The thoughts & opinions of Sassarella, the Queen of Sass as she cavorts in 's Gravenhage & beyond. Brought to you by CES's (Chief Executive Slaves) of Big Skanky Ho Inc.
By the way, this should be two pictures of Munich, not long after its summer floods. posted by Alleen at 11:03:57 PM
So, I got a look at last month's hours worked and it turns out that I worked a total of 10 days in October. Added to my total of 10 days in September makes for a total of 20 days worked in the past two months. No wonder I've been travelling so much.
Anyway. I've had a pretty quiet week since I got back, except that I blew up the back tire of my bike. So... since it would have cost as much as the whole bike to repair and going without a bike isn't an option, I started to look around for a new bike. Today, one of the people at work told me that sometimes when bikes are left behind in the lockup at work, they give them away. I found myself with a new bike within hours. To be honest, this bike is in worse shape than the old one, and also has the problem of being far too tall for me, but it's actually quite stylish. On the other hand, now I've got two bikes that are desperately in need of repair, one of which is sort of rideable in the meantime. I feel that I should probably just invest in a decent bike, but when cheap or free ones are so thick on the ground it hardly seems worthwhile.
I'm not entirely clear on how to lower a bike seat so if anyone has any advice on this subject feel free to share. Hopefully, I'll have some spare time next week (ha ha) to go get this one repaired. The handlebars and the front wheel are misaligned and one of the pedal bars is bent. I don't know how much of a problem these things are but it certainly feels wierd when you're riding. Also, it has no kickstand. It used to have a wheel lock, but this was cut off when they removed it from the bike lockup so in addition to being horribly unsafe, it kind of looks like I'm riding a stolen bike.
So, really, this might be the Dutchest bike in the whole of the Netherlands. People here ride around in bikes like this all the time, and without helmets at that. My mom was really insistent that I wear one and if I was sensible I might. On the other hand, I'd be the only person in the whole of the Netherlands in a helmet and god knows, I'd rather be dead than wierd. Hell, children don't wear bike helmets. Babies, in their handlebar baby seats, don't wear bike helmets.
there's a counter now. 'cause i'm feeling sassy & procrastinatey...stupid friday tomorrow! posted by Rocketbride at 2:01:04 AM
Tuesday, November 12, 2002
Okee dokee. I've got some appropriate blogging music on and I'm sitting at my computer with a glass of juice and a bowl of cereal. Hell, I've even got my thinking dress on. So basically, I couldn't be more ready to blog. So here goes.
My brother's visit--Day 1:
I go to work, then pick up my brother at the airport. We hop the train and come back to my place. We go out in pouring rain to eat Chinese food. We come back. I proceed to inflate his inflatable bed and everyone goes to sleep.
My brother's visit--Day 2:
Waking up slightly later in the day than planned, we hopped the train to Amsterdam. The weather was surprisingly clear all day, which was good because Amsterdam is the kind of city best viewed on foot. You can see a lot of the city just by walking everywhere, because hey, it's not that big. We started out by taking a trip to the Rijksmuseum to see Rembrandt's famous Night Watch. I ended up kind of not liking it. Especially as it's surrounded by similar paintings of captains and their companies in equally silly clothes. One even has a bunch of them hanging out at dinner. I guess it's the kind of thing you can hang in a regiment house, like a photo of a soccer team or something. We also saw Vermeer's famous Milkmaid and van Gogh's famous Self-Portrait. In fact, my brother was kind of in a hurry as we only had 2 days to cover the whole of the Netherlands, so we ended up mostly seeing the stuff that the museum had marked out as special. This actually led my brother to spend half an hour searching for the Rijksmuseum's famous Poppenhuis, which, guess what, is actually a great big fancy dollhouse.
