Delft to Paris

The last few days of my trip have been pretty hectic. Very little of what I planned to do happened.

My time in Amsterdam was good though. I visited the Anne Frank house and also the Van Gogh museum. I decided to skip out on Riksmuseum because despite being able to catch Rembrant´s Nightwatch, 2/3s of the library was closed and they still charged full admission. The only thing I didn´t really get to see was the red light zone while it was busy. I did catch it in the early morning (6-7am) but there were only two whores about. I saw a few more in a brothel that was isolated from the rest of the zone though. While I fully expected whores, porno theatres and the like, I was still surprised to see various advertisements with explicit photos.

I sat down for a beer and lunch with a large group of random dutchies. Really nice people but I think I was intruding a bit more than usual as these were a bunch of nursing/psychology students that were having spending some time with their mentors and celebrating a classmate´s birthday. They were still really nice and fun... one bought me a beer and I had a pretty indepth conversation with another guy - I can´t recall his name right now but I have his email and will contact him later and thank all of them for their hospitality.

Later in the evening, I talked to Rose and bolted to Delft, which is an hour south of Amsterdam. On the way, I met this Norwegian exchange student who was studying event management. She was quite nice and I found out she actually does some DJíng on the side by the stage name of Aglais. I´ll have to check out some of her stuff in the future.

Delft hosts the most impressive university campus I´ve seen from a "Oh my god, look at that gargantuan building" kinda way. The best way I could describe this one engineering building (before photos) is if you took all the buildings on the UBC campus and put them all into one, 10 story building. Rose´s residence was also ridiculously impressive... it looked like it belonged more on the yaletown waterfront than as a student residence. The architecture was tres chic with the grey oval building overhanging a large canal. She also lucked out and got the top floor with an amazing view of the sunset. Of course, still being a residence, it was falling quickly into disrepair.

The party at Rose´s for her b-day was a lot of fun. About half of the attendees were Iranian so it was nice to see how that culture celebrates. I also had some good laughs with some dutchies - they were going to be heading to China in a few months so they were exploiting some of my experiences. What I probably enjoyed most about the evening was how friendly and open everyone was. It was too bad that at house parties, dancing rarely happens but Rose, myself and a couple others put in a valiant effort.

I didn´t get much sleep that night and I had to get up at 6:30 to get ready to catch an 8am train to Brussels. The plan was to arrive around 10am, run around, eat some moules et frites, down some belgian beer and chocolates and hop on a train to Paris by about 3pm. Now, I really should´ve made a point to understand how the labelling for trains worked but I didn´t so instead of being in Brussels by 10am, I ended up in Eindhoven before realizing I was heading in the wrong direction. If you look at a map and look for Delft, Brussels and Eindhoven, you´ll get a sense for how far out of my way I was getting. Luckily, I was able to get myself to Brussels to catch my reserved Paris train otherwise I would´ve been really fucked. At least along the way to Paris, I talked to this pretty interesting American businessman who owns his own agriculture consulting business. I tried to get an insider´s view on the corn-ethanol fiasco.

In Paris, my day of a comedy of errors continued: I tried to book a reservation on the night train for the next day but it was completely booked. I had to settle for that night´s train to Barcelona which only gave me like 3-4 hours in Paris. I walked through some of the streets, technically saw Notre Dame and la tour Eiffel and sat down for an unimpressive french meal. While I did get some fresh oyesters and a really refreshing ice cream sorbet thing, the main course was pretty disapointing. Some cream over bland fish and bitter veggies. At least the mushrooms were good in it. I got a complemetary post card that I might send off to one of you lucky readers.

Alright, I think that´s enough for one post. I´ll talk about the train to Barcelona and the city itself next time. A little preview: la sagrada familia is fucking awesome with an emphasis on awe. And photos will still come at some point... maybe when I have more patience with laptops or get to a desktop... or at least a mouse.