Computers and Detergent

Sadly, my lovely old linux box didn't turn on when I got home. I could troubleshoot the powersupply but instead went out and bought the cheapest laptop with a decent sized screen. So, finally after ... 7 years I paid for another windows license (Vista).

My first impression: yeah, I still like linux better. Vista took *forever* to install. Then I had to spend another hour removing the crapware. After that I had some installs to do without the joy of Synaptic (windows users of the world, you are really missing out!). Anyway, now the machine is running though not without hiccups. I always cringe a bit when my linux box had a problem or two and would think about how people coming from windows would find the experience a disappointment. Well, this windows installation is not without hiccups of its own!

Of course I will be dual booting this machine. I think I will wait until the next Ubuntu distribution release in October. I still have Mr. E for when I need linux to do what windows cannot.

So while I am busy copying the data from my old hard drive, I have an anecdote from Germany to relate.

I was in the grocery store trying to buy more laundry detergent. I didn't know the word and was trying to go based on the picture instructions and bottle size. Anyway, when I brought my prize back to the hostel I was informed I had bought fabric softener. So back I went to the store and mimed handwashing clothes to these 3 ladies who helped me get laundry detergent.

Anyway, I kept the bottle, a souvenir of Germany. I've never bothered with fabric softener before. I particularly want to use it because of the poetry on the back. The girl at the hostel thought it was hilarious.

"Wenn Sich die Wuste in der Abendsonne rot farbt und die Luft zu gluhen scheint, dann bekommt man das Gefuhl, dass fast alles moglich ist und alles passieren kann."

Which google translates to

"If the red desert in the evening sun and Glow Color test the air seems, then one gets the feeling that almost everything is possible and anything can happen."

Now I know it isn't fair to mock what comes out of google translate, but what I was told in the hostel sounds pretty damn similar. I'm expecting magic things from these laundry loads!

Back in Canada

Well, I've made it back to Canada after 14 hours of solid travel (train, plane and traffic jam).

When I got onto the airplane I was surprised to see that I had been upgraded to business class. Not too shabby. The food was still airplane food but I got a glass of wine to go with it. They still pee the same in first class, only the washroom had bottles of hand lotion. However, by the end of the flight, even with the fancy chairs I felt like I had been stuck on an airplane for too many hours. I don't think business class can really make that go away.

I sat beside an older lady who just couldn't manage anything from her seat. She would always ask me how to open the tray, turn on the light, etc. Even when I showed her she couldn't do it. She wouldn't even give something a try first. I remembered the girl on the Italy trip who was helpless like that which the boys liked and wondered this is what it looks like after 50 years. I think about how much more people are capable of when there is this expectation that they should just be able to do it. This reflects on my thoughts about girls in math and computing. They always comment on the lack of girls, but then many claim (especially the boys) that they just have a more natural gift for it. However, people are much more capable when there is an expectation that they can do it. I've certainly noticed it in my experience. I say I can do hard stuff and voila, it works. It also works the opposite, I know that my opinions of my abilities have hamstrung me in the past.

Anyway, on the flight I finally watched the two latest bond movies and Slumdog Millionaire. I really liked the bond films (though I enjoy the Bourne movies better). Usually it's the 'bond girls' who put me off those films.

And sadly when I got home to turn on my desktop computer it wouldn't boot. I think it is the power supply as the fan wouldn't even start. I don't really know how to fix it, I guess look around for a newer power supply at home but I don't think we have any. Mr E, you're a cute little computer and I loved you in Europe but now I have some serious work to do! Don't feel bad though, it's not you, it's me.

Finally, as this post indicates, this blog is probably going to get a lot more boring again! It's nice to be home but there isn't too much excitement to write about. I still have stuff from the trip I want to post and I anticipate a move in the nearby future (can't live a life of leisure forever) so here's looking forward to more interesting times!

the stinkiest pie in the world

I like making apple pie, Fokke likes to eat it. Seems like a good combination. The way I make pie in Canada is with lard which you buy in the grocery store. It makes a nice flaky crust so I thought I would try it here in Holland.

Well, the first thing is the grocery store doesn't sell lard. That's not a showstopper, you can get it from the butcher so I ordered it. I'd read about how glorious lard from the butcher is and what great pastry you can make so it seemed like a good time to try.

The lard that came from the butcher looked... different.

