So.....it's been 3 months since I've written anything. What has transpired in these past three months, you ask? Well, more than you can imagine. A brief summary:
Went to Chicago for 10 days
Went to Germany for 8 days
Spent 24 hours in Amsterdam seeing old friends
Drove 200+km/hour on the German autobahn
Went to Finland
Went to Thailand to meet up with old friends for 9 days
Got the Job of my Dreams
I guess with that precursor, it would seem fair to explain how exactly all of this went down.
My last blog post was August 7th. As planned, on August 16th, I flew to Chicago, and was there for work/visiting family until August 25th. I then flew back to China, arriving on August 26th, before leaving for Germany August 29th. As you can imagine, my internal clock was a bit messed up for a few days.
Anyway, Germany was interesting. Despite my having formerly lived in their neighbor, the Netherlands, I'd never been to Germany, though I did connect in Frankfurt back in 2009 when flying Rome-->Istanbul on Lufthansa. We arrived in Frankfurt and took the train straight from there to Cologne for the SPOGA+GAFA trade fair, a major trade fair involving basically all outdoor-type products (and may others, though outdoor definitely seemed to be the emphasis). Our 9 days in Cologne were sensational, Cologne was a marvelous city of a decent size, full of great views of the Rhine River, nice historical sites, phenomenal beer, and a whole host of other German stereotypes including but not limited to lots of Volkswagens, a very efficient public transport system, an infinite selection of different meats, cheeses, and breads, and a whole host of surly (but in fact quite friendly) Germans! During our time in Cologne, we worked about 7 days at the convention center, and had a couple of days to sort of explore the city.
From Cologne, we had 2 days following the expo as "free time" before our flight back to Hong Kong. My boss, Jacky, and I pored over a map of Europe for about 20 minutes, talking about places that seemed to be within reasonable distance of Cologne. After intense debate centering around my hatred of Brussels, Belgium, we decided that the best thing to do would be to rent a car and drive to Amsterdam. As I was the only one of the 4 people there who knew how to drive, I was chosen as the driver. We got to Enterprise to pick up our reserved car, only to encounter a slight problem.....
The car was a stickshift. In the United States, we NEVER use manual cars. I would guess ~2% of the cars on the road in the US today are manual, and many of them are old and driven by either proper car enthusiasts, crazy people, or, up until about 5 years ago, my grandmother. So obviously I have no idea how to drive a stickshift car.
After making several sad attempts at getting the thing out of the parking lot, I decided to call it quits, and asked if they had another car. They did not, however a place down the road did, so down the road we went. After renting a little 4-door Renault, it was off to Amsterdam via the famed German Autobahn. And justifiably famed it was.
After reaching a speed of 201km/hr (this was literally the fastest the car could go....I was flooring it), I was amazed to see Mercedes's, BMWs, Audis, etc., flying by me in the left lane at what must have been 250+km/hr. Absolutely mental. The highway was remarkably well-paved and in excellent shape. Upon our arrival in Amsterdam, it took around 1hr of driving through the incredible narrow and confusing canal streets in order to find our hostel, which ended up being right in the center of town. It then took me another hour to find parking and return to the hostel.
Anyway, so our 24 hours in Amsterdam (as it were, it was exactly 24 hours, given that I parked the car, paid something like 45 euros for 24 hours of parking, and we got back to the car at the end of the parking time and hightailed it back to Frankfurt) was excellent. I was able to catch up with two old friends from exchange, Marije and Roald, and chatted a bit about their lives as young recent university graduates in the Netherlands. Interesting stuff.
The drive back to Frankfurt was fairly uneventful, however upon return to Frankfurt we did encounter a small problem--a flat tire. Now, this could have been a horrendous situation: we're in downtown Frankfurt, very far from the airport, very far from any car rental place, and we get a flat, five hours before our flight back to HK. Thankfully, we broke down right next to a car repair place.
"OK, well this could be worse, I assume they'll have tires here", I said, trying to sound optimistic.
As it would turn out, no, they did not have tires here. Nor did anyplace nearby. Well, we seemed screwed. However, in a miraculous turn of events, we called the rental car company. And this is how that went:
"Hi, we've just had a flat. We're at some car repair shop right next to the Commerzbank Tower"
"OK, here is what you should do: leave the car there. Give them the keys. We will have it towed later. You will have 120 euros (~$150) deducted from your deposit on the car to cover the cost of tire/towage. Get a cab or metro to the airport. Have a good day"
And Richard Dawkins cried out, "Thank Charles Darwin!"
And so we did.
Anyway, while I did feel slightly dodgy about just handing the car keys to some German guy and hoping for the best, we had few other options, so that's what we did. (update: they really did only take 120 euros from my account. Amazing)
So we got to the airport with time to spare. Only to find out Lufthansa had gone on strike over a decrease in the allowable consumption of German beer by flight crew during flights (flight crew members are now limited to consuming 10 pints on domestic flights, 15 on international). Among the flights affected....Frankfurt-->Hong Kong. So we were rerouted on Finnair via Helsinki. Consequently, I now have a Finland EU exit stamp in my passport, which is something I can't say I saw coming when I woke up that morning.
After returning to the great People's Republic of China, I was here for about 3 weeks working before heading to Thailand for Chinese National Holiday to meet Dan, one of my good friends from High School who currently lives in Vegas. I also met with my friend Tina from Illinois State who is currently studying abroad at Thammasat University in Bangkok.
Put bluntly, the trip to Bangkok was 9 days of drinking on Khao San Rd., chatting with Chinese tourists in Chinese while Dan watched and had me translate, and doing very little in the way of actual sightseeing. Though as I'd previously been to Bangkok twice and seen most of what there was to see, this was no great loss.
One very interesting thing to come out of the Thailand excursion, however, was an email from an old coworker of mine from SES WORLD SKIES in the Netherlands. She was short and to the point, something like:
Hi Blaine, how have you been doing lately? In case you haven't heard, I left SES, and am currently working for Company X. We're looking for new analysts, I was wondering if you'd be interested in applying?
I had a look at the job description. 3 things stood out at me:
1) I would be writing research papers for money. This is something I've previously done and would do for free
2) I can make my own hours/work from home
3) "We are very flexible in terms of location, provided there is sufficient internet and telephony services"
Well, as anyone who knows me can imagine, number 3 is a pretty dangerous proposition. So I applied. And interviewed. And interviewed again. And interviewed again. And on November 9th, 2012, I received an email making me an offer I couldn't refuse.
And I didn't refuse it.
So now I will be leaving Shenzhen. Having resigned earlier this week (which went remarkably well with my boss), my last day with my current company will be November 29th. I will be returning to Chicago the next day and staying through the holidays, before taking a 1-way trip I booked yesterday to Seoul, via San Francisco, on December 28th. Intention is to look at apartments in Seoul for a couple of weeks, and if I can find some decent ones for some decent prices, I will live in Seoul for probably a year or so, learn some Korean, eat some kimchi, and probably learn to Gangnam Style like you would not believe. If apartments in Seoul prove unreasonably expensive or cramped, plan is to head to Beijing or possibly somewhere in stupidly northern China like Harbin.
