Pump stations! Water Filtration! Confusing spelling!

April 17
We embarked on another set of excursions to see more water-related things. Turns out, when 25% of a country is below sea level and 2/3s of the country is vulnerable to flooding, a lot of the interesting things in the country are going to be about dealing with water - kind of like that awesome movie Waterworld (with Kevin Costner), where the majority of the world has been flooded.  Maybe it all could have been avoided had Kevin utilized an effective system of dikes and polders...
Our first stop was the Museum de Cruquius, a building that was converted from a pumping station into a museum.  It used to pump the water out of the Haarlemmermeer, the lake that used to occupy Haarlem. After 3 years of pumping, the lake was drained, so the pump essentially worked itself out of a job (really inspiring, yeah?). It was one of the first steam-powered pumping stations, so its kinda historically significant.  Its now a museum, but didn't really have much inside it in terms of informative material - instead, it was just interesting seeing the inside workings of the museum.

At the pumping station, there was some sort of live reenactment going on. It was in dutch, so I didn't have any idea what was happening.  I just
thought it was interesting because that that beer glass he was holding was HUGE.

We left the cruquius musuem and drove to Amsterdamse Duinwater Leiding, a park in Haarlem.  Our professor told us that in order to get drinking water for the Netherlands, water is filtered and then sent to the park.  The park is on top of sand dunes, so letting the water seep through the sand provides further filtration.  The water is then filtered once more and is ready for household use.  The park played a more vital role in the water filtration process in the past, and is now largely used for tradition's sake.  It was really beautiful, and the great weather that day definitely helped.

Also, "de cruquius"? "amsterdamse duinwater"?  Dutch spelling bees must be impossibly hard.

Entirely unrelated song post - now, with twice as many songs!:
Glue was one of the first indie-rap groups that I really got into.  They were made up of maker (the producer), dj dq (a turntablist), and adeem (the rapper).  They made 3 great albums from 2004-2006 and then, to my dismay, split up.  Here's one of their songs offa their Catch as Catch Can album, called Beat Beat Beat. Anyways, I'm bringing this up because Adeem is releasing an album in less than a month, called "The Volume in the Ground".  This song is off of that album.  Its kinda reminiscent of a lot of flobots' music, which is a good thing.  It's called "Meet Death With a Handshake". I'm excited.

Product Placement! Flips and Tricks!

April 15
In keeping with my plan to visit a lot of museums, on Friday I went to the Rijksmuseum with the other Matt (from Calvin). The Rijksmuseum is a dutch art and culture museum with paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and a bunch of other artists. I'm not a huge fan of the Rembrandt paintings that I've seen - the paintings are obviously really good, but I don't find them very exciting. I don't have any pictures of the inside of the museum, because my camera's battery was almost dead (and photography was prohibited).

After the museum, Matt and I went to find a Subway. When not getting lost downtown or toiling away at my studies, I have been watching the tv show Chuck throughout the semester. It is about a computer nerd working a dead-end IT job who, one night, has a bunch of top-secret spy things downloaded into his brain. Its a pretty good show, but apparently didn't have a large enough viewer base to keep going through advertiser support.   Subway ended up taking a large sponsorship role in the show, and so in the later few seasons, there is a LOT of obvious product placement for subway. As such, I have developed a craving for subway over the past couple weeks- luckily there are several Subway restaurants around the city.
I've had better sandwiches, but having one after craving it for weeks is really satisfying.  It was also cool eating "American" food.

Matt and I eating our sandwiches.

That night, I went to a local(well, 40 minute bike ride) gymnastics place to work on flips and stuff to add to my dancing. Much like the amsterdam bboy scene, the trickers/free runners in amsterdam are experienced and talented, and so its a helpful place to learn.  I've practiced before at a gymnastics spot in GR called Aerials and Baranis, which can be a good spot to practice. However, its often overcrowded - there simply isn't enough space there for everyone to do their own thing comfortably. I always feel like I'm about to step on a small child at Aerials, but the dutch spot is huge.

