i am sad to report back and tell you that i have only taken three pictures so far in delft. and one of them is a bad picture. but i will share the other two with you. here they are:
there are tiny waterfowl babies in that basket that the cat is watching closely. on friday i also saw a woman walking an enormous pig.
this has more context. it is oude delft straat. this is also where the mecanoo office is, hiding in a normal building at oude delft 203. check out their work at mecanoo.com.
that night i went to a goodbye party for jean-paul. it is kind of weird to be at a party for the person you are "replacing," but i had a decent time. it was at his girlfriend's student living near oude delft straat. most of the people there weren't from the netherlands (variously: ecuador, russia, belgium, france, india, greece, botswana (though he was dutch)). it was a party pretty much like any other party for people in their mid-20s. the music shifted from j dilla to ghostface killah to jimi hendrix and finally settled on some european techno. everybody sang along and air-guitared to "electric ladyland." the grolsch flowed freely and lots of people were smoking really heavily. "pulp fiction" was on TV with subtitles but it was muted and nobody was watching TV. the meal was mostly seafood-based so i got the same exact probing about my vegetarianism that i usually receive from strangers. wait, seafood isn't meat so why don't you eat that? why are you doing this to yourself? where do you get protein from?
beyond that, people seemed interesting. one of jean-paul's friends (the one from ecuador) he met while working at OMA. this guy was talking about a project he is interested in to create a shipping route up the amazon, over the andes, and down to marta, a deep port on the pacific. manaus in brasil is a huge free-trade zone and currently does tons of business with china. however, goods from manaus have to go down the amazon and through the panama canal to reach the pacific, a trip that takes about 45 days. this proposed solution is to ship the goods as far up the amazon as they can go and then put the containers on semis for the trip over the andes and down to marta where they are repacked and shipped out. this trip would probably take 25 days, mostly because you don't have to wait for all of the traffic coming through the panama canal. in addition to this, there would be funding for a huge biodiversity reserve in the same region called yasuni. there is a lot of oil underground there but this guy proposed selling it off as carbon credits instead of actually harvesting it. they could make 6 billion USD by keeping the oil in the ground. my initial response to this is that while it is great to keep as much crude oil in the ground as possible, this is still a net-zero solution because people buy carbon credits for fossil fuels they've already emitted, as if to "make up" for it. but the same amount of carbon is still in the atmosphere. is there something i am missing?
anyways, i think life at a major public university is the same everywhere. people from lots of backgrounds, casual parties, the same mix of music. there is even a domino's pizza giving out their same medium pizza deal for incoming students that i haven't seen since living in illinois. at night i can hear music pumping from some undisclosed fratboy location. the campus is huge and mostly for technical students. apparently they have the best solar car team in the world and will definitely smoke MIT's team at the race in australia sometime soon. for some reason, that gives me a little bit of happiness.
OK, friday was registration. i should take pictures of the new building (bouwkunde), but that will have to happen later. the international students and exchange students sat through some initial talks by a professor and administrator before being split into small groups to have talks based on our discipline. i went to the architecture one. there, an angry japanese professor with long hair couldn't get the projection system to work because the cabinet was locked. this seemed too familiar to tech experience at MIT. he also kind of reminded me of shun kanda. he quickly went through the masters program and all of the required things, most of which didn't apply to me because i am only here for a semester.
then lunch. then registration where we filled out a form and got a packet allowing us to register online. then a lame tour of the facilities by a younger student named joost who looked like he should be in a hair commercial instead of studying architecture. oh yeah, i figured out why the masters program here exchanges with the bachelors program at MIT. it isn't just about english skills. the bachelors program here is 3 years long whereas at MIT it is four years. so, when first-year masters students exchange with last-year bachelors students, they are in the same year of schooling technically (even though some MIT students don't start architectural studies until their sophomore year).
in addition, i talked to some people about tuition at TUD. like i had suspected, i am getting majorly ripped financially by doing this exchange. generally, MIT costs about $36000 USD for tuition for two semesters. talking with jean-paul and his friends, they mentioned that for them, as dutch citizens, TUD costs about 1800 euro for two semesters. this is about $2600 USD! and amrita, a student studying from new delhi, said that for foreign non-EU students, it is about 8000 euro or about $11500 USD. that is $5750 USD per semester versus the $18000 USD per semester than i am paying. what a rip-off!
after registration i fell asleep until around 7, eliminating any time i could shop for phones, shoes, or a bank. i need to stop falling asleep at odd hours and just get adjusted to living here. it rained for the first time and got chilly as the sun was setting. i went for a walk to see the eastern part of town that i haven't seen before. i crossed a canal where 4 or 5 teenage dudes were drinking and smoking and yelling at people. it wasn't well-lit and one of them passed close to me and for a second i saw my head red on the pavement and what little euro i had stolen, but that didn't happen. i walked on, eventually roping around back to the center area. i passed a bike shop i need to return to. it was close to a well-stocked record store that had just closed at 21:00 as i walked by. some of the restaurants looked tempting to eat in, but i had a wave of anxiety remembering that i didn't even know how to order in a restaurant in dutch. it also felt lame to be eating by myself on a friday night. i didn't have a book with me.
i came back and talked to runja on skype from her classroom, which was exciting. it is funny now that she is using a mac desktop and i am using a windows laptop.
then i fell asleep again for an inexplicably long amount of time. it was only about 1 am when i went to bed but i didn't officially wake up until noon or so. and then, i tossed in my bed in a light sleep until around 5 pm! i just wasted another day! the sleep wasn't even that good, filled with chaotic dreams. when i would roll over and look at my clock and think "jack, you lazy bastard," i was powerless and would sink again, another anxious dream starting as soon as i sunk deep enough. though about 5 is when i would usually wake up on saturday (11 am EST) so maybe i am still not here? it makes no sense.
but, here i am. i think tonight i am going to see the rest of campus including the famous main library building. tomorrow i can't get anything real done because businesses are closed, so i might go to rotterdam for a while to check that out. classes start on monday but i am not sure what time or where (still finding this out).
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