I didn’t realize how much I had bonded with some people here until I had to say goodbye. Most of them I will probably never see again. Maybe I will have some email correspondence with them. A few people asked me if I had any plans to come back. I told them that I had […]

Major props to Carole Ann for recommending Museum Speelklok (the music box museum) in Utrecht. It was probably the best museum I saw on my trip, and I saw a lot of museums – thanks to the Museumkaart for making this fiscally practical. This place combined (obviously) music (including the Charleston), history, simple machines (most […]

My routine is just starting to feel like a routine, and I have exactly one week left here. I’m starting to stress about the little things I want to do before I leave. One is that I need to find some nice gifts for people here who have been key to me getting situated – […]

As soon as I was feeling not-sick enough to go on another bike adventure, I rode to Dordrecht and then on to an epic national park called de Biesbosch. I first spent an hour or two trying to get Jacques, my French road bike, to shift properly. The problem seemed to be a bent derailleur […]

Often I find myself without plans for the weekend until Saturday morning. It’s a result of starting work in the afternoon and working until about 9pm. I do this in order to have more time to overlap with my colleagues who are mostly in Boston and Providence. As a result, my Saturdays tend to be […]

For the past nine days, I have had a hacking cough that wakes me up at night. The first couple of days, it was terrible, but now it is just annoying. The downside of this, aside from just being sick, is that I have been isolating myself from my newly established daily activities. I have […]

Up until this point, I had been living here mainly as an outsider. My typical day was something like the following. Morning: wake up leisurely around 8:30, make myself breakfast, do some necessary errand such as buying groceries or do something fun like explore the market that happens twice a week in the town center. […]

Update: turns out I made a common mistake in thinking that this was the scene of Vermeer’s View of Delft. The gate in Vermeer’s painting is actually the Rotterdam Gate, which was torn down in 1836. Oops. While Em was here, she provided a quick crash course in Dutch art history that included many field […]