Yeah, I didn't see a lovely pie crust coming too nicely out of that piece of pig. So I decided to ask that wonderful repository of ancient wisdom, google, what to do next. I got a bunch of blogs about people describing their attempts of rendering lard and how wonderful it was - like it was the second coming of Christ! Man, foodies and wine snobs drive me nuts. Anyway, there were some photos and instructions and it sounded easy enough so why not give it a try.

First cut up the fat into cubes (the smaller the better) and add a bit of water to the bottom of a heavy pan. Then heat for a few hours on medium low heat (we used #2).

It took a while before the fat started to melt but finally it did and the remaining chunks turned brown. They are supposed to float and when the fat is rendered they will sink.

At this point, the smell of stinky pig lard started to become apparent (not that we weren't warned). We stopped the heating and filtered the hot lard through a coffee filter.

We ended up with a nice clear liquid.

Which slowly cooled and turned white. So it looks like the stuff from the grocery store. And as the foodie blogs extolled (cue angel choirs) it wasn't that nasty hydrogenated shelf stable stuff you can buy. However, unlike the stuff from the grocery store, this one still had the aroma of slightly burnt bacon.

I guess the two things I would change would be to heat it on lowest heat (1) and stop the melting earlier (not that any blog we read mentioned the pig smell and how to fix it). I would also insist on trying leaf-lard next (I won't be asking at the grocery store again though, they thought I was crazy enough the first time). I also read that you can do a water extraction to pull out some of the excess protein and the lard will solidify as a fat layer on top of the water. The biochemist in me wonders if pig stink is fat or water soluble.

Anyway, I used the lard to make the pie crust. The consistency was similar to the store product and it formed a decent pastry dough. I put it in the oven and hoped the apple and cinnamon flavour would overpower any remnants of pig.

The apples were Jonagold (I think) and they disappointingly didn't give off a lot of juice. I know I'm supposed to obsess over apples but I can never remember which types are best and I certainly don't know the dutch names for them. I was also going to try to introduce how wonderful strong old chedder cheese tastes with apple pie. They didn't have chedder cheese at the grocery store either but said they would ask the cheese man. Sadly, what he had to offer were those horrible kraft cheese slices. I don't think the piggy pie needs to be dragged down any further.

So here's a picture of the pie. Yes it is cooked in a springform pan. You gotta make do with the tools ya got so I improvised. Perhaps it's an advantage that the apples aren't too juicy or they might be leaking all over the oven.

So in the end Fokke decided it was too much work to do but wanted a second piece of pie. Tineke could identify a small amount of bacon flavour but it wasn't overpowering and Carly said she couldn't notice the pig at all. That is why I will never be a foodie and yet always be satisfied.

Besides, everyone knows that linux heralds the second coming.

Sailing

My second cousins have a sailboat and I was told that sailing is the thing to do in Friesland. Lucky for me they took time from building their house and we had lovely weather. Here we are, just packing the boat and getting ready to go.

But wait.... the motor died (sounds like my motorcycle actually...). Anyway, time to take the motor off and a quick clean of the carburetor.

And now we are off. I like the goat sitting on the side of the canal watching as we set off.

Then we set off down the canal. To fit under some of the low bridges we were able to lower the mast (it was on a hinge).

And here is the family out on the lake. We had beautiful weather and it wasn't too cold. I have been lucky with weather in Friesland, it is even warmer than it was in Brabant.

Franeker

Before I visited Leeuwarden I visited the town of Franeker. This town was recently was featured on boingboing for the Planetarium (which we visited). The planetarium was built by an amateur scientist Eise Eisinga who learned math and astronomy from his father.

At the age of 16 he had published a book on math and at 17 a book about astronomy. At the time, there was an interesting conjunction of planets and an anonymous writer (later identified as the village priest) published a work claiming the gravity would suck the earth into the sun and all would be destroyed. The villagers panicked and didn't go to work and Eisinga decided to build a planetarium to demonstrate the clockwork regularity of the universe and that the planets were so far apart they would not collide.

Above the living room was the wonderful mechanism for running the planets. It would also show sun rise and sun set times and the current astrological sign.



The inside of the room was beautiful and still the original paint. However, I was not allowed to take photos, even without a flash. I was very disappointed by this. Given that it was constructed to spread knowledge to the masses, now you need to buy the postcard. I took a photo of the postcard. You can see the ceiling with the orbits of the planets marked out and the beautiful colours.

On the way back I took some photos of two aqueducts. To ensure traffic isn't impeded they have the canal go over the road. This first picture shows you how deep the water is as it crosses the highway.

Here is the second canal we crossed under.


And here you can just see the sailboat going through the canal as we cross under it.

