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Month: March 2009
Amsterdam Miscellanea
I wrap up my reports from the Netherlands with some miscellanea. The Netherlands was not tolerant of Catholicism; that’s why they split from what became the Spanish Netherlands, which is now Belgium. That’s why so many former clandestine Catholic churches in Amsterdam (Our Lord in the Attic, Moses and Aaron, Begijnhof Chapel) are now tourist […]
Nijmegen: “Too small to blog about”
A horrible thing to say about a town. But yes, Nijmegen is small: 140,000 people or so. I see from wikipedia that some would lump in Nijmegen in the Randstad, a metropolis that if you squint long enough encompasses the whole of the Netherlands. That strikes me as special pleading: yes, everything is close to […]
A Wilhelmus to the Netherlands
When I was an undergraduate, one of my lecturers was the quite Dutch Tobias Ruighaver. At the conclusion of his course on computer architecture, I stood up with a couple of musicians in the lecture theatre, and gave a stirring rendition of Het Wilhelmus, the Dutch national anthem. I think Tobias was more interested in […]
Fine Dining In Amsterdam
I was not going to leave Amsterdam without crossing off some of the local specialities off my list. Fries was not on my list, but since I didn’t know what I’d get in Brussels, I thought I’d try some here. And a good thing, because the fries in Amsterdam are free to proclaim to the […]
Jottings of Amsterdam, Centraal to Rusland
Here at opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr, we’re all about the heterochronicity. So as I sit in the foyer of Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen, waiting for a taxi to launch me on the path back to Amsterdam… and in the plane over the Western Desert returning to Australia… … I will continue blogging about what I saw when I […]
Some shoutouts
For those of you keeping score, a shout out to my tuthree loyal blog readers, for staying subscribed even though I had not updated in nine months. A shoutout to my friends who have been waiting for a status update on Facebook for about a year, and will have to settle for this instead. A […]
Bruxelles–Brussel–Roosendaal
I am now on the train out of Brussels, and not sure when I’ll get a free internet connection again. The train, rather more packed than the one I came in, is hurtling across the Waloon–Flemish divide, and on its way to Roosendaal in North Flanders, oops, the Netherlands, where I’ll change trains for Nijmegen, […]
Study of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Pie-Eater
Courtesy of David Massart, whose office in Brussels I’m visiting today (with a view out my window of the Greek Embassy, of all things), a couple of shots of me getting stuck into a tarte à citron. The Greek Embassy through mesh: The Greek flag in closeup, through mesh and artificially enhanced. (Or the Shroud […]
Name That Doggerel
In response to comment from Philip Newton, here is a closeup of that house-identifying doggerel. (It was actually next to a cafe, in an awkward vault location): Over to you!
Jottings of Amsterdam: Rusland to Centraal
The title is a reference to McGonagall, and is about as well-informed… If you’re not live-tweeting your photographs into interwebosphere, doing a blog based on your photos three days after the fact is something of a challenge. Let’s just see what I can throw at the wall and make stick. Did I fall in love […]