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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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!
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 […]
Life, it is a giddy thing. Yesterday, I was in Amsterdam, where Dutch is spoken. Today, I am in Brussels, where Dutch appears on some shop billboards, and is the third language after Arabic. Yesterday, I was walking down the Zeedijk, where the first language was English. Today, I’m in Chaussée de Mons, where the […]