Anyway! So that's all, folks. It seems my year or so in Shenzhen will be coming to a rather abrupt and bittersweet end. I briefly toyed with the idea of staying in this city, as I really do love it, but at one point I realized that if a 2-years ago version of myself was told that at age 24, with a fair bit of cash saved up, I'd be told I can go live anywhere in the world, and that I chose a place that is 1) the city I've just spent the last year living in, and 2) Shenzhen, China, I would have thought this to be a terribly unimaginative choice. Consequently, Seoul it is, at least for now. I suppose I'll try to put at least one more post up here from Shenzhen, though who knows.
Some other assorted goings on and interesting events as of late:
1.) Text received from a good friend of mine here in Shenzhen the other day: "Most bizarre thing I've ever seen in Shenzhen. Just arrived at this technology park, fancy office complex and there is a homeless guy who looks like he arrived from feral middle of nowhere yesterday with his dick out walking around pissing on the pavement and no one is paying any attention"
Well, no one comes to China because it's the most civilized place in the world...
2.) 2 nights ago when walking home through a park, my friend and I witnessed what can only be described as a many hundred person dance orgy. Basically, there was a huge public square that was fairly logically divided into four areas. In what we'll call "area 1" were several hundred people following the lead of some guy doing the Gangnam Style, with the song itself blasting out. In "area 2", there were people doing the tango. "Area 3" was ballroom dancing, and "area 4" was a sort of traditional Chinese-ish Tai Chi sort of dance.
So I suppose you'd not find that at home.
3.) This article: http://www.chinasmack.com/2012/pictures/chinese-boy-defecates-in-guangzhou-subway-netizens-shocked.html
4.) I ate at a fairly traditional Cantonese restaurant a few weeks back. Outside the restaurant, they had a display case with dead dogs hanging there for purchase. This no longer unsettles me, as you see it all the time here. However, halfway through the meal I had to use the toilet. I went back to the toilet, which was on the side of the restaurant outside in an alleyway. I had to wait outside as it was in use. I saw, to my sort of perplexed but not so surprised amusement and horror, was a sheep's head, cut in half down the middle (imagine a human face cut in half right down the middle through your nose, sort of like a 2-face type of idea), sitting in a basket on the ground just next to the toilet. I have no idea what this sheep head was doing there, but I can only hope it was not waiting for someone to purchase the "boiled sheep head" and consume it, as it was just sitting outside in the horrendously filthy alleyway in the horrendously filthy part of Shenzhen known as Buji.
So obviously, it must be impossible for the readership consisting of 5 people to imagine why I'm a bit apprehensive to commit to another year in China, and am rather going to a much, much more developed, civilized, and generally pleasant place that is Seoul, South Korea.
So now that we've all caught up on what I've been up to, heard some other random and disgusting stories, and have become thoroughly bored of this blog post, I will wrap it up.
I will be leaving 2 weeks from yesterday for Chicago, and will be around for 4 weeks. So any friends of mine in Chicagoland, let me know if you'd like to get together during December. That's all for now, more to come as it develops.
Showing posts with label Amsterdam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amsterdam. Show all posts
Friday, November 16, 2012
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Missing the Exotic Vibes of Asia in the Disturbingly Normal Netherlands
Regarding the title to this blog post:
Asia is a different world. No where else that I've been can you just see something absolutely ridiculous happening (elephant walking down a street, street sign preventing bringing Durians into a subway system, bullet holes in bus windows, etc.) and just dismiss it nonchalantly as "well, that's Asia". Everything is abnormal, and your senses simply get overrun by the pandemonium that is everyday life going on in the world's largest continent. After awhile it becomes a bit of a nuisance, but overall it's a pretty beautiful way to live your life, as far as just having absolutely perfectly structured anarchy going on all around you. Europe, as I knew beforehand, is extremely different. It's just normal. Yeah, you'll see some weird things in Amsterdam, but overall, the Netherlands is just incredibly normal. Everyone bikes, which is odd for an American, but that's not shocking or offensive, its just different. Also, pace of life is very much slower than ANYWHERE in Asia. This could be a result of the time of year (Europe goes on holiday in late July-early August. Yes, the continent of Europe. All of it), but in my other experiences in Europe its been much the same. What I'm trying to say here, is that I'm sort of missing the absolute sensory overload and pandemonium that was, and still certainly is, Asia. We'll see how this goes in the next 6 months once I'm back in the states. ANYWAY:
So I've got about three weeks left in the Netherlands. All things considered, it's been a pretty crazy year so far. As both regular readers know, I'm heading to Colombia after this for about 9-ish days, much to the general chagrin of my family, but in fairness, I'm graduating college pretty soon and have few opportunities left to travel recreationally. Plus, cheap airfare is a powerful motivator. This last week here has been pretty good:
Friday of last week, Hunter and I went to a friend's house and hung out for a bit before heading out into The Hague for a night out. Not a bad time at all, except for one of our friends who fell off his bike on the ride into The Hague and was bleeding profusely for the next 3 hours or so. Rookie error, as they say, but eh, pretty hilarious nonetheless.
Saturday we headed to Amsterdam to play tourist. We started the day at the Heineken Brewery around 1:30pm or so. It was a pretty awesome place, for 15 euros you got a tour, 3 free Heinekens, and a wristband similar to the LiveStrong ones, except instead of endorsing cancer research, they endorse alcoholism. Welcome to Holland. After a 2-2.5 hr tour, we headed from there over to Leidseplein (probably misspelled). This was just sort of a square with some restaurants, touristy shops, etc. From there we had dinner at the Hard Rock before going to a pub crawl organized by some company in Amsterdam, and, for 20 euros, offered a free t-shirt, entry+1 drink at 6 clubs, and some "vodka" between bars. The quotations there indicate that it was basically 95% fruit juice and 5% vodka in 2L bottle that they just poured into your mouth. The alcohol content was so pitiful that it could have easily passed in a Madrasah without anyone blinking an eye. The bar crawl was rather disappointing, and the night ended with us jumping into the canals of Amsterdam with some Serbians. Yes, you read that correctly. To my knowledge I do not have any intestinal parasites as a result of said actions, but I'm no doctor...
Sunday we went to Zaanse Schans with Samer and Laura. Basically, imagine the most incredibly stereotypical Dutch town you can think of, and multiply it's Dutchness by about 7. The place was shocking. Just tons of picturesque windmills caressed by canals which extended into fields of tulips and other such things. Cottages where they showed you how Dutch cheese is made, a place where you can see how they've mechanized the creation of Dutch wooden clogs, just really really touristy Dutch. Overall it was a great time, I got some good photos and bought a pair of wooden clogs (which I intend on wearing with disturbingly decent regularity upon my return to the States). We also got some magnificent weather during the day at Zaanse Schans, which made the day all the more excellent. One problem was the fact that the entire town had a whopping one ATM, which was conveniently out of order (those Dutch, can't take them anywhere), so I had to borrow a bit of money from Hunter for about 6 hours.