After the Rijksmuseum, we headed on over to the nearby canal for a hop-on, hop-off canal tour, which took us around to places like Leidseplein and Centraal Station and the harbour and eventually Anne Frank Huis, where we hopped out. Anne Frank Huis is, not surprisingly, the house where Anne Frank and her family and their friends were in hiding. It's small and a pretty short tour all around, but really really heart-wrenching. On the other hand, we were going around at the same time as two little kids and their parents, and nothing makes for less heartwrenching than two kids racing each other up and down an incredibly narrow and steep staircase that would give a mountain goat pause. I ended up having to point this out to their parents, who apparently had perfected the art of ignoring them.
After Anne Frank Huis, we took a bit of a walk around the city, eventually ending up at the Cafe de Jaren for dinner, which was delicious as always. I don't know what a butterfish is, but I like it.
Then we went home and slept.
My brother's visit--Day 3:
My brother felt that we'd done all we could with Amsterdam, so we spent the earlier part of the day looking at the Hague. It was pouring rain most of the day, so we decided to walk. We started out at the Peace Palace, where I took a picture of my brother next to the Flame of Peace, and then continued on to the Tribunal, where we picked up my bike and then went back to my house. Deciding that we'd seen all we needed to see of the Hague, my brother decided to go to Utrecht. I'd never been to Utrecht, so I was pretty pleased with this suggestion. It's about as far from here as Amsterdam, but in a whole other province! That's right! The city of Utrecht is in the province of Utrecht! That's crazy!
Anyway, Utrecht turned out to be really pretty, though it was hard to tell under the all-encompassing rain and darkness. Utrecht has a really high church tower which is not actually connected to a church. So, apparently, the people of Utrecht decided they wanted to have a great big church, so they built a tower and a nave, which weren't connected. They meant to finish the rest off, but due to waning interest in church building, they didn't build the middle bit as nicely as the rest of it and it fell down in a hurricane. It took them 150 odd years to clean up the mess, but the church was never finished and so it's kind of small (for a cathedral anyway) as it's only got a monstrously tall nave which is across a square from a monstrously tall tower. So we climbed the tower. There is a great view of Utrecht from this tower, the only problem being the fact that there was an unholy wind, the paving stones were wet and if you slip, you'll either brain yourself on gothic decorations or fall tumbling to your death. This had my brother hugging the wall as he walked, which naturally inspired me to go to the edge and lean over the balcony. After we came down, we went looking around the town of Utrecht, which was really nice and actually kind of, dare I say it, happening. There's a university in Utrecht, so it's kind of a funky little place, and I'm definitely going back at some point.
Then we ate dinner, went home and slept.
My brother's visit--day 4:
London, baby, yeah! we flew to London in the morning for the world's fastest visit. We got there Saturday morning and I left Monday morning to rush back to work (which turned out to be unnecessary as my trial was cancelled and it's Tuesday and I'm still not working). After dropping our bags off at our hostel (the Generator, the kind of place which pretends that it's whole industrial, flourescent lighting look is avant garde and not just cheap), we headed out for some touristy fun. First off, after figuring out the London tube, we headed out to, you guessed it, Buckingham Palace. We got there in time to catch the tail end of the changing of the guard, which was kind of fun. The crowd was incredible, though, and it thinned only marginally after the guard was well and truly changed. Basically large groups of every nationality on earth were standing around gawking at the queen's house, which kind of makes you wonder if she ever goes near any of the windows. We left, and quite coincidentally ended up walking along the Princess Diana memorial walk to the the Parliament and Westminster Abbey. The Houses of Parliament are closed to visitors and despite an impressive exterior can only really hold someone's interest for so long. It took me about three minutes to wander off, which is really testament to how impressive the building is because I've got a really short attention span.
Westminster Abbey, on the other hand, accepts visitors, to the point where we had to join a line-up to get in. But, aside from being really interesting to look at, it's like walking through a quick history of England, so that was pretty cool. I got to see the Coronation Chair, which is actually pretty banged up. Apparently students in Westminster Abbey used to carve their names into it, which struck me as pretty funny. I also got to see a whole bunch of crypts and it being close to Remembrance day, I got to have a look at the tomb of the unknown soldier. Well, just the marker. They don't actually let you into the tomb because there's a decomposing corpse in there. Not fun for the whole family.
