Orange People, Day 4: Amsterdam and airports

Multi-storey bike park, Amsterdam. The Dutch like to complain about bike theft, apparently, but they also like to leave their bikes around with no or minimal chaining compared to the big U-clamps common in Sydney and London. Statistical correlation or coincidence? You decide.

This will be a shorty, as Tuesday was my last day in the Netherlands and Grant's last day with Rohan and Narelle, as his work required him to get drunk with some Dutch customers on Tuesday night, and he had a meeting with them on Wednesday.

So, Rohan went to work like a good soldier, and Narelle and Grant and I headed to Amsterdam for a look at the outside of things, since we only had 3 hours or so to work with before we had to head for Schipol airport for my flight home/Grant's meeting with his workmates ahead of the pissup. Pictures here and following, bearing in mind that (a) the bridge opening is in Den Bosch and (b) there are no pictures of the pleasant half hour nap we had in the park next to the guys discussing the thriving market in 'shrooms.

We really didn't have enough time to experience the joys or otherwise of Amsterdam but it was good to see what we saw. Maybe next time we'll get a better crack at it. Until then, fave Netherlands places in order of faveness: the Hague, Utrecht, Den Bosch, Amsterdam.

After that, I had a relatively uneventful flight home to Gatwick and a train trip home that took longer than the flight from the Netherlands. Go Thameslink and the tube!

Steps on holiday: a million, so I promptly ceased walking altogether on our return home.
Thesis words: none in two weeks, and now I'm scared to touch the thing, a slight problem as it's officially due in a month. However, I think I'm only about 2-3000 words from the finish line so a little more procrastination will just help make things more exciting. Right?

Summertime, and the living is easy (OR, early spring and the weather is summery)

So. It's been 24 C for three days. TWENTY-FOUR! T-shirt weather, in April! It feels kind of summery. Or at least hotter than I remember it being in early spring back home. Global warming is not all bad, as Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame has sagely noted.

Hence,, our usual weekend hikes were rather sweatier than usual. On Saturday, we decided to go to Regent's Park, both for the purposes of chicken tikka wraps in the Church Street markets and to see whether the formal gardens were looking appropriately bling.

They were:

Those are some very, very fancy tulips, indeed (at the end of the main promenade). And just in time to make up for the the fluffy white tree things which are no longer in bloom. The fluffy pink trees have also stepped in to take up the slack.

Regent's Park also has some genuine black swans. They look like home. At the moment, it also has a population of about 100,000 half naked people carpeting the grass, but this seems to be de rigeur for the season.

On the way home by the canal, we came across this tragic casualty.

It was a lovely day, and we both came home with the teeniest stripes of pink skin on our arms, being apparently newfound English people without our former Australian leather hides to protect us - and all after skipping only one summer! Thank God we wore hats. I think I'm going to have to rethink the "sunscreen is for sissies" approach to the Northern Hemisphere.

On Sunday we had grand master plans to do a day trip from every tourist's bible "25 Day Trips From London," with St Albans (Roman ruins) and Rochester (Norman ruins) on the shortlist. However, Thameslink trains were out until 11am and Grant took advantage of my morning weakness - plus the fact that we were both already wilting in the heat at 11am - to suggest that we just hang around locally instead. Hence, we contented ourselves with a circuit of Kensington Palace Gardens (or KPG as Grant now calls it, being jiggy with the language of the young people) and Hyde Park, both of which also had a carpet of half-naked folks (ditto, Princess Di memorial fountain/human cooling device, Hyde Park). People were not, however, hot enough to risk microbial infection swimming in the Serpentine pool thing. Again, another beautiful day even if it was stinking hot, which on the other hand did provide an excuse to spend the rest of the day watching sci-fi DVDs flaked out in bed. By the way, that is totally one of the main advantages of the bedsit way of life.

Another gratuitous flower shot, this from the gigantic wisteria around the corner:

Classy, eh?