The work week was interesting. Henning, Simon, and Mr. Sprague were all out of the office, so I had no one to report to. Consequently, Monday consisted of me just putting random variables into graph format to see if I could discover anything meaningful among our European customers. Tuesday I did a fair bit of editing on my final project, as advised by Henning via phone. Wednesday and Thursday I did some editing that was suggested by Regina. Sidenote on Regina: she works in Market Development (I think?). Her comments on my paper were extraordinary. The sharpness (for want of a more existent word) of her critique was literally unbelievable. Absolutely incredible how valuable the critique was. Anyway, Friday Mr. Sprague returned from Singapore. The flight was 13 hours, he arrived at the house at like 7:45am, and was in the office before 9:00am. The phrase "Is THAT all?" got thrown around a lot in Hong Kong, but I feel like that's about the only thing to say here. Hunter's work week was a bit hilarious. Thursday and Friday his 3 immediate bosses were all gone on various excursions, and at one point I went down to his desk to say hello. On his side of the floor there's about 12 desks, and 11 of them were empty. He was literally the only person on his side of the floor. Absolutely hilarious.
This weekend should be pretty quiet, it's been a good, long while since I've just had a day to relax, which will likely be tomorrow. As I'm typing this, Hunter has just woken up, and I think the plan for today is to go to some other town in NL, either Utrecht (home of the Peace of Utrecht in 17?? which ended the War of Spanish Succession, if AP Euro serves me right), Nijmegen (home of Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678? which ended something?), Rotterdam (Europe's largest port), or Delft. We'll see.
As I said at the beginning of this blog post, I've got three weeks left here. It's incredible that I've been here 2 months already, and that I've been away for about 7 months or so. It should be interesting to re-immerse myself in American culture after this whole world tour. Not a whole lot more to say at this point, I'm beginning to get a bit road-weary, if you will, for the fact that I have not seen my closest friends from home since before Christmas (with the exception of Dan, who I obviously saw during the entire trip to Japan in January). Turns out I've travelled to 11 countries on this trip not including Dubai (where I only had a layover). I've flown about 33,000 miles, and I have a fair few more to go in the coming month. And I wonder why I've spend about 60% of my money during the past 7 months...
Missing the exotic vibes of Asia a fair bit in the terribly normal Netherlands
Asia is a different world. No where else that I've been can you just see something absolutely ridiculous happening (elephant walking down a street, street sign preventing bringing Durians into a subway system, bullet holes in bus windows, etc.) and just dismiss it nonchalantly as "well, that's Asia". Everything is abnormal, and your senses simply get overrun by the pandemonium that is everyday life going on in the world's largest continent. After awhile it becomes a bit of a nuisance, but overall it's a pretty beautiful way to live your life, as far as just having absolutely perfectly structured anarchy going on all around you. Europe, as I knew beforehand, is extremely different. It's just normal. Yeah, you'll see some weird things in Amsterdam, but overall, the Netherlands is just incredibly normal. Everyone bikes, which is odd for an American, but that's not shocking or offensive, its just different. Also, pace of life is very much slower than ANYWHERE in Asia. This could be a result of the time of year (Europe goes on holiday in late July-early August. Yes, the continent of Europe. All of it), but in my other experiences in Europe its been much the same. What I'm trying to say here, is that I'm sort of missing the absolute sensory overload and pandemonium that was, and still certainly is, Asia. We'll see how this goes in the next 6 months once I'm back in the states. ANYWAY:
So I've got about three weeks left in the Netherlands. All things considered, it's been a pretty crazy year so far. As both regular readers know, I'm heading to Colombia after this for about 9-ish days, much to the general chagrin of my family, but in fairness, I'm graduating college pretty soon and have few opportunities left to travel recreationally. Plus, cheap airfare is a powerful motivator. This last week here has been pretty good:
Friday of last week, Hunter and I went to a friend's house and hung out for a bit before heading out into The Hague for a night out. Not a bad time at all, except for one of our friends who fell off his bike on the ride into The Hague and was bleeding profusely for the next 3 hours or so. Rookie error, as they say, but eh, pretty hilarious nonetheless.
Saturday we headed to Amsterdam to play tourist. We started the day at the Heineken Brewery around 1:30pm or so. It was a pretty awesome place, for 15 euros you got a tour, 3 free Heinekens, and a wristband similar to the LiveStrong ones, except instead of endorsing cancer research, they endorse alcoholism. Welcome to Holland. After a 2-2.5 hr tour, we headed from there over to Leidseplein (probably misspelled). This was just sort of a square with some restaurants, touristy shops, etc. From there we had dinner at the Hard Rock before going to a pub crawl organized by some company in Amsterdam, and, for 20 euros, offered a free t-shirt, entry+1 drink at 6 clubs, and some "vodka" between bars. The quotations there indicate that it was basically 95% fruit juice and 5% vodka in 2L bottle that they just poured into your mouth. The alcohol content was so pitiful that it could have easily passed in a Madrasah without anyone blinking an eye. The bar crawl was rather disappointing, and the night ended with us jumping into the canals of Amsterdam with some Serbians. Yes, you read that correctly. To my knowledge I do not have any intestinal parasites as a result of said actions, but I'm no doctor...
Sunday we went to Zaanse Schans with Samer and Laura. Basically, imagine the most incredibly stereotypical Dutch town you can think of, and multiply it's Dutchness by about 7. The place was shocking. Just tons of picturesque windmills caressed by canals which extended into fields of tulips and other such things. Cottages where they showed you how Dutch cheese is made, a place where you can see how they've mechanized the creation of Dutch wooden clogs, just really really touristy Dutch. Overall it was a great time, I got some good photos and bought a pair of wooden clogs (which I intend on wearing with disturbingly decent regularity upon my return to the States). We also got some magnificent weather during the day at Zaanse Schans, which made the day all the more excellent. One problem was the fact that the entire town had a whopping one ATM, which was conveniently out of order (those Dutch, can't take them anywhere), so I had to borrow a bit of money from Hunter for about 6 hours.
The work week was interesting. Henning, Simon, and Mr. Sprague were all out of the office, so I had no one to report to. Consequently, Monday consisted of me just putting random variables into graph format to see if I could discover anything meaningful among our European customers. Tuesday I did a fair bit of editing on my final project, as advised by Henning via phone. Wednesday and Thursday I did some editing that was suggested by Regina. Sidenote on Regina: she works in Market Development (I think?). Her comments on my paper were extraordinary. The sharpness (for want of a more existent word) of her critique was literally unbelievable. Absolutely incredible how valuable the critique was. Anyway, Friday Mr. Sprague returned from Singapore. The flight was 13 hours, he arrived at the house at like 7:45am, and was in the office before 9:00am. The phrase "Is THAT all?" got thrown around a lot in Hong Kong, but I feel like that's about the only thing to say here. Hunter's work week was a bit hilarious. Thursday and Friday his 3 immediate bosses were all gone on various excursions, and at one point I went down to his desk to say hello. On his side of the floor there's about 12 desks, and 11 of them were empty. He was literally the only person on his side of the floor. Absolutely hilarious.
This weekend should be pretty quiet, it's been a good, long while since I've just had a day to relax, which will likely be tomorrow. As I'm typing this, Hunter has just woken up, and I think the plan for today is to go to some other town in NL, either Utrecht (home of the Peace of Utrecht in 17?? which ended the War of Spanish Succession, if AP Euro serves me right), Nijmegen (home of Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678? which ended something?), Rotterdam (Europe's largest port), or Delft. We'll see.