After hanging out and talking to people from the gym for a while, I biked home and got back around 11. 'Twas a good day.

Things I still oughta do while still in europe

The semester is coming to a close - at the point of writing, there are only 6 or 7 weeks left. As a result, I've felt a push to make sure I do a lot of stuff before the end of the semester and do everything I've been planning to do, but have put off. It's kind of like a "bucket list" for the semester, except I just fly back to America at the end, instead of dying.

Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson are welcome to accompany me in any of the listed activities.

Things I want to do before heading back to the states:
-Go to most or all of the major museums in amsterdam - when we arrived into the Netherlands, all of the Calvin students got museum cards which give us access to 28 different museums around Amsterdam. I've visited 3 of those and probably won't be able to make it to the other 24 in the last few weeks, so I am going to need to hone down the list.
-Visit every major park in amsterdam
-Travel to Switzerland, France, and maybe somewhere in the UK.
-Attend another 2 or 3 bboying jams
-Have a cookout somewhere around amsterdam

I'm sure there are other things I'm going to do before leaving, but those are the basics. I'll probably add to this list in the next few weeks.

Entirely unrelated song post:
This song isn't at all new, but still dope. The Glitch Mob is an electronic/glitch-hop band that I got a chance to see live last semester in Grand Rapids. For being an electronic band, a surprisingly large amount of their music is reproduced through live sampling rather than just mixing their tracks like a traditional dj set. They sound sorta like a glitchy version of Ratatat with heavier beats. The song below is a track called "Beyond Monday", which they put up for download on RCRD LBL.

Other amsterdam semester abroad blogs

Because blogging about our semester here is a super cool thing to do (as is using phrases like "super cool"), a few of the other students are blogging as well.  It might be interesting to check them out as well: Nate's blog http://nateinamsterdam.blogspot.com/ or Matt's blog http://canadainamerica.wordpress.com/. Although we do a lot of the same activities, they have different perpectives on those things.  Check em out!

Goya! Secret Gardens! Executive Summaries! (end of Spain trip)

Saturday March 26
The bus ride to Madrid was 6 hours long, leaving Seville at 11pm friday, and arriving in madrid 5am on saturday. It was a cramped and uncomfortably warm ride, resulting in a less-than-restful night. When we arrived into madrid, we crashed at the bus station for a few hours before heading out into the city. The station in Madrid has this odd rule that you can't put your head on the ground, probably to avoid the station from being overrun by miscreants and ne'er-do-wells like us, but we tried to get a couple hours of sleep anyway. A bit later in the morning, we walked through the Parque del Buen Retiro, and saw the historical highlights downtown, one of which was the Royal Palace of Madrid.

Some claim this palace to be the largest inhabited palace in the world, but as I later learned on the definitive wikipedia article on the topic, this title is up for heated debate. The royal family doesn't actually live in the palace, but it is still used for state functions. At the least, it is the largest palace in Europe, which is nothing to wag a finger at. (Just in case you were considering wagging a finger at the Royal Palace of Madrid).

As mentioned in an earlier post, during my trip to Belgium my stuff had been stolen, and later returned to the venue of the event I was attending during that trip. I received my bag back the same Monday that we left for our trip to Spain. This was great, because I had my passport, so I could actually fly, and my wallet was still in my bag (devoid of cash, of course). The weekend that my bag was taken, I canceled my bank cards, and had not yet received new ones by the time we left for Spain, so I had to go to a place that exchange cash for euros. This is a lot more expensive route than withdrawing money from an ATM, so I was trying to make it the rest of the trip without exchanging money again. The rest of the group was trying to keep the trip cheap as well, and so for the most of the trip we eschewed street vendors and restaurants for local grocery stores and street markets. Eating like this worked out great, as we ended up buying a lot of fresh bread, cheese, and produce on the cheap, and checking out the local markets.