Uni-wise I have had a bit of a patchy week. I started and finished my holiday trade mark assignment on Friday which I thought was a reasonable effort. However, it is 3,500 words long - roughly twice the usual limit for this sort of task. I am certainly not going to admit the length to my tutor, since it is his damn fault for not setting a word limit. Anyway, as my thesis demonstrates, I am incapable of producing a short piece on anything. I have been avoiding my copyright assignment since I think it is kind of silly and a waste of time. I would much rather do an essay, but instead I am stuck with the job of cross-referencing international treaties. YAY. I have also been avoiding my thesis for the last fortnight, since I have had more pressing demands on my time, but I always think this is something of a mistake since I end up in chronic self-doubt mode if I don't work on it fairly regularly (as Grant will attest, having heard me moan about it all weekend), plus it takes me a while to get back up to speed when I get back on the job, given that the subject is MAXIMUM EXTREME THEORY, just for fun. I comfort myself with the fact that I THINK my supervisor would have mentioned something somewhere in the last 23,000 words if he thought I was completely off the track or an idiot. However, maybe he just wants to leave it to the last minute to maximise shock value.

Anyway, today I barely managed some futzing around with German copyright law. I'm still not up to speed with copyright and it vexes me. I think I am doing a little better with the other two subjects, the main problem being that they are both more interesting than copyright, which let's face it, would not be hard.

I've organised a study group for this week, and it will be interesting to see how many of the promised attendees actually show. Hopefully it will make it more palatable to get working on the past papers. Exams are in August. It seems like a long time away, especially since I only have 7 weeks of class between now and then and the rest is time off, but it's never too early to panic, right?

In other news, I finally managed to make decent bean burgers yesterday, by dint of actually following the recipe properly instead of stuffing around with it. Who'd a thunk? Alison Holst, I salute you, and your thrifty meal ideas! Also, today proved my housewife street cred by baking an apple cake. It is a bit eggy (how could you let me down, Alison Holst?) but it's OK.

Ro and Ral are arriving shortly. Hurray! More tourist times ahead.

Steps: 85,000 last week (at .6m per step, more than 40km), only about 5,000 for today though.
Thesis: don't touch it, and it can't get longer, right? I don't know. It's kind of like Shroedinger's thesis. If I don't open it to do a word count, it could theoretically have less words.
Bike: zip - my head hangs in shame
Prolix trade mark assignments: ONE.
Vitamin D absorbed through sweet, sweet sun exposure: quite a lot, I think.

It Done Snowed II

OK, so further to our previous tantalising post: BEHOLD THE SNOW. This would be from last Thursday. Shut up, I never said we'd update frequently! Take a careful look at the picture of Grant. He lost that beanie (lovingly knitted BY HIS WIFE) half an hour later.

It was especially wonderful snow actually - still coming down at 10am, all clothes soaked, sizeable snowperson-facilitating snow (my snowperson was lame because my hands got cold).
Much better than the previous January snow which, while nice, had stopped by the time we got up. When I went to copyright class in the afternoon, my lecturer, who is an Australian expat decades removed from the motherland, said to me in excitement: "Isn't it wonderful?"

After I dropped Grant off at the station at about 7.30am I went for a hike through Holland Park, which is the foresty snowy pictures, esp the maze, the terribly cold fishies in the Kyoto Garden and My Lord Holland You Are Sitting Very Still.

Freakishly, the tube was only running about 20 mins late when I caught it in to class in the morning despite the snow. Considering that it routinely does way worse in bright sunny weather, I was pleasantly surprised! It still would have been faster to ride in, but I get scared of unusual weather conditions, viz. when I rode home after hail in Sydney and tried to access my inner European for racial memories on what to do when hitting an ice drift at speed. I did ride in the next day, and got absolutely drenched in a sleety downpour (fellow student, English: "You don't have to ride in EVERY day, you know"), and then afterwards had to spend half an hour cleaning the grit out of the bike that had been scattered in the snow the day before. Apparently gritty abrasive salt+dirt+water = bad for bikes. Or so I am told. I have my suspicions that it is a beat-up though to make me clean my poor old bike.

Grant actually had to come home early on the snow day with a cold and was off sick the next day too (damn contracting damn no sick leave). However, he's much better now, with the exception of in the wee small hours when he tends to start hacking up a lung just to piss me off. We have new cough syrup - honey and lemon flavour. On inspection, ingredients = honey and lemon. Not entirely sure why this product exists.