As I said at the beginning of this blog post, I've got three weeks left here. It's incredible that I've been here 2 months already, and that I've been away for about 7 months or so. It should be interesting to re-immerse myself in American culture after this whole world tour. Not a whole lot more to say at this point, I'm beginning to get a bit road-weary, if you will, for the fact that I have not seen my closest friends from home since before Christmas (with the exception of Dan, who I obviously saw during the entire trip to Japan in January). Turns out I've travelled to 11 countries on this trip not including Dubai (where I only had a layover). I've flown about 33,000 miles, and I have a fair few more to go in the coming month. And I wonder why I've spend about 60% of my money during the past 7 months...
Missing the exotic vibes of Asia a fair bit in the terribly normal Netherlands
Thursday, July 15, 2010
The World Cup Final, and Other Rants Ranging from Lorenz Curves to Caterpillar Scholarships
It is a rather long blog post, but I feel like I've kept it decently interesting. If nothing else, it's not as though I'm forcing you to read it.
So it’s been a little while since I posted anything, and, while these last 12 days or so have been uneventful relatively speaking, it’s still been 12 days of living in a country that is, despite becoming more and more familiar, still quite foreign. Let’s get the boring stuff out of the way first: work.
Work has gone well lately. Today I finished my complete analysis on our largest European customers. The analysis was like 42 pages of just dense, dry, boring numbers. I tried to liven it up with colorful vocabulary, weird case studies, quips, commentaries, inappropriate or immature jokes, and other such things that might keep the reader out of a mental institution, but it was still a rather tough pill to swallow. At least the graphs were nice. And I got to use “jamboree”. Speaking of not-often used words, the other day (and by that I mean like 3 weeks ago) I was proofreading a friend’s paper when I came across the word “philosophes”. No, that was not “philosophies” with a typo. “Philosophes”, or, (generally) French Enlightenment thinkers. I hadn’t heard that word since literally 2006. Definitely made my day. Now that you’re all questioning whether I belong in a mental institution…
Henning is currently on holiday in Poland with his family. He left last Tuesday, and beforehand I had a meeting with he and Simon to sort of hand over control of me from Henning to Simon. Consequently I’m reporting to Simon now for the time being, which would be nice, if he hadn’t left this morning for the UK. So basically I’m now outsourced labor despite not having been outsourced. But yes, I’m outsourced in that I am working elsewhere from my immediate bosses and will be taking a lot of orders via phone. I want to clarify that I’m not complaining about this, I just find it rather interesting (just like I found it interesting when Henning told me that SES employees get 27 paid vacation days per year. Twenty. Seven. Let’s say the office is open 50 weeks per year times 5 days, that’s 250 days. Over 10% of the days are therefore vacation. In theory you could basically take off from Thanksgiving onwards and not come back until next year and still be paid. I’ll be that’s the very longest thought within a single set of parenthesis that any of the 6 readers of this blog have ever seen. And if it’s not, I’d really like to hear what is. Seriously, email it to me, bvcurci@ilstu.edu).
ANYWAY… other than that, I showed Ludmila my Russia+CIS analysis (which dealt exclusively with her customers). Brief aside: Ludmila is Bulgarian. She is a phenomenally sweet lady, but, by nature of her Eastern European-ness (if there is such a word), I was expecting her thoughts on my paper to generally be “what can you improve”, rather than “what have you done right”. Again, I’d like to point out that she is one of my favorite people at the office, and I do really enjoy working with her, but I was just expecting a more negative critique. Quite the contrary, the first thing she said was how impressed she was with the writing quality, and that there was significantly more in this paper than she had told me in the interview I had with her, which showed a good bit of initiative and outside research. She also gave me some wonderful pointers on how to improve the paper, and I definitely feel like it is better as a result. Overall a very good chat, and one which really showed that she is a very skillful critique, as she picked up a number of small details that I’d’ve never picked up had I read the thing 10 times (which I’m probably absorbed enough in my own work to do). Other than that, on the work front not a whole lot has been going on. Again, I finished my novel of a European customer analysis (the table of contents was two pages, it contained 14,933 words, it required an industrial-strength stapler, 7 teams of oxen were required to carry it from my desk to Simon’s office (a path now known as the Oregon Trail), the weight alone nearly collapsed the building, a rainforest the size of Ukraine was cut down to produce the paper, and other massive under-statements like that. You read that correctly. Understatements…).
So now to the fun (or… not so fun?) stuff, the World Cup. As many of you probably saw (and as many of you didn’t because I’d assume that about 75% of the readers (i.e. 3 people) are American), the World Cup happened to occur this summer. For those who don’t know, Holland made the final. I already went into detail about the pandemonium surrounding our quarterfinal beheading of Dunga and his joga bonito-ing Brazilian fighting squad, so that’s the end of that. Tuesday of last week we played Uruguay in the semi’s. We went out to a 3-1 lead late in the second half, Uruguay scored a 2nd to make it close, but we held for a 3-2 win. The Netherlands went into pandemonium. There were fireworks, flares, mortars, bazookas, insurgents, Taliban (now we’re getting politically incorrect)… but you get the idea, it was nuts. The next night Spain upset arguably the most German team on the planet, Germany, with a 1-0 win. This made an all-European final of Spain and Netherlands, in a matchup that pitted the stylish, free-flowing Spaniards against the orange, oranje, and anaranjado Dutch.
Hunter and I decided that it would probably be a good choice to go to Amsterdam for the final, because there were allegedly 80,000 people at Museumplein for the semifinal, and therefore it was reasonable to expect at least like 50-100 people there for the final (conservatively speaking, of course). Turned out it was closer to 150,000 people, or roughly the population of Siberia. Crammed into a space the size of a large elevator. This led to an incredible atmosphere that included truly staggering amounts of the following: orange, Dutchmen, Heineken, vuvuzelas, shoes (each person was probably wearing two… so think about it, three hundred thousand shoes!), and did I mention the ORANGE. So much orange it was unbelievable. I bought an orange t-shirt for an outrageously expensive 5 euros. I nearly told the lady m-goi, thinking “I must be back in Asia for prices this cheap”. Anyway, so the match was being broadcast on 3 massive (and my God do I mean massive) televisions perched about 20-25 feet above this sea of orange (or the Orange Sea (not to be confused with the Red Sea), as I christened it just now in a failed attempt at wit). The match atmosphere was intense, though the match was about as exciting as reading my report on our European customers. So it was a positively thrilling affair. Anyway, in a throwback to the 2006 Italy-Germany semifinal, no one scored for like 115 minutes. Then, Andres Iniesta stuck a knife into the hearts of 16 million Dutch and two Americans (I believe their names were Gustovson… Anyone get the reference????) as he scored a goal to put Spain up 1-0, tearing off his kit to reveal the “Dani Jarque siempre con nosotros” t-shirt, an homage to his fallen friend Dani Jarque who died of a heart attack at age 26 last year. Anyway, so afterwards, the closest thing I can compare Amsterdam to (even more so after watching Shaun of the Dead last night) was a zombie apocalypse. Yeah that’s right, I just compared a world cup loss to a zombie apocalypse. Which coffee shop have I been frequenting, you ask? Well basically here is what I mean: the 150,000 or so people that had been watching the match just sort of left Museumplein. They were walking the streets in hordes just sort of walking without purpose. Their faces were full of a combination of sadness, disbelief, horror, and just general lack of comprehension at what had just occurred. They were essentially just walking to avoid standing still. We nearly saw several fights break out due to people being in such a foul mood. Weird, weird stuff.
