the end for real sort of

well. the last time i wrote i was walking on water and now my studio is over and i am fitting everything into my suitcase.

so, my time now in holland is at an end. i am really going to miss it here, both the lifestyle and all of the cool people i've met from all over the world. it is a typical exchange experience to feel like you don't have enough time to develop friendships with the people you meet, i think. when i sit down in america and think about it i will be quite sad actually. but, again, it doesn't feel like i am saying good bye forever. beyond tools like facebook, there is a strong chance i will find myself seeing some of these people again, either in america or in their respective home nations or back here in holland. i've talked with numerous people about coming back to work at one of the many important offices in rotterdam. a few other people are serious about coming to america so i hope they will visit me. another cool thing about exchange at such an international school is that now i have global contacts and people i know in portugal, barcelona, berlin, london, greece, milan, latvia, bangalore, hong kong, shanghai, brisbane, melbourne, and LA. that is a nice feeling. the world is a small, good place.

my studio finished and i am super excited about that. the end result (which probably won't be posted here but may be available shortly elsewhere) is ok but unstable and frustrating and immature as an entire studio. there were strong organizational issues with the teachers and no given situation for us to respond to. most studios are organized around problems: design a building for this, propose a new urban plan for this area, whatever. here it was just sort of a blank expanse: do some research and come up with an idea, especially when the topic is as abstract and philosophical as it was. i think my part is OK and, with some work, could stand as an ok project. in the end it was mostly me and another student trying to coordinate everything together but it turned out alright. i spoke a bit with winy about it and he is aware. he will be at MIT soon so maybe we will talk there. i never quite realized how MIT even as a name is such a global fetish. anytime i would drop that i go to school there, people are frequently suddenly impressed. its reputation is pervasive mostly for its technical and media lab work but i guess people assume it continues over to architecture even though the undergraduate program is tiny and rocky. the problems with the studio are also another reason why this blog has been more travel-oriented than academic. i think for most people that is ok because nobody likes shop talk, especially in blog form.

well, what did i do in my last few weeks? mostly stayed in delft like a slob. in the past two weeks i did some work. i actually stayed up all night on wednesday which made me feel kind of good that i was actually working. anyway, i finished two 8-10 page papers for the two lecture courses i was in. i rode my bike around ypenburg, an area north of delft that is a dutch new town development for the hague. MVRDV has some houses there and everything sits on canals. there will be pictures on flickr or facebook sometime. it was a nice sunday afternoon ride. yesterday i had my final review and ate dinner with jean paul and hannes, the two TUD students who went to MIT in my place. both of them are super cool dudes who i would love to hang out with more. it is funny because we know the same people and places now (we spent a lot of our time joking about MIT and talking about cambridge) but we don't really know each other! then there was a great party here with everybody from the two Msc2 studios at the why factory. very good party, if i am able to say so myself. it was a good way to say good bye without being emotional.

then today i went to amsterdam for the last time and walked around a new area of the city, mostly the east docklands that is a huge west 8-masterplanned housing area. there are the really stylish and now well-known dock houses (pictures to come) by MVRDV and others like EMBT. i am glad i got to see them. i also went inside the new amsterdam public library which is super nice as a place to hang out. it was a nice mix of louis kahn-type wood and brick work with some dutch interiors inside. i also saw the renzo piano nemo museum, a building i didn't know existed until this morning. then i was walking and saw the steven holl addition to an office building along the mauritskade, a green block with thin windows cut out in unexpected places and wrapped with a mesh. pictures would explain more. walking back towards the damrak i unexpectedly discovered aldo van eyck's orphanage, a building that jan wampler worships. it was just ok. i became unexpectedly emotional walking back to the station and through these small streets with snow falling. it was beautiful in a way that i hadn't seen very much here. i will miss that.

but then there is also the future: my last semester at MIT and moving forward with my life. i am excited to return to the treehome and have a big nice kitchen and my friends and cat. my classes this spring will be interesting and hopefully not as stressful as before. playing music will be good. and then i can probably graduate and do adult things and act like i have a position of authority on a topic because i have a degree in it. ok, this will also probably be the last post on this blog too because i will be back home and its purpose will have been fulfilled. i am fine with that. see you all soon in the real world.

it is that time of the year

when the canals freeze over and become walkable.