Yeah, that sounds about right

Found on today's XKCD. Yup, that sounds exactly like what I do.

Leeuwarden

I'm currently close to Heerenveen in Friesland and I haven't been doing much of anything. I am staying with relatives and there is a very lovely garden and wonderful books to read and I don't have to do much. I have also just recently discovered the wonderful supply of lemon quark (at the grocery store, I shouldn't be that surprised). The weather has been lovely and I have been highly unmotivated to move anywhere.

However, I did manage to visit my second cousin in Leeuwarden. First the bus using the strippenkarden (spelled completely wrong I know). All bus fares are standardized for the cities of the Netherlands, so bus ticketes you buy can be used in any town. Then the train and finally I ended up in Leeuwarden. There, with the bf of said second cousin we wandered around town and checked out the Freis museum (Mata Hari was from Leeuwarden) and then on a canal tour (number three for the Netherlands, one for each time I (re-)enter the country).

Check out this crooked building. It was built sometime around the 1500's (I think) and was built by a German man. He was used to building on rock but this time the building sunk on the sand. So the joke is this is Friesland's leaning tower of Pisa. However, if you look closely you can see the difference is here the walls are crooked but the doors and windows are straight.


After that was pizza for dinner and mine was great:

• tomato sauce
  
• cheese
  
• Gorgonzola cheese
  
• asparagus
  
• garlic
  
• onion
  
• pineapple
  
• bacon

After that it was a game of Settler's of Catan. I feel the urge to write that I indeed won said game of Settler's, even though it was in dutch...

I have some photos to upload later, but my stuff is in complete disarray. I am also being consumed with mosquito's here and hope to have at least some blood left to take me back to Canada (*sniff* I almost wrote take me back home to Vancouver). People of Vancouver, rejoice in your wonderful lack of mosquito's! Truly it is a worker's paradise

The cheese truck

I'm in Holland and can you believe it! They have a truck that comes to your door and delivers cheese!

Paris

Paris (like Rome and Berlin) was huge. Unlike Berlin (and even Rome) they had an excellent Metro system for getting around the town. I arrived at my hostel and was a bit disappointed as I thought the rooms were for four people but instead it was for six. Anyway, first up is a picture of a pretty good looking lion (but I can't remember where it was taken from).

Then the Arc d'Triumph. It was huge, I believe it is the arch that someone flew a biplane through. You could go to the top and on my second to last day I climbed the stairs with my aunts.

The Eiffel Tower was very pretty and very very crowded.

You can see some of the crowds and also the military personal who were guarding important Paris monuments including the Eiffel tower.


The next day we went to Versailles, one of the two places in Paris I really wanted to visit (including the Louvre). Talk about industrial tourism! This time you didn't have a guide walking through the castle and it was PACKED. The palace was very pretty however, and the gardens behind where *huge*. As is in the order of km's huge. So if you were willing to walk you could rapidly leave the crowds behind.

Here you can see the crowds as we walk past room after room with nothing in them but paintings. Versailles is similar to the Doge's palace which I visited in Venice. I wonder if I would be as shocked if I visited it again. Probably not, but still, it had more impressive rooms than Versailles.

Here is the famous hall of mirrors. It was as packed as the Vatican.

Here is a lovely view of the Palace looking from the gardens behind. It was very impressive and very large and you can see we haven't travelled very far and the crowds are already thinning out.

This is the famous Apollo fountain, too bad it isn't running. None of the fountains were running and I heard it had to do with the economic crises. Good god, you mean they normally stuff even more people in the palace!

There were so many different parts of the gardens to see. After the main palace we walked to the grand and small Trianons (more palaces of some sort that I haven't searched on wikipedia). The small Trianon was famous as being the special place of Marie Antoinette.

Man did she do some pretty interesting things. The gardens and grounds, though much smaller than the main palace, were still huge and had many different places to visit. For example, here was a rock cave formation that was carved to look wild and it had a pond and waterfall behind it and secret little paths wandering around it.

Then there is the famous farm and village that was built for Marie Antoinette. The village was on a pond (remember, this is all in the small garden of the small Trianon) and the village was very picturesque. There was a mill, and a milk parlour and various other buildings, animal pens, gardens, paths etc.

Here is a lovely picturesque village house. We couldn't enter any of them and you could see some were in disrepair.

After our huge walk around Versailles we visited the Orsay museum. This place was fantastic! It had many of the easily recognizable paintings of the impressionistic period and wasn't too crowded. Also in the museum was an amazing collection of Art Nouveau furniture and objects (I really like this style).

