Second time's a charm: class excursions, pt. 2

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