June 2026 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Subscribe to Blog via Email
Join 296 other subscribers-
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- Wlodzimierz Kuczynski on Vamvakaris: The flood
- opoudjis on Which Indian states are well known in other countries?
- Test Test on Which Indian states are well known in other countries?
- opoudjis on Karamanlis and their food
- Stazybo Horn on Karamanlis and their food
Archives
- July 2023
- June 2023
- May 2023
- February 2023
- June 2022
- November 2021
- October 2021
- March 2019
- February 2019
- November 2017
- October 2017
- September 2017
- August 2017
- July 2017
- June 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- September 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- June 2016
- May 2016
- April 2016
- March 2016
- February 2016
- January 2016
- December 2015
- November 2015
- September 2015
- February 2011
- January 2011
- November 2010
- July 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- July 2008
- June 2008
- November 2006
- October 2006
Categories
Meta
Category: Countries
Montreal I: Never again poutine
It’s almost 10 am of a Sunday morning, and I have asphalt to pound exploring Second City. (Unless Toronto is the Second City. I don’t know these things well.) So in brief: I tried staying up till 4 am in Melbourne, so I could sleep peacably on the plane to Montreal. The staying up bit […]
Canadie la belle
I’ve been sidelined the past two weeks by Lerna, the e-Framework, and seasonal malaise that may or may not be porcine-related. Not necessarily in that order. So even if I had much to say on this blog, I wasn’t really going to get around to it. I have noted with some concern the dearth of […]
Animadversions on the Dutch and the Greek National Anthems
George asks me in comments whether the Greek suburb of Oakleigh put on any kind of a big deal for Greek Independence Day, on the 25th—or whether moving to a Greek suburb was all in vain. Well like I said, the point of moving to Oakleigh wasn’t that it was Greek, but that it was […]
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 […]
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 […]