Work Monday was a bit dead with the exception of Nuria (who is Spanish), as she bounced around the office. She was very graceful in victory, however, refusing to be overly cocky, celebratory, etc., which was good to see (though probably not something I’d ever do). Anyway, so that’s about it for the World Cup, only 47 more months until Brasil 2014. I now have a massive Jabulani shaped void in my life, which will likely be filled by British comedy, a developing case of workoholism, and reading SuperFreakonomics and the Lonely Planet on Colombia (month from tomorrow, should be good provided I don’t get kidnapped by a cartel… and even if that does occur, no one could argue it wouldn’t be a life experience).
ISU came through in flying colors today when I found out, a whopping 36 hours in advance, that the deadline for the Caterpillar Scholarship is tomorrow. This $2,500 scholarship is awarded to 4 College of Business students every year. One of the kids that won it last year was a juggernaut (US Marine veteran, studied abroad in Japan, just a spectacular kid), but this year there’s no one really like that, so my chances are good I think. Got some help from Grammy today on my app essay via Skype (modern technology for the win), so we’ll see. The whole 36 hours in advance thing was even more infuriating because I’d emailed the lady in charge like 6 weeks ago asking about the Caterpillar Scholarship, and she said she didn’t know but she would email me when she did. Suffice to say she did not just find out today about it. But eh, got the application in, that’s all that matters.
Read for a good long while last night about Gini coefficients and Lorenz curves, pretty interesting stuff. I’d previously understood how to interpret individual Gini coefficients, but had never really bothered to learn how they were calculated, etc. Turns out it’s a right-angled graph using a Lorenz curve and taking the area to the left of said curve divided by the total area of the graph. Or, more obviously, area to the left of the curve times 2 (as the area of the total graph is 0.5, as the axes are from 0-1). Really good stuff involving mathematical demography.
The plan for the weekend is to play tourist. Saturday we’re (Hunter and I) going to Amsterdam to see the Heineken Brewery, Amsterdam ArenA, the Hard Rock Café, etc. Sunday we’re going with Samer (another intern) to some really stereotypical Dutch town up north (stereotypical being windmills, wooden clogs, Dutch people, soft “j”s, KLM, etc.). Should be…Dutch? Yeah. Incredible to think I leave 1 month from tomorrow to go to the states for a whole 4 hours before leaving for Bogota. I’ve learned a ton this summer, and even more on my entire world tour, which is really quickly coming to an end. In fairness I’m about ready to head home, and in the words of Alexander the Great, “there are no more worlds to conquer” (aside: I know very well there is much more of the world to see, I’m just ready for a break, so at this point that’s where I’m at.) So yeah, plan is currently to leave Holland the 16th, fly to Miami the 16th, overnight layover before flying to Bogota morning of the 17th, do God knows what in Colombia until the 24th, fly home the 24th before another overnight in Miami, arrive in Chicago the 25th at 9:30am before heading down to ISU that afternoon. Should be a blast. Seriously though, should be a good time.
Note: I’m fairly satisfied with this blog post. I feel like it’s a bit lengthy but it reads reasonably well and I’ve kept it fairly entertaining I feel. If you feel the same way, I’m very glad to hear that. If not, I guess you’ll just have to punch me in the mouth next time you see me.
An enormous thank you if you’ve read my psychotic ravings. And an enormous request to not report my Taliban reference to the authorities. Other than that, good night, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, or good whatever time of day you may be reading this (except noon… who says good…noon?)
So it’s been a little while since I posted anything, and, while these last 12 days or so have been uneventful relatively speaking, it’s still been 12 days of living in a country that is, despite becoming more and more familiar, still quite foreign. Let’s get the boring stuff out of the way first: work.
Work has gone well lately. Today I finished my complete analysis on our largest European customers. The analysis was like 42 pages of just dense, dry, boring numbers. I tried to liven it up with colorful vocabulary, weird case studies, quips, commentaries, inappropriate or immature jokes, and other such things that might keep the reader out of a mental institution, but it was still a rather tough pill to swallow. At least the graphs were nice. And I got to use “jamboree”. Speaking of not-often used words, the other day (and by that I mean like 3 weeks ago) I was proofreading a friend’s paper when I came across the word “philosophes”. No, that was not “philosophies” with a typo. “Philosophes”, or, (generally) French Enlightenment thinkers. I hadn’t heard that word since literally 2006. Definitely made my day. Now that you’re all questioning whether I belong in a mental institution…
Henning is currently on holiday in Poland with his family. He left last Tuesday, and beforehand I had a meeting with he and Simon to sort of hand over control of me from Henning to Simon. Consequently I’m reporting to Simon now for the time being, which would be nice, if he hadn’t left this morning for the UK. So basically I’m now outsourced labor despite not having been outsourced. But yes, I’m outsourced in that I am working elsewhere from my immediate bosses and will be taking a lot of orders via phone. I want to clarify that I’m not complaining about this, I just find it rather interesting (just like I found it interesting when Henning told me that SES employees get 27 paid vacation days per year. Twenty. Seven. Let’s say the office is open 50 weeks per year times 5 days, that’s 250 days. Over 10% of the days are therefore vacation. In theory you could basically take off from Thanksgiving onwards and not come back until next year and still be paid. I’ll be that’s the very longest thought within a single set of parenthesis that any of the 6 readers of this blog have ever seen. And if it’s not, I’d really like to hear what is. Seriously, email it to me, bvcurci@ilstu.edu).
ANYWAY… other than that, I showed Ludmila my Russia+CIS analysis (which dealt exclusively with her customers). Brief aside: Ludmila is Bulgarian. She is a phenomenally sweet lady, but, by nature of her Eastern European-ness (if there is such a word), I was expecting her thoughts on my paper to generally be “what can you improve”, rather than “what have you done right”. Again, I’d like to point out that she is one of my favorite people at the office, and I do really enjoy working with her, but I was just expecting a more negative critique. Quite the contrary, the first thing she said was how impressed she was with the writing quality, and that there was significantly more in this paper than she had told me in the interview I had with her, which showed a good bit of initiative and outside research. She also gave me some wonderful pointers on how to improve the paper, and I definitely feel like it is better as a result. Overall a very good chat, and one which really showed that she is a very skillful critique, as she picked up a number of small details that I’d’ve never picked up had I read the thing 10 times (which I’m probably absorbed enough in my own work to do). Other than that, on the work front not a whole lot has been going on. Again, I finished my novel of a European customer analysis (the table of contents was two pages, it contained 14,933 words, it required an industrial-strength stapler, 7 teams of oxen were required to carry it from my desk to Simon’s office (a path now known as the Oregon Trail), the weight alone nearly collapsed the building, a rainforest the size of Ukraine was cut down to produce the paper, and other massive under-statements like that. You read that correctly. Understatements…).