After Westminster Abbey, we took a pretty short walk up to Trafalgar Square and had a look at the really tall statue of Lord Nelson and then went into the National Gallery. London may be really expensive, but it's museums are completely free! Yay! So, I got to have a look at a da Vinci and a Michelangelo and various other fun stuff (pretty quickly too, since my brother slows down for no man) for absolutely nothing. At this point we were overcome by hunger so we headed over to Leicester Square, where we also picked up tickets to an evening showing of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). Chinatown is not too far off, so we opted for that instead of traditional English food because frankly, it's better. Poon's turned out to be reasonably priced and tasty, with swift, if unfriendly service. We were out of there in time for the show, which turned out to be pretty funny, though solely populated by tourists like us with last minute tickets. Then again, it's not like you go to the theatre to socialise and a good time was had by all.
That night, we got back to the hostel and slept like the dead.
My brother's visit--day 5:
Another incredibly busy day started out really horribly with a fire alarm, which the hostel used to wake everyone up in time to be out by 10am, which is when housekeeping cleans the rooms. Avant garde, my fat ass. Still, you can't mooch around a hostel all day, so we got ready and quickly headed on over to the Tower of London, where we were immediately confronted with a long line-up. It didn't take a huge amount of time, and soon we were in, enjoying our free-with-the-price-of-admission tour by yeoman-warder. These guys actually live on the Tower grounds and get to dress up in goofy beefeater outfits all the time. It was a pretty fun tour, since our guide knowledgeable and amusing and had an especially loud voice. He mentioned that he had been a guard for 25 years, one of the kind that stands still and doesn't talk or move, so he probably wasn't averse to a job where he could be as loud as possible to a group of people that he can abuse at will. Pretty neat job, though. Pretty cool place to live.
We spent a pretty long time wandering there and I especially enjoyed the White Tower and the ravens and the armoury and the crown jewels and the towers where prisoners were kept and the walls where they'd whiled away the hours by carving messages. They have a plaque where the scaffold for executions used to be, which is neat, though obviously not as picturesque as a head on a pike or the bloated remains of a hanging victim. But, you know, whatever.
After the Tower of London, we took a trip over to the British Library. Why? Because we're nerds. Sure oohing and aahing over illustrated manuscripts isn't for everyone, but then again, everyone isn't as cool as me. So there. The British Library had a pile of neat stuff, like Leonardo Da Vinci's notebook (which you can flip through in an interactive electronic display), a copy of the Diamond Sutra, the Magna Carta, the first copy of Alice in Wonderland, which was done by hand for the original Alice, scrawled out Beatles lyrics in their original form, and just neat fun stuff. I probably wouldn't have spent as much time in there as my brother ended up doing, but it was pretty cool nonetheless.
After leaving, we had planned to go for fish and chips, but were forced to change plans because the chip shop was closed. We ended up eating at a place called Cagney's and while the place was completely cheesy, my Swiss Chalet-like quarter chicken wasn't half bad. After heading back to the hostel that night, I realised the utter foolishness of travelling without an alarm clock (or hell even a watch), as I had to be up by six the next morning. Long story short, I ended up getting the worst night of sleep ever and still woke up late. I made my plane, but only just. Unfortunately, since I was one of the last people on the plane I ended up in a middle seat next to guy who spent much of the flight trying to find out my past sexual history and attempting to convince me that we were destined for each other. Then I came home. Since then, it's been nothing but work and sleep, but this weekend is shaping up pretty well.
This Saturday heralds the arrival of Sinter Klaas and Zwart Piet, the Dutch version of Santa Claus and his elf, who apparently travel to the Netherlands via boat from Spain. This Saturday the boat will land at Scheveningen harbour and me and several thousand screaming children will be there to see it. I can't remember if I've mentioned Zwart Piet before, but... well... it's a little hard to explain. Maybe I'll explain it after I see it firsthand. posted by Alleen at 10:33:19 AM
Monday, November 11, 2002
I'm back!
FYI for those of you who phone me... I'm most likely going to be changing my phone number sometime today, so watch out for an e-mail with the new digits.
