March 19, 2011
On Saturday, we left for our second set of excursions (the first being our trip to look at piles of mud), to check out several different cities, one of which was Almere.
Almere's grass rooftops
Unlike many other areas throughout the Netherlands and the rest of Europe, Almere is a really new city - established in the 70's due to population expansion in Amsterdam. Almere's modernity really shows - the city planning and buildings are all done in a really interesting fashion. It doesn't have a typical downtown vibe - you don't see many 90 degree angles or classic concrete-and-glass office buildings, at least in the center of town. Another really cool aspect was the grass roofs (rooves?) - check out the photo to get a feel for it.
Another cool shot of almere's downtown.
It seems like an area where neighbors could come and hang out after work, or possibly grill out or something. Following Almere, we jumped into the van and drove to Batavia, an outlet mall in Lelystad. I found this entertaining in that it didn't seem the most educational of places to visit. As it turns out, there was a museum at the back end of the outlet mall that focused on ancient Dutch life. In front of the museum was a giant head statue, seemingly without context. Crazy dutch people.
The third, and last, place that we visited for the day was the town of Urk, a small fishing town on the east side of the giant Ijsselmeer lake in the middle of the Netherlands. The town was really beautiful, and also really quiet. I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a peaceful retirement, or possibly a place to lay low in the face of a manhunt. For lunch I had a shawarma sandwich for the first time. It was okay - I think I prefer Infected Mushroom's similarly named album to the food it is named after. Before leaving Urk, we visited their local museum. There wasn't much of note in the museum, aside from a strange choice by the curators to place mannikins in each room. This was presumably to add personality to the museum, and I guess it worked, in a really creepy sort of way. I kept being startled when I walked into a room, and saw one of them quietly sitting in the corner…watching me.
Yup. Until next time.
Entirely unrelated song post:
A site that I've been checking out pretty frequently in the past couple weeks is Salacious Sound, an electronic music blog. While perusing their website, I stumbled upon this cool house-y remix of a song by two door cinema club. I think its pretty cool. Two Door Cinema Club - What You Know (Young Empires Remix) by rafalmichalfilip
In my previous post I mentioned my plan to travel to Antwerp for the Raw Circles bboy jam. The weekend of the jam arrived, and I woke up early saturday morning, took the 30 minute or so bike ride to central station, and then grabbed the train down to Antwerp.
Upon arriving in antwerp's
central station, I was immediately impressed - the Antwerp train station is pretty grandiose, especially for not being that big of a town. I arrived around 10 am, and walked around town.
Antwerp is a pretty touristy town (as many European towns are), but was still quite nice (as many European towns also are), and an enjoyable change of pace from Amsterdam. After noon, the town started getting more lively, and I fulfilled one of my goals for this trip - consuming belgian waffles. I wanted to see if belgian waffles from belgium were better than the ihop variety.
The waffles were really good - I don't think they were decidedly better than a typical waffle, but the flavor was slightly tweaked. Definitely a worthwhile experience.
After the waffle, I checked
out a few other touristy areas around the city,
including Het Steen
("the stone") - the local castle, and a cathedral. It seems as if every european city has a least one centuries old and incredibly ornate cathedral. I walked around for a few more hours, and finally took the tram over to the event venue.
The jam was dope! There were many cyphers (circles where dancers take turns freestyling) and 2 circles set aside for the preliminary battles. The main event was the top 16 bracket of the jam, where dancers from all around the world competed for a cash prize. It was really fun to watch.
One of the best battles of the night was Morris and Gravity vs. Knuckleheads Cali. All 4 of the dancers are highly respected dancers from the states. The energy was through the roof during this battle.
Shortly before 9pm, I started getting ready to leave, so that I could catch the last train at 10 back to Amsterdam. I had been sitting in the crowd, so I walked over to grab my bag. This proved difficult, as my bag was nowhere to be found. I frantically looked around, asked the emcee make an announcement, and had the groups of people sitting near the last known location of my backpack stand up, to no avail. Even after the event ended and the venue cleared out, I could not find my bag - it had disappeared.
What worried me was not the loss of my mildly tattered nike backpack, but the loss of the bag's content - in the backpack was my passport, wallet, ipod, money, and train ticket. I looked around until about 10:30, and then headed over to Antwerp's central station, really disheartened and worried about what I would do. My plan was to chill at the train station overnight, and see if the person working the ticket counter would let me take the train back to amsterdam in the morning after hearing my sob story (it wasn't exactly an air-tight plan, but it was the best I could come up with). Since I evidently was lacking a great idea about what to do, I called a friend in amsterdam asking for advice.
In a good samaritan-esque show of kindness, that friend reserved a room for me for the night and took the train down the next morning to pick me up. I was amazed at that - I didn't have any other recourse, and I was helped out tremendously. I made it back to amsterdam okay, but was still left without my wallet or passport or anything. Later that week, I got an email from the managers of the venue saying they had found my bag, and would be able to ship it to me. I eventually got the back bag, with only my ipod and the cash missing. Happy ending! (more or less)
Entirely unrelated song post: Producer Tor mashed up Sufjan Stevens' "Star of Wonder" with Aesop Rock's "None Shall Pass".
Both are good songs on their own, and the product of the two turns out great.
March 12, 2011 Dancing in the Netherlands
Most people know me know that I lead a secret double life as a dancer. (the secret is now out).