snow storm

while the east coast of america was being buried under snow, holland also experienced a huge snow storm. according to my roommate, it is the most snow the west part of the country has seen in over 20 years. i think in delft we received about 30 cm or 12 inches of snow. this paralyzed the city for about two days where travel by foot was the main form of travel until enough salt was thrown and the city's overwhelmed snowplow brigade could work it out.

the storm also froze travel all over the continent. planes didn't fly from schiphol, and for the past three days very few NS trains ran across the country. the problem for the trains relates to the switching mechanisms. around freezing temperatures, these devices are heated electrically to ensure they keep working and don't freeze. but the heaters are rarely used and so many do not work. then when it snows and the switch heaters are needed, many do not work and thus stopping train travel throughout the country. it took my friend 6.5 hours to get from almelo (north of amersfoort) to delft, a journey that usually takes 2 hours.

snow in america also ruined runja's original itinerary to visit me here. her flight to DC was canceled so she was unable to catch her plane here. after a long time on the phone, she was able to reschedule her ticket for later and leaving from dallas. this means she got to spend some time in denton this week! i am jealous about that. she'll arrive on christmas morning and will stay later until january 6. i am excited about the places we'll go visit and all the good food and art we'll be making too. yes!

ok here are some pictures of the snow. nothing epic. if you'd like to see some cool stuff, look up pictures of the mecanoo TUD library during the winter. it has a sloped roof and when it snows students use it as a sledding opportunity (it is the biggest hill in delft, after all).


extra security guards were assigned to my apartment during the storm


mijn straat met sneeuw


how do ducks get around? they waddle on the ice! and now since the canals are beginning to freeze, they all gather in the wider areas that aren't frozen yet and quack loudly.




it stopped snowing/sleeting and the sky turned this uneasy orange cream color as the sun set in the west. both pretty and unsettling.

first snow in delft

ting ting a ting goes the cymbal

time is rolling downhill over here in holland. i blink my eyes and already it is december 10. i went to berlin 2 weeks ago, a fact that is hard to swallow. i have been busy with school work because we have a lot to do in studio and there is reading to be done for my other class. it is annoying to have a school term that bridges the christmas break into january. all of the joyful momentum of the christmas break is simmered with the realization that you have 3-4 more weeks of school after trying to enjoy your holiday time.

this past saturday was sinterklaas with sinterklaas and his zwarte piet, the comical black men who help him deliver presents to the young ones of holland. there are a lot of funny things about the story so i encourage you to find it on google or something instead of hearing my incomplete version of it. but i wanted to do something fun so i hosted SINTERKLAASHUISFEESTNACHT and invited friends over for some potluck, drinks, and eventually attempts at collage art. the mess is visible in the photo below. i like house parties like this where everybody can talk with everybody else and the atmosphere is relaxed and comfortable. it made me think of the parties at the tree home that i have missed by being away.



tonight i watched "waltz with bashir" with my cinema class. it is beautifully animated but hideous in plot. it was even stronger because i had no idea about the war events depicted in the film, nothing about the war between israel and lebanon. wow. then i went to rotterdam to hear the stoner drone machine band called brightblack morning light play in a bar there. they are from california sort of and make some hazed out pentatonic drone sounds, with heavy fender rhodes basslines, two drummers, reverb-soaked vocals, and pedals (even harmonium at one point). this set seemed particularly free compared to the restrained versions on their records. nice enough.

now i am packing and preparing because i'm going to barcelona tomorrow until tuesday morning. it will be nice to explore that gorgeous city and even better to see the song again. it hasn't been that cold here but the lack of sunlight is the killer part. it should be yet another adventure. i will report back about the city next week. then i am working to finish things before my very special guest arrives for the christmas holiday. tot ziens, y'all.

if you give a swan a croissant, he'll ask you for a glass of milk...