So now to the fun (or… not so fun?) stuff, the World Cup. As many of you probably saw (and as many of you didn’t because I’d assume that about 75% of the readers (i.e. 3 people) are American), the World Cup happened to occur this summer. For those who don’t know, Holland made the final. I already went into detail about the pandemonium surrounding our quarterfinal beheading of Dunga and his joga bonito-ing Brazilian fighting squad, so that’s the end of that. Tuesday of last week we played Uruguay in the semi’s. We went out to a 3-1 lead late in the second half, Uruguay scored a 2nd to make it close, but we held for a 3-2 win. The Netherlands went into pandemonium. There were fireworks, flares, mortars, bazookas, insurgents, Taliban (now we’re getting politically incorrect)… but you get the idea, it was nuts. The next night Spain upset arguably the most German team on the planet, Germany, with a 1-0 win. This made an all-European final of Spain and Netherlands, in a matchup that pitted the stylish, free-flowing Spaniards against the orange, oranje, and anaranjado Dutch.
Hunter and I decided that it would probably be a good choice to go to Amsterdam for the final, because there were allegedly 80,000 people at Museumplein for the semifinal, and therefore it was reasonable to expect at least like 50-100 people there for the final (conservatively speaking, of course). Turned out it was closer to 150,000 people, or roughly the population of Siberia. Crammed into a space the size of a large elevator. This led to an incredible atmosphere that included truly staggering amounts of the following: orange, Dutchmen, Heineken, vuvuzelas, shoes (each person was probably wearing two… so think about it, three hundred thousand shoes!), and did I mention the ORANGE. So much orange it was unbelievable. I bought an orange t-shirt for an outrageously expensive 5 euros. I nearly told the lady m-goi, thinking “I must be back in Asia for prices this cheap”. Anyway, so the match was being broadcast on 3 massive (and my God do I mean massive) televisions perched about 20-25 feet above this sea of orange (or the Orange Sea (not to be confused with the Red Sea), as I christened it just now in a failed attempt at wit). The match atmosphere was intense, though the match was about as exciting as reading my report on our European customers. So it was a positively thrilling affair. Anyway, in a throwback to the 2006 Italy-Germany semifinal, no one scored for like 115 minutes. Then, Andres Iniesta stuck a knife into the hearts of 16 million Dutch and two Americans (I believe their names were Gustovson… Anyone get the reference????) as he scored a goal to put Spain up 1-0, tearing off his kit to reveal the “Dani Jarque siempre con nosotros” t-shirt, an homage to his fallen friend Dani Jarque who died of a heart attack at age 26 last year. Anyway, so afterwards, the closest thing I can compare Amsterdam to (even more so after watching Shaun of the Dead last night) was a zombie apocalypse. Yeah that’s right, I just compared a world cup loss to a zombie apocalypse. Which coffee shop have I been frequenting, you ask? Well basically here is what I mean: the 150,000 or so people that had been watching the match just sort of left Museumplein. They were walking the streets in hordes just sort of walking without purpose. Their faces were full of a combination of sadness, disbelief, horror, and just general lack of comprehension at what had just occurred. They were essentially just walking to avoid standing still. We nearly saw several fights break out due to people being in such a foul mood. Weird, weird stuff.
Work Monday was a bit dead with the exception of Nuria (who is Spanish), as she bounced around the office. She was very graceful in victory, however, refusing to be overly cocky, celebratory, etc., which was good to see (though probably not something I’d ever do). Anyway, so that’s about it for the World Cup, only 47 more months until Brasil 2014. I now have a massive Jabulani shaped void in my life, which will likely be filled by British comedy, a developing case of workoholism, and reading SuperFreakonomics and the Lonely Planet on Colombia (month from tomorrow, should be good provided I don’t get kidnapped by a cartel… and even if that does occur, no one could argue it wouldn’t be a life experience).
ISU came through in flying colors today when I found out, a whopping 36 hours in advance, that the deadline for the Caterpillar Scholarship is tomorrow. This $2,500 scholarship is awarded to 4 College of Business students every year. One of the kids that won it last year was a juggernaut (US Marine veteran, studied abroad in Japan, just a spectacular kid), but this year there’s no one really like that, so my chances are good I think. Got some help from Grammy today on my app essay via Skype (modern technology for the win), so we’ll see. The whole 36 hours in advance thing was even more infuriating because I’d emailed the lady in charge like 6 weeks ago asking about the Caterpillar Scholarship, and she said she didn’t know but she would email me when she did. Suffice to say she did not just find out today about it. But eh, got the application in, that’s all that matters.
Read for a good long while last night about Gini coefficients and Lorenz curves, pretty interesting stuff. I’d previously understood how to interpret individual Gini coefficients, but had never really bothered to learn how they were calculated, etc. Turns out it’s a right-angled graph using a Lorenz curve and taking the area to the left of said curve divided by the total area of the graph. Or, more obviously, area to the left of the curve times 2 (as the area of the total graph is 0.5, as the axes are from 0-1). Really good stuff involving mathematical demography.
The plan for the weekend is to play tourist. Saturday we’re (Hunter and I) going to Amsterdam to see the Heineken Brewery, Amsterdam ArenA, the Hard Rock Café, etc. Sunday we’re going with Samer (another intern) to some really stereotypical Dutch town up north (stereotypical being windmills, wooden clogs, Dutch people, soft “j”s, KLM, etc.). Should be…Dutch? Yeah. Incredible to think I leave 1 month from tomorrow to go to the states for a whole 4 hours before leaving for Bogota. I’ve learned a ton this summer, and even more on my entire world tour, which is really quickly coming to an end. In fairness I’m about ready to head home, and in the words of Alexander the Great, “there are no more worlds to conquer” (aside: I know very well there is much more of the world to see, I’m just ready for a break, so at this point that’s where I’m at.) So yeah, plan is currently to leave Holland the 16th, fly to Miami the 16th, overnight layover before flying to Bogota morning of the 17th, do God knows what in Colombia until the 24th, fly home the 24th before another overnight in Miami, arrive in Chicago the 25th at 9:30am before heading down to ISU that afternoon. Should be a blast. Seriously though, should be a good time.
Note: I’m fairly satisfied with this blog post. I feel like it’s a bit lengthy but it reads reasonably well and I’ve kept it fairly entertaining I feel. If you feel the same way, I’m very glad to hear that. If not, I guess you’ll just have to punch me in the mouth next time you see me.
An enormous thank you if you’ve read my psychotic ravings. And an enormous request to not report my Taliban reference to the authorities. Other than that, good night, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, or good whatever time of day you may be reading this (except noon… who says good…noon?)
Thursday, June 24, 2010
More Holland, South America Plans, You Know, The Usual
So it’s been about a week since I posted anything, and given the swings experienced when adjusting to a totally new culture, a week is a fairly long time to go between posts, so here we go:
Where we left off from last time, I was struggling a bit to adjust to things in The Netherlands, and longing for HK. I’m glad to report that since then things have changed significantly, most of that change taking place in the last 48 hours or so. That being said, let’s backtrack to right after my last blog post:
Last week was fairly uneventful. Henning was out of the office for a few days, and I just sort of did my own thing at work. The work week was rather long, but I learned a fair bit more about the industry, key customers, the setup of the company, etc. Last weekend was also the planned “970X run”, i.e. go to a major public transport hub and try and catch the next mode of transport to somewhere. Anyway, so the plan was to take off Friday and go somewhere, but Henning preferred that I did not take off Friday, given that I took off a few days a couple weeks ago to head down to Italy to meet with the family.