More specifically, I do bboying, commonly known as breakdancing - if you are not aware what breakdancing is, picture any street dance/breakdance movie you have seen. IT IS EXACTLY LIKE THAT, except for the movies' emphasis on choreographed routines over freestyling, the apparent conflict between ballet and street dancing, the need to either be a minority or a white kid from a broken home, the community centers that can only be saved by winning the local competition, the vandalism and trespassing always performed by the street dancer at some point in the movie, and the evil crew that has just stolen their best moves, only to be beaten in the end. Aside from those few differences, the movies pretty much have it right. In Michigan I am a member of the Grand Rapids Crew 61syx technique, and regularly practice and compete in the michigan area. It's lots'o'fun.
Since I've been in Amsterdam, I've gotten the the chance to practice 3 or 4 times a week with dutch bboys. This has been a great way to meet dutch people (real dutch people!), continue practicing, and check out a lot of the city - the location for practice is different for each day of the week, so I bike all over en route to the spots. The scene here is a lot bigger than in Grand Rapids, and most of the dancers here have at least a few years of dancing, whereas many of the dancers in Grand Rapids are just starting - the GR scene is growing really quickly. The upside to the large amount of experienced dancers here is that the knowledge base is a lot larger, which makes it much easier to learn new moves.
One of the top items on my study abroad list was go to a few local competitions, so when a friend told me about Raw Circles, a 2v2 competition going on in Antwerp, Belgium, I jumped on the opportunity. My plan was to travel to Antwerp early in the morning, be a tourist around Antwerp during the morning and early afternoon, then go to the jam for the rest of the afternoon and the evening, and catch the last train back to Amsterdam that night.
This was the plan, and it mostly worked out. Next post is going to be more about my trip, and the crazy turns it took. Cliffhangers!
Entirely unrelated song post: Indie rapper Slug of Atmosphere, performing over some acoustic guitar. It seems pretty divergent from his normal style, but I really like it.
Sadly, my time here does not solely consist of biking around at midnight without any idea of where I am - occasionally I also have class and other school related things. One of those school related things is class excursions on some of the weekends: the group of students from Calvin are led by our professor on educational(ish) trips around the netherlands. This excursion consisted of a 2-day driving tour around different cities, focusing mainly on different mud flats, terps, polders, and peat bogs (the interview in the previous post was about this trip).
photo above: mud flats. about as interesting as it gets.
For the uneducated masses: mud flats are long expanses of mud, terps are raised dirt mounds, and polders are areas of land that are encompassed by dikes.
Throughout the 2 days, we drove around Friesland (in the north of the Netherlands), looking at different examples of these dutch landscape features, occasionally punctuated by a windmill or two.
One of the more engaging parts of this excursion was that we got to check out a windmill museum, with a working windmill that was powering an Archimedean screw - essentially a method of pumping water upwards. Its pretty ingenious.
on the left: the windmills at the windmill museum.
If you couldn't pick up from the title, the picture on the left (your right if you are looking at your screen from the other side) is of my trusty bicycle. The vast majority of bikes here are older bikes that have seen a lot of use; I don't know how many other owners this bike has had. Its actually really interesting that although bike use is a lot higher here than in the states, the bikes are also a lot lower quality. I don't really know why that is - maybe people view bikes as less of a luxury and more as a 'work horse'. Also, if you have a nice looking bike, its more likely to get stolen, which is a very real concern.
My bike needs a name. I am thinking "Cycle of majesty", "Mechanical horse of greatness" or possibly "Tiger blood". Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
On Wednesday, instead of our exchange program class, the Calvin group visited the Aalsmeer flower market. Apparently, the Netherlands boasts the largest flower market in the world. Flowers are shipped in and out of the auction facility from all over the world. In order to provide for such large-scale flower shipping, the actual building where the flowers are kept is huge - much larger than a meijer or walmart, for example.
In the center of the complex is a room where flower brokers can buy sets of flowers.
The entire system seems to be really efficient - the flowers are quickly moved around the building
on sets of rails built into the floor, and all of the flowers are sold by 11 in the morning.
This was an old town that struck me as a Dutch version of Jamestown or Williamsburg. 'Twas fully equipped with cheese, windmills, and wooden shoes - a classic Dutch experience. It was really interesting to see some of the windmills in action - through a series of gears, they were harnessing the wind power and grinding different materials into pigment for painting. The tour guide informed us that some artists actually still use this pigment today, which is pretty cool.
Wooden shoes (clogs)-Pretty amazingly ornate. They're no uggs, but still pretty cool.
Hello! Thank you for reading. As mentioned in the previous post, I've started this blog a tad late into the trip, so I figured I'd fill in about the basics of my trip.
Where i'm living:
A giant apartment complex, several blocks from the university. It came with a television, mini-fridge, and a few items of furniture (luckily including a bed).
Transportation:
Everyone owns a bike, and the majority of the time, if you need to get anywhere (except for very large distances), you bike there. Otherwise, people take some form of public transit, such as the tram or bus. The cars you do see are usually a fraction of the length of cars in the US.
On the right side of the picture is a multi-floor parking garage for bikes, right outside of central station.
The University:
I am actually attending 2 different schools right now: the VU (Vrije Universiteit, or Free University), and the University of Amsterdam. The VU is about a 10 minute bike ride from where I live, and UvA is about a 30 minute bike ride away. I'm taking a few different Comp. Sci. classes, and a class taught by a prof from calvin about the Netherlands history and culture.
Both of the schools are really interesting and modern-looking.
central station, I was immediately impressed - the Antwerp train station is pretty grandiose, especially for not being that big of a town. I arrived around 10 am, and walked around town.