diagoon housing by herman hertzberger

this is the diagoon housing project by herman hertzberger, built in delft in 1971. one of my peers at MIT studied it as a precedent in a studio last spring. i was looking up hertzberger's work in the netherlands and discovered that this project, a small single building for 8 or so families, is very close to me. it is tucked into a dense pack of suburban developments southwest of the center, right near the delft zuid train station off the kruithuisweg. you approach this through a maze of houses with cars in front, gardens in various states of disarray, cats on the prowl, and two kids climbing trees on a sunday afternoon that is cold enough to bite your ears when you ride quickly through it without a hat. the building faces west towards a square of land long overgrown with trees but still with paths cut through. dutch ideas of gardens are always messy and overgrown, a bit ragged as if you have been on vacation for months. i was late for something so i only had a chance to observe quickly and then continue. it always makes me nervous to start architecturally undressing a building with people inside looking out at me. i could only take one picture without feeling awkward because somebody in a white shirt was in the second-floor kitchen. hertzberger built some cool stuff with plain CMUs and modernist detailing. the cool thing about this project was its supposed interior flexibility and split-level floor stacking. it seemed nice from the outside, like a little commune set among the banality of suburbia. really, though, you couldn't tell it was much different from the surrounding blocks except that this one looked particularly austere and plain. the flickr photos of this place make it seem very clean cut and maintained, whereas in my picture it sits beyond a bulging hedge and empty tree. i almost like this more, as an image of a work that is lived in, inhabited, and has its own life. its domestic scale and simplicity give it a humble reading i admire, as if to say "i can't change much about the rest of the built environment, but i can provide a worthwhile place to make a home."

i had a discussion recently with another architecture student at the halloween party at the nieuwelaan house, the one where i was dressed as the great state of texas and encouraged people to write their stereotypes of the state on its foiled shape that hung over my shoulders. he is fed up with starchitecture and the lack of concern for details or at least architecture as something other than image or brand. he asked me who my favorite firms were in america who were unknown here but doing solid, well-designed, respectable work. i could only name a handful, embarrassingly (i did mention the name lake/flato because i like them a lot). but it made me think about how much work there is out there for architects and how even the smallest projects can be so satisfying. projects that have clean lines and are enjoyable places to live are beautiful. this is why dwell magazine does so well.

maybe: fuck the birds nest and zaha hadid and santiago calatrava and design competitions. maybe what we need instead of legions of grad students with thick glasses getting off to the rem koolhaas el croquis are people who want to move to a small town somewhere and start building solid, inspiring, cheap buildings. the chances to work at that huge scale and with that piercing urban/global vision are so minimal and the situations so saturated with compromise and legality. even if i end up being an architect i will never work like that. thought i would be open to working for somebody who works like that. in the end, there is probably more value in sitting in your hometown and designing schools, fire stations, churches, and homes. i worked for a company that did just this and has had a great impact on denton over the last 30 years. of course this takes a narrow view of what architecture can be (just buildings) but it is an inviting, human-scale version of an architectural career. so lets all light a candle for the architects who get no recognition in online rags like archdaily for putting in long hours on local projects that really change lives. god bless samuel mockbee and architects for humanity. amen.

ok, now i'm going to sleep. i have work to do tomorrow and a short presentation with winy maas present about a why factory workshop i'm participating in. goodnight.

monday update

well. here i am. and there you are, reading about my being here. it puts us in the same place for a moment. for the past two weeks i didn't really leave delft because i was sort of lazy and afraid of spending money. yesterday i went to amsterdam for the first time and this deserves an independent post, so i'll do that later. so, let me fill you in with some details in wobbly chronological order:

last weekend, all of holland celebrated openmonumentendag. on saturday and sunday, all of the archaic monuments of the country were open to the public and free. so all the old town halls, cathedrals, forts, manors, mansions, castles, preservations, homes, and other monuments were fair game. i stayed in delft like a slob but i managed to see the interiors of the two main churches here and the town hall (stadhuis) too.


this is the nieuwe kirk on the main square. they built it when they got tired of the oude kirk. i think it is still about 400 years old. it still chimes every half hour and you can hear it everywhere in the town, even when you're trying to sleep. lots of people were wandering. there was a sing-a-long for hymns too. the stained glass was impressive.




this was near the apse in the front of the church. what was this tiny door used for?


then i went up into the stadhuis, which is still used for municipal meetings and the town council. they have a nicely elevated view of the market, complete with a train for kids to ride on.


the oude kirk is probably around 800 years old. i don't remember for sure. i remember seeing a map of delft in 1200 and the church was on it as one of a few landmarks other than some canals. it is more austere in its whitewashed lack of ornament but it is interesting how both have the same style of wooden roof construction. both also had a similar layout inside, with the organ over the entrance in both cases (though maybe this was installed later).


also on saturdays delft has a flea market with very refined taste. vendors line up to sell old portraits, chairs, plates, novels, war items, and lots of other trinkets you could purchase to decorate your home. most of the inventory would qualify for antique status. it is fun to look though.


where shopping carts go to die.

