My host recommended this bike mechanic who lived down the street as being cheaper than a full-on bike shop. His name is Tonie and he’s a semi-retired gentleman who works on bikes. He’s also that totally awesome type of extremely knowledgeable, clever, craftsman that you don’t seem to run into very often anymore. When he started working on the lights, he said, “Now you will see how a man with an electro-technical background fixes a bicycle.” Apparently he had been an electrical engineer or something similar before he retired, and it showed in the methodology he used to test the various components to get the lights working. Example: to test whether the generator that powered the lights for the bike was good, he hooked it up to a power source and ran it backwards as a motor.

It was actually fairly complicated to figure out which wires went where, because somebody had worked on it before and left a lot of extra dead wires which did nothing.

Here are some pictures of Tonie and his shop. I have a few more but the internet is really slow right now at the library, so I’ll post the rest later. EDIT: I have now posted all of them.

I really enjoyed it for that 18 hours or so. I haven’t decided whether I’ll try to get another one or not. One thing’s for sure, if I do, I’ll get a much better lock and try not to park it anywhere so exposed in the future.

I’ve never really seen the point of “goth”, it’s obviously a distinct subculture, but it seems to be centered around nothing more substantial than wearing black and being sad. It’s like emo with pseudo-intellectual overtones. Hell, even punk pretends to be about things other than music and fashion.

Nevertheless, yesterday I was in the Domplein and there was a big goth fair there. Also, I found out that they were having a concert inside the Domkerk, which is an authentic gothic cathedral building, so that seemed appropriate.

The band was a group called Persephone. They were fairly decent, and not what I was expecting. They had two cellos, an upright bass, a percussionist and a redheaded vocalist. The whole performance was pretty overdramatic, with the singer handing out flowers, and dancing around. The lyrics were overwrought goth stuff, “When will my soul stop bleeding…” but musically they were not bad.

Anyway, I took some pictures.

His place was actually interesting. In the Netherlands, when commercial properties go vacant, they often let people rent them as residences for cheap in order to keep out squatters. It’s kind of a weird setup, but you get a huge amount of space for very little money. The downside being they can ask you to leave at any time with 2 weeks notice if a commercial renter wants the property. Anyway, my host lived in this vacant commercial office park about 15 minutes by bus from the city center.

The Rat Tail: I’m really not sure what the thinking on this hairdo is. It’s either a really small, off-center ponytail or one, really long braid. Either way, it ain’t pretty. Every time I saw it, I felt like a long tailed macaque had somehow burrowed its way into his scalp.

Uh, dude, I think there's something on your head

The Dread-Mullet: What do you get when you combine a ridiculous redneck haircut with a styling white kids only wear right after they’ve “gotten really into Bob Marley lately”? That’s right, the dread-mullet (a.k.a. “mulletlocks”). I guess he’s set in case a monster-truck-rally-slash-ganja-fest spontaneously breaks out. Actually, that sounds insanely awesome and somebody should organize one immediately.

Business up front, rasta-party in the back

So, after all the buildup, tada! Feel free to mock me as mercilessly as I’ve mocked the poor Spaniards.

Yes, this would also be my MySpace shot

The tower stands 368 feet (112 m) tall, but they blew all their money on the tower so it took much longer to finish the rest of the church. The central nave was never fully completed–they didn’t get to add the flying buttresses necessary for structural support. When a major storm struck Utrecht in 1674 the nave collapsed. All that remains today are the choir and the transept (Domkerk), and the tower which now stands alone. It took until the 1800s for all the rubble to be finally cleared away, but the space where the nave once stood is now a nice outdoor square.

Anyway, here’s a ton of pictures from in and around the tower and the Domkerk.

I’ve heard from multiple Dutch people about the 2-2 tie in the USA-Netherlands soccer game, which was apparently almost an embarrassing loss for the Dutch until a last minute goal. I also heard a lot about the Dutch gold in 4×100 swimming, beating out the US and Australia who were considered favorites in the event.

Last night, on Belgian TV (the Belgian stations apparently have better Olympics coverage than the Dutch ones), we watched Angola’s lopsided defeat in basketball by the USA ‘Redeem Team’. I’m not usually that into sports, but it’s great that almost every nation participates in the Olympics and people from all over the world can follow their team.

I’ll post more details later, but right now I have to go eat pancakes with a Dutch guy and an American girl who’s working here as an au pair.
In the meantime, here is me on a camel:

All we did was go in a circle

Anyway, there were tons of goings-on related to Uit week, as you can see from the photos. What isn’t quite clear from the pictures is the degree to which Uit takes over the city. This stuff is spread out all over the city center, not just in one square or on one street. There was a ferris wheel–interesting historical note/plug for Chicago, the very first ferris wheel was invented for the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. It only cost one euro, so I rode it with a girl from Latvia who is visiting here. One of the student organizations had a camel they were letting people ride, so that was fun. The camel surprised me by not smelling awful at all. Also, it’s hard to tell from the photos but its front hump leaned to the left a lot. For some reason I assumed camel humps would be basically symmetric.

I got in touch via email with a woman who’s similarly studying technology activists, though in a much more formal way, as a Ph.D. candidate at the European University Institute. Her website was/is here, but it seems to be dead from a database glitch right now. I also made an appointment to meet with one of the main guys from PUSCII.

In de Neude square, I talked to some people from the international students group here, and they were very friendly and welcoming. They invited me to come by their office and see what kind of events they have planned, and to their weekly Tuesday night meet-and-greet, and also to a large party they were throwing that night.

I went to dinner at this pancake place with a Dutch mapmaking student from couchsurfing. Looking at the menu, they had both sweet and savory types of pancakes, so I sort of assumed that “pancake” actually meant “crepé”, and I ordered the ham and cheese one. They actually were real (but thin) pancakes, and the ham and and cheese was sort of baked into it. They did intend for you to eat it with powdered sugar and syrup, so it was kind of a mix of sweet and savory.

Later that night, I went to the International Party along with the Latvian girl, and it was pretty cool. It was free to get in, the place was really busy and beers were only €1.20, yet somehow there wasn’t a line. I attribute this to the fact that there were at least a half-dozen other enormous parties occuring simultaneously at other venues. I talked to a math major girl, and we may have set a new world record for ‘nerdiest conversation ever had in a night club’ by discussing linear algebra.

All in all, it was a pretty awesome day.

You can see the lock on the wheel

I also met with one of the guys from PUSCII. He seemed like a very interesting, intelligent guy, but also very intense. He apparently spent 10 days in jail for chaining himself to railroad tracks along with other protestors to block the movement of trains carrying equipment for the war in Iraq. The charges were eventually dropped in response to bad press. He’s a true old-school computer guy, he even has a Commodore 64. He seemed to feel like the hacktivism scene in Europe was getting stale from a peak in the late 90s with the tech bubble. PUSCII at this point doesn’t have much of a physical presence, and he said it’s been hard attracting volunteers. He did give me some tips on other groups that might be more active (including a couple in nearby Amsterdam). So I’ll probably try to check that out.

The PUSCII sign

For dinner I cooked up this thing that’s sort of a Turkish equivalent of the frozen burrito. It was actually fairly tasty with vegetables and spices and stuff (I cooked it in the oven instead of the microwave, which usually helps). But what was really bizarre is that actually printed(?) onto the wrapper/tortilla part of it is the word “Mmm”. You can see it in the photo below. When I first saw it, I thought I was imagining it, or that I’d somehow failed to remove all the plastic covering. But no, it’s actually printed on there with food coloring or something. As a general rule, I try to avoid readable food, with special exemptions for alphabet soup/cereal.

"Mmm"