Temple de Debod, a rebuilt ancient Egyptian temple in the Northwest of Madrid

One of the last things we checked out was the Museo del Prado, which has a lot of really interesting art, including pieces by Goya and Rembrandt. At this point in the trip, everyone was really exhausted, so we didn't spend too much time in the museum, but still had the chance to view a lot of interesting pieces. Side note: Goya's Black Paintings are pretty crazy, in a dark and creepy sort of way. He painted them on the inside walls of his house. They were meant to be expressive of the panic and hysteria caused by the social unrest at the time, though I feel that if he was stressing out, seeing paintings like "Satan Devouring His Son" while Goya was grabbing his morning coffee probably didn't help much with the stress.

After the museum, we walked to the bus station in order to find a ride to the airport. This station had a feature I haven't seen in any other bus stop: a giant greenhouse area, complete with turtle pond. We watched the turtles for a while, and finally grabbed the bus to the airport, where we would spend our last night in Spain.

Where we stayed saturday night

Final thoughts about the trip:
Seville was my favorite city that we visited. Its a lot smaller than the other two, so I think you get a better feel of a spanish town, whereas larger cities have a less unique feel. Although it didn't have the most to see or do, I think it was the most beautiful of the 3 - it was really enjoyable just walking around the town and looking at the old spanish houses or streets, or hanging out on the terrace on the top of our hostel. It also helped that it was more sunny and warm when we visited than the other two. However, all three

Before I embark on my next journey, I'm definitely going to research where I'm staying more - at the very least, find out if the bus stations or airports are open overnight. Sleeping outside = not fun. Also, I need to find out where the tourist stations are beforehand. Strangely enough, we had trouble finding them in every city we visited; you'd think that they would be really easy to find.

This was a really exhausting trip, but also a really great one. Its definitely one of the highlights of my semester so far.

Yet another Cathedral! Impossibly clever pop culture references!

Friday, March 25
Thursday, we had checked spent a lot of time checking out Seville and seeing most of the popular destinations, so on Friday we explored at a more relaxed pace.  One building we hadn't looked at yet was the Seville Cathedral, so we walked around inside for a while.  Fun facts: the cathedral was built on top of an old mosque, is the largest gothic cathedral in the world, and is the alleged burial site of Christopher Columbus. Later in the day we explored Triana, a neighborhood on the west side of the city-dividing Guadalquivir river.

The bridge connecting Triana and the Rest of Seville

The previous day, the tour guide had mentioned how there is some beef against Triana and the rest of Seville - apparently, Triana would rather be its own city than part of Seville. Luckily, we were able to avoid any Shark vs. Jet crossfire as we traversed the city, though a spontaneous musical number by a street gang would have been much appreciated.

Insanely impressive parallel parking skills

Because of the aforementioned construction at the hostel, friday night they offered a free barbecue dinner.  Our bus was leaving for madrid at 11pm, so we at the barbecue and hung out again on the hostel's rooftop terrace for a few hours.  As a whole, the day wasn't jam-packed with different museums or monuments, but it was still really good.

Entirely unrelated song post:
My roommate introduced this song to me a while back, and I've listened to it quite a few times.  Its a remix of Nancy Sinatra's song Bang Bang (click the link for the video of the original song).  The original is actually quite good in itself.  Anyways, Bare's remix is very different from the original, but also very good.   You can download the remix here.
Bare - Shot Me Down (FREE 320k DOWNLOAD) by Dieselboy

Seville! Free walking tours! Budget airlines!

Thursday, March 24

Seville was the second out of the three cities we would be visiting on our trip. Early thursday morning, we took an early-morning taxi from the hostel to the airport, and then a plane to seville. Because of the great deal that we grabbed on our flights, the taxi ride ended up being more expensive than our flight. That's pretty crazy - I doubt anything like that would be possible in the us. With the budget airlines, I also expected the quality to be really bad, but they are quite similar to typical plane rides in the states.