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then during the week i worked mostly on school things. right now we're doing research to narrow our interests into a topic of manageable scale that we can use it in our design. what i mean is, the studio is about how future technologies influence the city. while past technical innovations were mostly mechanical (subways) or material (steel), now the city has become a vast network of automated processes ranging from water pump control to wireless to CCTV to environmental sensors to traffic control devices to supercomputers that model the inside of an atomic bomb to the heavy infrastructure of cabling and data centers that allow the internet to exist. there is a lot going on. our assignment is to first figure out what type of technology we want to base our design on.

i first was interested in doing some type of project addressing invisible technologies like wireless networks and somehow making it visible, but then i got excited about a more organic approach. tools are already in use for biomodification and genetic alteration on a number of scales from medical treatments to new species of fruit to goats that can produce spider silk to pigs that are altered to reduce the amount of nitrate in their waste to glofish to debates on using animals like pigs as organ farms for human use. a lot of the representation of this is very pessimistic about humans abusing the tool of genetic manipulation and the world being degraded as a result. there are rightly a lot of ethical questions about all of this and i still need to get more educated about the facts (though i did have a good starter conversation about genetically modified crops with sam and katie at royal bengal).

so i'm interested in how this tool could be used. for example, there are researchers working on modifying plants so they can sequester far more carbon dioxide than they normally do. how would the use of carbon-sucking species influence green space or even building facades in the city? i've heard there is a francois roche building in bangkok that supposedly incorporates something like this at a nano level, but i haven't found any good documentation of it yet. plants could also be modified to produce specific rare chemicals that are critical to electronics manufacturing. what if you could grow corn that contained a harvestable amount of silicon? plants also can act as sensors: a recent project is a plant that grows red instead of green when planted in the presence of landmines. some species could be a distributed network of groundwater or soil contamination or air quality. maybe fluorescent bacteria could light streets or airborne organisms could continuously clean urban air. waste management is also an issue in cities. some smaller areas are now opting for manmade wetlands to clean water. how could this be implemented on a larger scale with possibly modified plants to make the process more efficient? how would the creation of large urban wetlands affect city growth and infrastructure? i think right now i am most excited about the wetlands idea but maybe because it is the most obvious and tangible application i have found so far.

so we're starting with both cultural references and technical ones. on wednesday we sat around and i showed bits of various sci-fi movies that are sort of relevant. on friday i finally had the chance to sit down and watch "logan's run," a 1976 glam sci-fi flick about a society where each person dies when he or she turns 30. so it is a culture of youth and excess; all of the clothing resembles flowing pastel tunics, like a gay robin hood in las vegas in 2050. blasters don't emit lasers; shit just blows up where you point it. not to give away the plot of the film, but some people decide to run away instead of "renewing" (people think you are born again when you're 30 through this cult ceremony but really they just zap you). they have to escape through the waterworks of the city. apparently, the future city (housed inside geodesic domes that would make buckminster fuller quiver) is powered by water. i was really excited when they finally showed the water intake because they shot that scene at the water gardens in fort worth designed by philip johnson:


other scenes are shot in futuristic places in dallas so it was a nice little tour of the metroplex. it was even more interesting because there was no mention or plot of the adversary in this film. why are people killed at 30? who made these decisions? who do they rebel against when they break the system? what are people actually doing? they hint at a computer presence that controls everything in a few key scenes, but that part of the plot could have been much more developed. the film though is highly recommended.

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whew. what else did i do? i sat in at a jam session at club bebop on tuesday. that was fun. i talked with a trumpeter who is more into "groove" than standards, meaning he plays funk. he proudly told a story of kidnapping bootsy collins from his hotel room in den haag when he was there for a festival and holding a james brown jam session at a local jazz cafe.

also somebody down the bushes in front of my bicycle storage unit and i came out the door to find some concrete pylons covered in snails! i had never examined a snail in detail before. they were pretty fascinating. two small boys were playing with them and shouting at me in dutch but i couldn't respond! what could i do? it was almost a boo radley moment where i just had to continue on my walk to the grocery store without saying anything. i came out with my camera in the morning but they were gone. where would snails go? how far could they really get in 18 hours?

while on another bike ride, i stumbled upon a small organic grocery store. i think i might go there more often even if it is more expensive. i finally found red onions here and bought some brown sugar and organic falafel. there is good food here, you just have to know where to look.

