dutch (some words dont even exist in dutch). but only here in the US i realized that my english is not that good (my excuse for everything nowadays! useful!); we all spoke english as a second language, and i guess that is why we never had a problem, we were all as limited; the pace was a little slower when speaking. now it sometimes goes soo fast for me! on top of that, often americans mumble, and i just have no clue what they are saying... ( i do not at all like to call, call centers are the worst).

there are also a lot of expressions and words i never heard of ("wicked funny", "im sweating my balls off" (for guys, i believe.. ;), "anomaly"). and i still have trouble with "hey, how are you?" or "whats up?" when just walking past someone in the hallway. i always think i have to answer this question..... then there are expressions i am now familiar with, but cannot get myself to use, as i think everyone immediately will notice i am not an american! like "like", or when giving directions: "you hang a left after you turned right". going out to dinner: "yes, we are all set" or "no, we are still picking away on this". when saying bye "have a good one". i could go on, if only my english was not so limited... ;) ah, and "awesome" of course...

the very first time i entered the US and was questioned by a bored officer i could not understand one of his questions, no matter how hard i tried. i asked him 3 times to repeat his question, and got so embarrassed that in the end i just answered "yes". but what he then said i did understand; "to this question you should have answered NO!" however, i still do not know what the hell he asked me!!

(i know i told this story already a million times, by now having i written down here, i will stop telling it... :) )

Mirror portrait

this was a complicated one. i saw this mirror in a very fancy shop, and wanted to picture tim reflected in the mirror. so i directed him to stand in the bushes while i was on the other side of the glass building taking the pic. then tim saw that from his side i was reflected together with the american flag (from the harbor or so). a much better one! thus then i had to stand in the bushes, while tim was posing on the other side... ah well...

Self portrait (2)

staying with the self portraits here... ah yes, am i lazy! (sorry! i will come up with something more interesting soon, i hope.. :) ) not only are we in the museum, but also in the mirror of the green line....