Perfectly understandable, so Friday night I decided to head to Amsterdam Schiphol Airport and attempt, knowing that it was a long shot, to just ask a KLM ticket agent if there were any not-full flights departing that evening that I could possibly fly out on for a discounted fare, given that odds are, if the flight isn’t full 2 hours before takeoff, it won’t be full. Given that Europe is the “land of high prices and unfriendly people”, they would have none of that, so I got nowhere fast from Schiphol. From there, I headed onward, relatively undeterred, to Amsterdam Centraal rail station, assuming that there’d have to be a train going somewhere Friday evening. Upon arrival, the international ticket office was closed for the night. Massively deterred, I tried walking to Amstel St. Bus Terminal, which I only knew to be “about 2km South of Centraal Station”. So naturally, having no real idea of where I was going, I just walked in a direction I knew to be South. Thankfully, Amsterdam is not a maze of a city, otherwise I might not have found Amstel St. Station. That was sarcasm. I absolutely didn’t have a chance at finding the place, by this time it was about 10:00pm, and I really didn’t feel ambitious enough to hunt down the station. Had it been HK I’d’ve taken a cab, but in Holland (or anywhere in the west), cabs aren’t retardedly cheap, so I just went back to The Hague Friday evening.
Upon waking up Saturday morning I saw that Marije (a friend of mine that I knew in Hong Kong that is Dutch, and lives in Amsterdam) had attempted to contact me via facebook regarding my plans for the big Netherlands-Japan World Cup match Saturday afternoon. I got a hold of her and she told me to come to Amsterdam to watch the match with some friends of hers in some random bar. I certainly couldn’t turn down such an invitation, especially given that I hadn’t seen Marije in like a month, so I took the train back into Amsterdam Saturday morning and met up with her and her boyfriend, Juriann at AMS Centraal. From there we went to drop off some things at their friend’s apartment, and I was able to see how Dutch students live. Not too surprisingly, it was a pretty standard, American-ish apartment. The one thing that would have looked very out of place in an American apartment was a huge soccer trophy, but that’s about it. And all the orange stuff all around. Speaking of orange, Steve Guilford (Stinen Guildford to those who know him well) would have loved the match. The bar we went to had about 60-70 people fit into a place that was about big enough for 40, and every single person there was wearing orange everything. Bright. San Francisco Giants style. Orange. Everywhere. Holland scored early in the 2nd half, and my God, did the place go absolutely nuts. Absolute pandemonium, the likes of which I can basically only compare to like, maybe the pandemonium I experienced when LSU blocked an Alabama field goal at the end of regulation to force overtime at a game I was at in 2008. But even that might be pushing it. Anyway, so that was electrifying, and Holland ended up winning 1-0. After the match we went and walked around Amsterdam for awhile, with Marije and Juriann pointing out interesting sights. I also bought a Dutch sim card for when my old European phone from last summer arrives in the mail from the parentals. With said sim card came a free orange vuvuzela in celebration of the world cup. Welcome to Holland (or Europe, for that matter) during the world’s biggest sporting event. So now that the random tangent about vuvuzelas is over, back to Saturday. After hanging around for a bit I headed back to The Hague Saturday evening and watched more World Cup.
Sunday involved some (shocker) World Cup watching, bike riding (found a very decent little Japanese restaurant in downtown Wassenaar), and talking to the Old AlanKey via Skype on his cell phone. I didn’t even know that was possible, but apparently AlanKey is able to talk into his cell phone as though he’s making a call, but have me be on the other end on Skype. What an age we live in, and to think, S.E.S. World Skies is (maybe) involved in the transmission of that info, given our involvement in everything (including World Cup broadcasting to North and South America). AlanKey was in central Hong Kong, and the sounds of the city could easily be heard in the background, making me a bit nostalgic for the old place.
Also Skyped Madlien for a bit in the evening to further discuss the possible trip to Bogota. It is looking decently likely that Blaine Curcio will be making his first appearance in South America sometime in August, an event that will surely be met with fiestas, siestas, and other “estas” immediately upon my arrival. So yeah, again, the plan would then be to arrive at O’Hare at 3:15pm on a flight straight from Dublin and leave for a flight to Miami at 6:55pm same day, have an 11 hour connection in Miami, then get to Bogota the next day, on the verge of mental and physical collapse from having travelled for something like 40 hours. However, if nothing else, I had decent training for this sort of thing on December 26, 2009, when Dan and I missed a connection in Minneapolis due to snow and ended up doing Chicago-Minneapolis (4 hour layover)-Amsterdam (10 hour flight followed by 11 hour layover)-Tokyo (10 hour flight)-Aiko Ichida (3 hour train ride). So if I can handle that (and, for the record, I felt great upon arrival in Tokyo), I can certainly handle Amsterdam-Dublin (3 hour layover)-Chicago (9 hour flight 4 hour layover)-Miami (11 hour layover)-Bogota (probably about a 6 hour flight). Now that all 3 readers are spinning from too many flights and cities and layovers and such…
This week was a good one at work. Monday and Tuesday were pretty standard, and Wednesday morning I decided that I ought to catch up with Henning on my work thus far, and on a gameplan for the last 7 weeks of the internship. The conversation went very well, with Henning and I exchanging some very interesting ideas and insights.
After that I worked out with H.R. my tax rate and other such things for my pay for this internship. Basically because I’m not making enough money to live off of, I pay very low taxes, as it turns out. That’s a win, that. I also am considering pulling the old tax fraud when I get home and not reporting my meager income here to the I.R.S., given that I can’t be bothered doing that, and they won’t find out about a few thousand US$ that I made here… hopefully. So yeah, good week at work overall.
Also, last night I figured out how to order pizza for delivery despite the fact that the whole website was in Dutch... I thought it was a decent accomplishment, at the very least.
This weekend the plan is to really explore The Hague on Saturday. I’d like to visit the place where Milosevic was tried and jailed and died. Given that it’s literally right across the street from my office, I figure I should go sometime… Friday night is the company summer beach party, which goes from like 2:00pm-late and includes, but is not limited to, volleyball, limbo, samba, Dutch people, food, beverages, napkins, and sand. Word is there’s going to be a beach there as well. Sunday I’ll likely go to Henning’s, as he and his wife are having some people over to watch England vs. Germany in the World Cup round of 16. The weekend after next, Iain McMahon, the man, the legend, the Aussie, will be in Amsterdam, so I’ll be going to visit and hang out with him and, presumably, Marije as well. That’s more or less all at the moment. It’s crazy to think that next week is already July, and that I’ve now (having just realized it) been here for a month. Time flies when you’re having fun… or working 50 hours a week.
To those who have read this far, a big thank you, and I hope that you enjoyed the hyperlinks I decided to put in, some obviously being quirkier and less useful than others, but all being lovingly placed for your reading enjoyment and enhancement. If you’re reading this then you’d probably be characterized in the statement “I miss you all!”
More news to come as it develops.
Where we left off from last time, I was struggling a bit to adjust to things in The Netherlands, and longing for HK. I’m glad to report that since then things have changed significantly, most of that change taking place in the last 48 hours or so. That being said, let’s backtrack to right after my last blog post:
Last week was fairly uneventful. Henning was out of the office for a few days, and I just sort of did my own thing at work. The work week was rather long, but I learned a fair bit more about the industry, key customers, the setup of the company, etc. Last weekend was also the planned “970X run”, i.e. go to a major public transport hub and try and catch the next mode of transport to somewhere. Anyway, so the plan was to take off Friday and go somewhere, but Henning preferred that I did not take off Friday, given that I took off a few days a couple weeks ago to head down to Italy to meet with the family.