i went to another lecture by patrick healy and it was still quite enjoyable. he ties a lot of things together in his ramblings that are periodically reinforced by a look at a pile of notes. he is irish and in moments of passion his accent shows itself. he talked mostly about 19th century interiors with citations of late 18th century french novels, paintings, monuments in berlin, and heavy references to both greek and roman art. on some level it is an exercise in archaic thought but he does a good job of reminding you why this discussion is relevant. he also had some choice quotes and made some good points about kitsch and its origin.

there is a carnival in delft this weekend too. they set up in the markt with bumper cars, an old west roller coaster complete with wide-nosed caricatures of american indians and a large mural about new york over a trailer that sold cotton candy. europe has gypsies but america has the upper hand on carnies. you could ride one ride that twisted you upside down and gave you a new view of delft. it seemed scary. a few friends rode it but i couldn't do it.



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then on saturday i took a bike ride east of delft to a park called westerpark. they had some nice marshy areas and a fair number of mosquitoes. transit in holland is well segregated by speed. bike paths are separate from streets and sidewalks. in the park, there were separate paths for bikes, pedestrians, and horses that would independently through the grounds as if it was an amusement park. added to those layers were paths for the golfers on the golf course and a road for cars. it was interesting to see how they overlapped. all of the non-motorized transit used the same bridges but when they would approach the bridge, each path would remain distinct so three separate paths, each separated by a meter of grass, would lead up to the bridge. it was cool to see. the area was nice.






this is how tomatoes are grown in holland.

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ok. i am hungry now. this blogging stuff is hard work. i need to go eat so i'll post something about amsterdam soon.

bike ride to schipluiden

after buying the bike on friday afternoon, i rode out to IKEA by the highway. did i mention i am 5 minutes away from an IKEA? i just looked, though, and then ate their delicious soft serve for only 50 eurocents. there was a time when i was addicted to soft serve but now i have overcome that demon.

on saturday i set out on a bike ride and found the city of delft transformed. there were stands and stalls everywhere selling every type of thing. flowers, ancient comic books, fruit, pillows, antique picture frames, ceramic ashtrays, delftware, food, cell phones, everything. i bought myself a super stroopwafel and walked around.

on the main markt, a thin layer of sand had been delivered and men were playing a game where you tossed heavy metal baseball-sized spheres, trying to get close to another type of ball or knock other metal spheres out of the way. i watched for a while and tried to discern some rules of the game. people took it seriously though; they played in teams of two and took turns tossing these metal spheres. some had quite fancy windups before tossing the sphere with a lot of backspin like a softball pitcher. they kept score too.







then i rode west out of delft for a while. there was a church covered in ivy that is now a restaurant. lots of cows and the smells of cows. farmland. the start of the A4 highway. in the distance large wind turbines. old barns. canals of all medium sizes crossed by bridges of all types. i saw a henhouse with an m.c. escher poster. here the gravel consists of tiny crushed bits of seashells. i saw one old windmill that wasn't in use. the country is obviously flat but surprisingly overgrown. i rode a bit past schipluiden and then turned around, stopping in that town to admire its deserted streets and drink some water before returning, a round trip of about 15 or so kilometers.










on the way back i ventured off the main road and found myself in a bizarre development with all the streets named after classical composers. the streets included mozartlaan, strawinskylaan [sic], bizetstraat, mahlerpad, chopinlaan, toscaniniweg, beethovenlaan, etc.

and of course, there is always time for waterfowl.

domestic life

this post is a visual report on my daily environment.


this is the swan that hangs out in the canal in front of my house. lots of various ducks and birds like to swim here. there are a fair amount of waterlilies too. the next picture documents possibly the above bird with other swans in the canal. they like to squawk throughout the day and even very late at night.


ok. enough waterfowl. down to business.


this is the street my room overlooks. it is called gasthuislaan. i'm not sure what that means. my windows are slightly visible. they are the windows on the 3rd floor with the angled face and the blue roofing. they rotate in the middle of the frame for easy cleaning.


this is my actual street. i would estimate its length at approximately 50 meters.


ik leef op en spieringstraat.


this is how you actually enter my house.