Here are two paintings I liked. First is the flower reflections on the knights armor.

And this very ...interesting painting of Jesus (yeah more Jesus!) and the 12 disciples.

The next day was an early morning (early because some dork in the room decided to set an alarm. That's not a problem except he hit the snooze button for the next hour!). Anyway, next morning, off to Notre Dame! The outside was fantastic.
And the inside was lovely, here is the large rose window which sadly I could just not make less blurry.

And I really liked the back and took my version of an arty picture.

Next I went to the Pantheon. Another Pantheon. This was beautiful and it had a huge central dome. From it hung Focult's pendulum, mimicing the original experiment demonstrating that the earth rotated.

There were many beautiful paintings in this building and the dome was huge.


Here's a great lion on a tapestry.

Next I rushed off to see the Paris Opera house. This was a grand building and I was familiar with it from the book the Phantom of the Opera

So of course I had to take a photo of box 5. Though there were several floors that had their own box 5.

The grand staircase.

While touring the opera, this man who made the chairs took me on a small tour of the opera house boxes. He opened a bunch of different boxes for me and I had interesting views of the theatre. He said that the chair backs were stuffed with horsehair and the chair seats were stuffed with some kind of plant material. To the left of the stage you can see the fancy boxes for the emperor. The empress would sit on the other side and they could see each other across the hall during the performance. The big fancy boxes had seats and back rooms because often you would come to the opera to show you could spend money buying expensive seats but then you would want to have a meeting while the music was playing, or perhaps a romantic rendezvous.

Ah the chandelier.

Finally (my busy third day wasn't complete yet) we went to the Louvre. It was open late and that was a good thing because this place was HUGE. Paris was very hot the entire time we were there and here I am cooling off my feet in the fountain as I waited for my relatives to join me.

The Louvre was also very busy.

Check out the crowds in front of the (very tiny) Mona Lisa. You couldn't even get close to see the painting (you also weren't allowed to take photos of the crowds).

I actually spent less time visiting the Louvre than expected. They had Italian art but I saw many great paintings in Italy. They had an excellent Roman collection but I saw many similar things in Rome. Berlin had much more impressive Persian/oriental items and I had seen many Dutch genre paintings in Holland. However, there was still much to surprise, for example they had many different animal mummies, complete with wooden and stone sarcophagi (like the fish here)

And they had great statues. I really liked Cupid and Psyche.


I thought this was a lovely lady statue lying on a blanket but I was wrong.

And the lion biting Hercules in the butt.

And Napoleon's apartments were fantastic (here's his throne).

The next day I took the train to Disney Paris. They say it is only 25 minutes from downtown Paris, but even then it takes half an hour to get to the outer edge of 'downtown Paris' where they are getting their estimates from. Anyway, I had a great time. I last went to a Disney park when I was a kid (11). And yes, there were sobbing children at the park, but they were greatly diluted in the crowds. It seems that fake castles and princesses are much more appealing to children than the real ones where the most exciting things are the paintings on the walls.

Ah Space Mountain (in Disney Paris called Voyage 2). I remember this ride the most when I went to Disney in Florida when I was a kid. The Space Mountain in Paris seemed much superior, twists and turns and just missing hitting planets as you whirled around. A fantastic ride.

I'm not that fond of Mickey mouse but I did get to see some Disney princesses. I met up with some people told me some stories about working for Disney. To become a Princess they have all the girls line up looking straight. Then to the side and then they walk along the line (yes, no, yes, yes, no, no). Then the girls that stay get make-up and the process is repeated. If you look enough like the character then you get tested for nature. You need to act like the princess and they give you scenarios (like, the little girl is screaming, as princess Belle, act out this situation). After that you go to princess training and learn more about how to act like the princess. I also learned there are different levels of Disney princesses. The parade princesses are those that most look like the character and are used in the parades and promotional material. Some girls want so badly to be a Disney princess that if they don't look the part they will even go and have a nose job so they can try again.

I even had my photo taken with Eric and Ariel. I think this one might displace my photo with the UBC Mace in the awesome-ness hierarchy.

Disney Paris also had a Thunder Mountain roller coaster and it was fantastic as well.

Finally, the park and attractions is just a matrix holding the huge number of Disney stores together. I had my heart set on these pillows.... but managed to avoid temptation.


So that for me was Paris! I didn't sleep much, I saw a lot and I am happy to be back in Holland not doing a whole lot besides reading and sitting in the sunshine. Wow, soon it is back to Canada!