We hadn't done too much planning before hand about what we were going to done once in Seville, so our first goal was to find a tourist center somewhere in the city. The tourist center was pretty well hidden in the city, but we finally stumbled upon it, and received a map and recommendations on what to visit.

Downtown in the historic area of Seville

Inside the Alcazar

That afternoon, we visited the Alcazar, the royal palace. The Alcazar began as a fort, but was eventually converted into a palace, with subsequent rulers adding their own attachments to the building. As a result, the palace and royal gardens are huge and complex, and really interesting to walk around in. We didn't stay too long in the palace, however, because wanted to catch the daily free 3-hour walking tour. This was my first time participating in a free walking tour. According to our tour guide, there is some restriction in sevillian law about giving tours without getting certified, but they no longer offer certifications as a means of keeping tour guide competition down. As a work-around, the tours are offered for "free", and you are strongly encouraged to tip at the end of your tour. This has the benefit of motivating the tour guides (if you give a dull or uneducational tour, you will probably receive less tips), and the method seems to work well - our tour guide was very interesting and knowledgable.

Our tour took us all around Seville, and we saw a ton of the city, including the Plaza de Espana and the bullfighting ring. The guide explained that many people today are opposed to bull fighting because it is really inhumane to the bulls. The bull is killed at the end of every match, and they injure the bull several times before hand so that it is weakened and starts to bleed out. NOT COOL, BULLFIGHTERS.

The Plaza de Espana

We were pretty exhausted after our day of touristing around seville, so that night we just chilled at the hostel. The 2 days that we were there, the hostel was undergoing construction, so to make up for the noise and the lack of a lounge, they served free homemade sangria. 'Twas delicious, and quite a bit better than the cheap jug we bought in Barcelona. Hanging out on the terrace was one of the high points of the day.

Entirely unrelated song post:
I'm a fan of a lot of stuff by DJ Shadow, a really well known producer and a major developer in the whole trip-hop/experimental hip-hop scene. He recently released a remix album for free download on his website, and while I don't like all of the songs on there, some of them are quite good, including this one by Ruby My Dear.
Building steam with a grain of salt by Ruby My Dear

Barcelona! Multiple sunsets! Mosaic overdose!

Wednesday March 23
Wednesday was our second day in Barcelona. We woke up around 9am, refreshed and happy that we had beds to sleep on - a decided improvement over the outside of the Eindhoven airport.
The hostel offered breakfast for free, so we took them up on their offer, and grabbed a bunch of rolls and pears for later snackage.

The walk up El Carmel hill, on our way to Park Guell.

Our first sight of the day was El Carmel hill, an area overlooking much of barcelona, conveniently with escalators on half of the way up. A short walk away from the hill was the main area of Park Guell, a park built by Antoni Gaudi in the early 20th century. This park is famous for its mosaic art, which covers the entire plaza. "Giant mosaic art plaza" can be filed under things that Grand Rapids needs to have. Get on it, rick snyder.

Sagrada Familia

The next stop on our journey was another project of Gaudi - the Sagrada Familia, a huge basilica in the downtown of Barcelona which has been a work in progress for the past 100 years. We didn't feel like paying the entry fee, so we just walked around the building and took pictures for a few minutes.


Taking a break from famous architectural masterpieces, we grabbed cold cuts and baguettes at a supermarket for lunch and dinner, and walked down to the beach to picnic for a while. While eating, we were approached a few times by people trying to sell us stuff - one person trying to sell us coconuts, and another trying to sell asian massages. To the dismay of the vendors, I wasn't in the mood for coconut or sketchy massage offers. Later, we visited la rambla again, and stopped by La Boqueria (a large street market) to grab some more food for dinner and breakfast the next day.