this is the money shot. unlike the other shots, it was taken at night. the entrance to the room is on the right, out of the frame. i am using a spindle of CDRs as a door stop. i also put one of jean-paul's amps there so i could practice. the bed and some shelving is through that dark space on the right where the light blue stand is (jean-paul's dad built that thing). the room is big and faces north so it gets decent light. i imagine i'll work most of the time on the big desk. i could also host a dinner party for six people. the shelving on the left continues behind me and wraps around the final corner back to the door. it is full of jean-paul's books about architecture. he has a lot of really good books, some of them in dutch (it is funny to see kenneth frampton's history of modern architecture in dutch). i will be reading most of these books throughout the semester.


this is a canal along zuiderstraat. there are houseboats and an austere new housing development.


this is zuidpoort. it is a plaza-based shopping development in the southern part of delft's downtown. C1000 is where i buy groceries. it is estimated that there are more bikes than people in delft (and also in holland).


how did another picture of a duck get in here? well, anyways, here he is in a particularly well-greened canal just north of the markt.




this is the markt, the main city plaza. that is the nieuwe kirk there. i don't know what style that is or when it was built, so don't ask. there is a oude kirk too further west whose tower is noticeably leaning in one direction. there is a fish market here some days of the week. people like to sit and drink various liquids along the edge of the markt.


opposite the nieuwe kirk is the stadhuis or town hall. i'm not sure what goes on here.


here is a thin canal just south of the markt. the name of the street is nieuwe langendijk. there are shops on this street. a fair part of downtown is mixed-use, with businesses on the first level and 2 or 3 floors of apartments above.


here is a slick modern house near the beestenmarkt. it is impressive because the street bends and this house negotiates the bend within the building. that is pretty cool. it is sort of an updated take on le corbusier's elevated private residences. the car in the carport is quite nice too, a really old curvy citroen. there is a restaurant in the back of the carport but i wasn't brave enough to go back there because it seems really expensive.

check the flickr link up there to see more pictures if you're interested.

continuation

OK so after i wrote that last entry i ended up falling asleep until 4 pm. i guess i was more tired than i had budgeted. i walked around delft to check out the city as the sun was low and then setting. it is quaint and small. i was surprised to see so many international restaurants (italian, indian, indonesian, mexican, argentinian, turkish), but it makes me happy to know there are lots of food options available. eating out here is expensive; you can spend as a minimum 10 euro but to get a nice meal in a nice place you'll be out at least 15 euro plus any drinks or appetizers you want. there was one place that had a wood-oven pizza smell wafting out from inside; i think i need to go there one time.

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).

arrival

it is almost dawn. there was a moth that flew in through the big velux windows that pivot in the center. a few minutes ago the sky was pitch black but now there is enough light to differentiate the outline of the trees from the brightening sky. a scooter just drove by. i am in my room that i'll be using for the term. there is a nice wooden table in the main space and a separate smaller room for an almost-square bed. i am trading rooms with jean-paul, a dutch student who is leaving on friday to attend MIT.

the transit from boston to delft was irritating only because of my luggage and wheeling it around. i decided to take my bass in order to practice, a decision that felt like a smart one when i saw that jean-paul has an amp in his room i can use (he plays guitar in a beatles cover band here). the flight overnight from boston to dublin was uneventful. the flight attendants and most passengers spoke english with a heavy irish stilt, something i wasn't ready for. i shouldn't have been surprised as it was aer lingus after all. i didn't really get to eat dinner because they didn't have a vegetarian entree. i sat next to a german guy who was finishing his post-doc at harvard in biochemistry and is moving to leiden to work in virology. we talked about influenza and he said he hated the GSD building at harvard. in dublin it was rainy and i spent too many euro on a stupid muffin and coffee. i heard gaelic being spoken in person for the first time.

the flight to amsterdam was short. we arrived around noon. seeing the netherlands from the air is a good introduction to the country. its flatness is unparalleled, even in texas (probably because it is artificial here). development seems well planned although the country is quite dense. i was astounded to see the variety of canals. they are the most pervasive element in the countryside and exist in all sizes. some canals are wide and support freight. others are thin enough for boats and have houses built alongside. other canals begin out of nowhere and disappear, not connected to any other water and only as impressive as a ditch. research into the history of landmaking and hydrology here is something i'll do soon. canals even lift off the ground to cross other canals or roads. trains cross highways. runways cross trains. when we landed there was a small group of people with lawnchairs sitting outside the airport fence, waving their hands and probably shouting. a highway emerged from under the runway, the concrete tunnel walls were tiled with a giant mosaic of a plane in flight.

