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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 […]