Perfectly understandable, so Friday night I decided to head to Amsterdam Schiphol Airport and attempt, knowing that it was a long shot, to just ask a KLM ticket agent if there were any not-full flights departing that evening that I could possibly fly out on for a discounted fare, given that odds are, if the flight isn’t full 2 hours before takeoff, it won’t be full. Given that Europe is the “land of high prices and unfriendly people”, they would have none of that, so I got nowhere fast from Schiphol. From there, I headed onward, relatively undeterred, to Amsterdam Centraal rail station, assuming that there’d have to be a train going somewhere Friday evening. Upon arrival, the international ticket office was closed for the night. Massively deterred, I tried walking to Amstel St. Bus Terminal, which I only knew to be “about 2km South of Centraal Station”. So naturally, having no real idea of where I was going, I just walked in a direction I knew to be South. Thankfully, Amsterdam is not a maze of a city, otherwise I might not have found Amstel St. Station. That was sarcasm. I absolutely didn’t have a chance at finding the place, by this time it was about 10:00pm, and I really didn’t feel ambitious enough to hunt down the station. Had it been HK I’d’ve taken a cab, but in Holland (or anywhere in the west), cabs aren’t retardedly cheap, so I just went back to The Hague Friday evening.
Upon waking up Saturday morning I saw that Marije (a friend of mine that I knew in Hong Kong that is Dutch, and lives in Amsterdam) had attempted to contact me via facebook regarding my plans for the big Netherlands-Japan World Cup match Saturday afternoon. I got a hold of her and she told me to come to Amsterdam to watch the match with some friends of hers in some random bar. I certainly couldn’t turn down such an invitation, especially given that I hadn’t seen Marije in like a month, so I took the train back into Amsterdam Saturday morning and met up with her and her boyfriend, Juriann at AMS Centraal. From there we went to drop off some things at their friend’s apartment, and I was able to see how Dutch students live. Not too surprisingly, it was a pretty standard, American-ish apartment. The one thing that would have looked very out of place in an American apartment was a huge soccer trophy, but that’s about it. And all the orange stuff all around. Speaking of orange, Steve Guilford (Stinen Guildford to those who know him well) would have loved the match. The bar we went to had about 60-70 people fit into a place that was about big enough for 40, and every single person there was wearing orange everything. Bright. San Francisco Giants style. Orange. Everywhere. Holland scored early in the 2nd half, and my God, did the place go absolutely nuts. Absolute pandemonium, the likes of which I can basically only compare to like, maybe the pandemonium I experienced when LSU blocked an Alabama field goal at the end of regulation to force overtime at a game I was at in 2008. But even that might be pushing it. Anyway, so that was electrifying, and Holland ended up winning 1-0. After the match we went and walked around Amsterdam for awhile, with Marije and Juriann pointing out interesting sights. I also bought a Dutch sim card for when my old European phone from last summer arrives in the mail from the parentals. With said sim card came a free orange vuvuzela in celebration of the world cup. Welcome to Holland (or Europe, for that matter) during the world’s biggest sporting event. So now that the random tangent about vuvuzelas is over, back to Saturday. After hanging around for a bit I headed back to The Hague Saturday evening and watched more World Cup.
Sunday involved some (shocker) World Cup watching, bike riding (found a very decent little Japanese restaurant in downtown Wassenaar), and talking to the Old AlanKey via Skype on his cell phone. I didn’t even know that was possible, but apparently AlanKey is able to talk into his cell phone as though he’s making a call, but have me be on the other end on Skype. What an age we live in, and to think, S.E.S. World Skies is (maybe) involved in the transmission of that info, given our involvement in everything (including World Cup broadcasting to North and South America). AlanKey was in central Hong Kong, and the sounds of the city could easily be heard in the background, making me a bit nostalgic for the old place.
Also Skyped Madlien for a bit in the evening to further discuss the possible trip to Bogota. It is looking decently likely that Blaine Curcio will be making his first appearance in South America sometime in August, an event that will surely be met with fiestas, siestas, and other “estas” immediately upon my arrival. So yeah, again, the plan would then be to arrive at O’Hare at 3:15pm on a flight straight from Dublin and leave for a flight to Miami at 6:55pm same day, have an 11 hour connection in Miami, then get to Bogota the next day, on the verge of mental and physical collapse from having travelled for something like 40 hours. However, if nothing else, I had decent training for this sort of thing on December 26, 2009, when Dan and I missed a connection in Minneapolis due to snow and ended up doing Chicago-Minneapolis (4 hour layover)-Amsterdam (10 hour flight followed by 11 hour layover)-Tokyo (10 hour flight)-Aiko Ichida (3 hour train ride). So if I can handle that (and, for the record, I felt great upon arrival in Tokyo), I can certainly handle Amsterdam-Dublin (3 hour layover)-Chicago (9 hour flight 4 hour layover)-Miami (11 hour layover)-Bogota (probably about a 6 hour flight). Now that all 3 readers are spinning from too many flights and cities and layovers and such…
This week was a good one at work. Monday and Tuesday were pretty standard, and Wednesday morning I decided that I ought to catch up with Henning on my work thus far, and on a gameplan for the last 7 weeks of the internship. The conversation went very well, with Henning and I exchanging some very interesting ideas and insights.
After that I worked out with H.R. my tax rate and other such things for my pay for this internship. Basically because I’m not making enough money to live off of, I pay very low taxes, as it turns out. That’s a win, that. I also am considering pulling the old tax fraud when I get home and not reporting my meager income here to the I.R.S., given that I can’t be bothered doing that, and they won’t find out about a few thousand US$ that I made here… hopefully. So yeah, good week at work overall.
Also, last night I figured out how to order pizza for delivery despite the fact that the whole website was in Dutch... I thought it was a decent accomplishment, at the very least.
This weekend the plan is to really explore The Hague on Saturday. I’d like to visit the place where Milosevic was tried and jailed and died. Given that it’s literally right across the street from my office, I figure I should go sometime… Friday night is the company summer beach party, which goes from like 2:00pm-late and includes, but is not limited to, volleyball, limbo, samba, Dutch people, food, beverages, napkins, and sand. Word is there’s going to be a beach there as well. Sunday I’ll likely go to Henning’s, as he and his wife are having some people over to watch England vs. Germany in the World Cup round of 16. The weekend after next, Iain McMahon, the man, the legend, the Aussie, will be in Amsterdam, so I’ll be going to visit and hang out with him and, presumably, Marije as well. That’s more or less all at the moment. It’s crazy to think that next week is already July, and that I’ve now (having just realized it) been here for a month. Time flies when you’re having fun… or working 50 hours a week.
To those who have read this far, a big thank you, and I hope that you enjoyed the hyperlinks I decided to put in, some obviously being quirkier and less useful than others, but all being lovingly placed for your reading enjoyment and enhancement. If you’re reading this then you’d probably be characterized in the statement “I miss you all!”
More news to come as it develops.
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