Anyway, Grant's bug did mean we didn't get up to too much hiking at the weekend, which coupled with the fact I rode into school 2 days last week meant that my walking total was CRAP - a measly 58000 steps. Did however do 40km on the bike. Not very flash, but given it is the dead of winter I am pretty chuffed. I have to wear a jumper while I ride and everything. AND windproof gloves, cf Wednesday when I didn't wear them and couldn't feel my fingers for quite some time thereafter.

We did meet a friend of Grant's from when he was working in Syd, who is over for the week, for drinks and dinner on Saturday night around SoHo (no champagne, but if there had been I doubt it would have tasted like cherry cola). Met some nice friends of hers, too, which is always a good thing in this big wide city. Otherwise the only other weekend adventure was a moderate stroll to Kensington Palace Gardens for tea and scones. I used the word "grand." Now all I need to do is start saying "all right" instead of "Hello, how are you?" and I'll be set.

Thesis has been doing quite well yesterday and today, in part because I cheated by doing thesis work instead of trade marks/copyright today as well as yesterday. Aren't I clever in using my self-distracting powers for good instead of evil? Yesterday I cleaned the flat from top to bottom by way of distraction. Excellent stuff. Anyway, today's slog got me 1800 words added and about 800-1000 subtracted, so I am still ahead of the game. My argument now goes from intro to parts a through c of part 2 before running aground, compare earlier where it sort of went intro, part 2(c), make of that what you will. OF COURSE, disclaimer here is that my supervisor has read none of it yet so could decide it is all total rubbish. I think I keep deterring him from reading what he has already by sending him a new draft every week. I personally would regard that as a tip not to read anything until I had a version someone was prepared to call final! It isn't due until July but I have 6700 done pretty well and another 6000 done in early draft form. Cue freakout re: 15,000 word target overshoot (familiar from 2000 where I produced a 25000 word thesis that was supposed to be 12000), which is why I am glad to have cut some words out. Have to do some more work on the USA part of it though.

I must say Jamie hit the nail on the head when she told me the problem with grad school was the utter lack of external stimulus to activity. I have *no* assessment tasks due until July, and final exams are August. Until then I could do jack and there would be no consequences. Don't tell my brain this or I won't get anything done. It's just between you and me, OK? All of this is way worse coming from a life where the task that got done first was (a) the most overdue (b) the one with the screaming client or partner attached to it, and there sure as hell were stimuli to prompt action (positive - $$$, negative - aforementioned screaming). Feel rather like a marionette with strings cut at times. Still, it is nice to relaxxxxxxxxx just the same, also to use brain as sharp instrument instead of blunt one for a change.

UK things people never warned me about: the limescale. OH MY GOD, THE LIMESCALE, THE KETTLE KILLING, DRAIN-CLOGGING, TAPE-CAKING LIMESCALE (apparently it's very healthy for you though). Also, still a bit annoyed by lack of tags on teabags.

OK, off to veg shop and then copyright study. YAY.

Bike k last week: 40km
This: 0
Thesis: 1800 words, but lost 800-1000, so what do we call that?

"Surreal, but nice."

Thus speaks the hero to the heroine in Grant's favourite girly flick, "Notting Hill," which was on the telly on the weekend. Hereabouts the movie is considered horrifically twee and it can also be regarded as a rather racially suspect whitening of a quite multicultural area. All that notwithstanding, it's nice brainmush and on top of that we now get to squeal "OH MY GOD, THAT'S...[insert name of local landmark/shop here]" every five seconds, which was indeed surreal, but nice. You know you've arrived when the geographical names in English film and telly start to make sense.

It was hotting up last week - even to the point of not having to wear a beanie! - but apparently this was a bluff, as it is now freezing again. Heavy frost this morning, for the first time really. No more snow, sadly.

I have given up on my lofty ambitions to do this degree properly and read each case report in full, and am now reading the headnotes only, which is like the Cribb's Notes. I feel like an intellectual traitor but on the plus side, I got through three weeks of trade mark reading in one day yesterday. You can't argue with that kind of brute force productivity, people. At this rate I might even catch up on copyright sometime before the exams.

Cycling kms last week: 40km
This week: none yet, trying to be brave enough to ride to uni today despite cold (riding is the only way to guarantee getting there in under an hour - it is supposed to be a 20 minute tube trip, but that only works under lab conditions)
Thesis this week: about 1000ish, again
Steps this week: truly pathetic 17,000.

And how have you all been?