schiphol is a vast airport. it takes 30 minutes just to walk from your gate to the baggage area. customs is non-existent; i walked through an automatic door and into the shopping area. i managed to corral my luggage onto an intercity train to the hague and sat down to watch the landscape pass. the train is silent and all types of buildings slid by. the level and scale of geometrical boldness in the buildings here (apartment blocks, offices, commercial centers, industry) is immensely attractive. there will be more time for architectural comments later. men rode tractors, spraying fields of crops. horses sat on green carpets, separated from a group of sheep by a shallow ditch (probably a canal). quite a few americans were on the train, though i only knew about this because they talked about how they were on the wrong train and needed to change at the hague to return to leiden. our train didn't stop there.

the hague is an impressive aggregation of buildings. medium-rise office buildings with circular windows and an elevated train that covered the streets. one building was a giant arch with probably a 50-meter span. you could see the trussing on the underside of the arch. under the arch trains sped by. there was the street level and then below that, a stretch of underground highway was exposed to the sun. because the dutch landscape is artifical, you can layer it however you want. there will be an upcoming post comparing land here to the beginning stages of making terrain in simcity.

finally arrived in delft. it looked like a stockyard town at the end of a cattle drive, packed with cows. except now the cattle are bicycles. cars are driven slowly and with caution but most of the time are left parked by canals. people of all ages floated by me on bicycles. i wheeled my luggage down the street and over the gentle humps that pass for bridges spanning thin canals. i passed groups of college-age students all wearing the same OWEE t-shirt. OWEE, i remembered, is the orientation program at TUD that i had been invited to but decided not to attend. i was glad that my first experiences of this place were alone and not in a cheery orientation group. i had a map of where my place was so i was easily able to navigate to it, pausing every two blocks to switch hands on my luggage and look around. impressions of delft as a place are initially favorable but i will report back when i have deeper contributions. the 3-story scale and diversity of designs is pleasing.

i found jean-paul and talked for a while with him. my room overlooks a canal on gasthuistraat. i live on the 3rd floor of a building that houses 12 TUD students. my floor has 4. there is a shared living room and kitchen and i share my bathroom with the other male student. the remaining two students are female. they seem like nice people but speak dutch really quickly. they have a chore chart to divide up household tasks. there is a chalkboard to mark which days of the week you plan to eat dinner at home so you can arrange to eat together. if you cook for one person other than yourself, you receive a point. if you eat another person's cooking, you lose a point. jean-paul is currently at -8. this means he is a bad cook.

the grocery store is called C1000 and is about 3 minutes away in a shopping plaza. the prices seem reasonable although i couldn't find tofu anywhere. you have to pay 20 eurocents for a plastic bag, a fact i didn't realize before snatching a bag to gather my purchases and having a teenage cashier bark at me in dutch. on zuiderstraat, i looked at the houses across the street for a few seconds before realizing they were houseboats anchored in the adjacent canal. jean-paul has a bike i can ride but i need to fix it up first. i was reluctant at first but then i decided to give him permission to ride whyte lyghtnying in cambridge. i miss her already, among other people. when i tried to say goodbye to eegloo, she was nowhere to be found. i think she knew and was mad at me for leaving.

i ate some bread and cheese around 5 before succumbing to jet lag and passing out. it gets chilly at night here. i woke up around 3:30 am and wasn't tired. i had no dreams and did not remember thinking anything after pulling the sheet over me. then i used the internet to talk to my family (hi mom!) and runja for a while. it is a different thing to visit the internet while in another country, mostly because you're looking at the same sites you always look at but your local setting has changed vastly. i read emails about WMBR that, if i was in cambridge, i would need to care about but now i am distanced. i never cared much about reading the mindless updates or games people play on facebook, but now it is even more pointless and irrelevant because i am across the planet and still reading about how you got a high score in bejeweled. can the internet make you care less about people even though you know more about them? anyways it was nice to talk to the people i do care about.

now it is morning for real. the sun is up off to my right behind a layer of clouds. i can see the terra cotta tiles and chimney of the house across the canal. the church chimes every half hour, even throughout the night. the dutch word for church is kirk. men who rise early are now rising, speaking to each other in the street. i heard gulls squeal even though we're pretty far inland. just now when typing that sentence i had a decent-sized portion of deja vu sweep through my head. i am going to lie down for a bit before getting up for the day. a picture update is appropriate and is forthcoming in the near future.

goedemorgen.