Walking back to our hostel, we had the idea that it would be a cool idea to have on dinner on Monjuic, a large hill overlooking the city, as the sun set over Barcelona. Because Barcelona's such a large city, we had to race up the mountain to make it up in time. A cool side effect of our race against the sunset was that we would see the sun set over one cool vista, then head up the mountain a bit further and see it set again. We finally reached the top, and had sandwiches and a jug of bad sangria. It was a great way to end a day packed with awesomeness.

Spain! Traveling, homeless style! Tapas!

Although the VU doesn't have a spring break, they do have a week set aside for exams, and since I only had 2 exams, I essentially had a week off after my Quantum Computing midterm on Monday afternoon. In order to properly take advantage of this free time, about half of the students in the calvin exchange program decided to travel to spain for several days (leaving on monday night and returning on sunday morning). We spent the first 2 days in Barcelona, the second 2 in Seville, and one final day in Madrid.

In brief: Spain is pretty cool.

Less briefly, it was too cool at times (I had to wear a jacket for several of the days, when I expected a tropical climate). Also, pretty (the cities we visited kinda put Amsterdam to shame in terms of that classic European beautiful town look).

If you would like a more in-depth review of my time in spain, I'm going to be breaking up my journaling over several posts.

Monday March 21st, 2011 - Eindhoven, Amsterdam

Our trip began around 11 at night, as we took the train to the Eindhoven airport (Eindhoven is a city a couple hours south of Amsterdam). Although Amsterdam has an airport, the budget airline that we were flying on only touches down in a limited number of cities, so our plan for the first night was to stay in either the Eindhoven airport or the train station for the night, and fly out early the next morning to Barcelona.

Walking the streets of Eindhoven

When we arrived in Eindhoven, we learned from several taxi drivers at the station that both the airport and the train station are closed during the night. Madness! With no place to stay, and nothing to do until our flight the next morning, we decided to walk the 2 hours across town to the airport. Once we arrived, it was a bit too cold to sleep on the benches outside, so we walked around the airport until 5, when the airport finally opened.

To those looking for a nice place to visit in the Netherlands: i would not recommend Eindhoven, unless you are a fan of industrial parks. We walked around Eindhoven looking for a late night cafe or something where we could hang out for a while, but saw nothing at all. It was a rough start to our trip, but entertaining in its strangeness.

Tuesday, March 22 - Barcelona

A shot of our hostel room.

In the morning we left from the Eindhoven airport to Girona, spain, and took the bus from there to Barcelona. Once we arrived in Barcelona, we found the hostel where we would be sleeping for the next couple of days. The website describes the hostel as a "cuckoo that’s muscled into the very plushest of nests", "in the best location ever dreamed for a hostel". While I don't know if the hostel is ritzy enough to be deserving of bird comparisons, I was surprised at the quality of the hostel - i hadn't previously stayed in a hostel, and pictured a ratty 1950's era government building with 40 people to a room. Instead, it proved to be quite nice - everything was clean and well-kept. The room that we slept in was on the corner of the top/6th floor of the building, looking out over one of the main streets. It could hold 10 people, but because we were visiting in the middle of the week, there were several vacancies, and we had the room to ourselves.

View through the Arc de triomf

After leaving our bags at the hostel, we left to go grab some lunch, and ended up eating tapas. Although there are tapas bars in the us, tapas originates in spain, and is a really important element of the spanish diet. I ate tortillas (egg-casserole type of thing) and a bomba - fried potato ball. It was okay, but the bar where we consumed said tapas was rather divey.

Following lunch, we wandered around barcelona for several hours, saw the port, and walked up la rambla, a main touristy street in the center of town, largely populated by street vendors and performers.

Above: Tortillas and bombas. Below: delicious paella. Both were delicious.

Entirely unrelated song post:
Another super cool dubstep song, by Skream and Example.  Plus, its up for free download on soundcloud!  BI-WINNING.

Shot Yourself In The Foot Again - Radio Edit by Ministry of Sound