Ola’s Visit to Holland

Ola has visited me this weekend! She flew in from Eindhoven on Thursday and left this morning for Krakow. She flew via Eindhoven because the BizzAir company does not fly on Schiphol, and because it is cheaper than any other airliner. Also, it flies from Katowice which is rather close to Krakow.

We spent Thursday at home, mostly, and Friday too as we both had to work from our laptops. We did manage to visit the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden late in the afternoon–where we spent a lot of time taking pictures. In the evening we went to see a show, íSa by dancegroup T.R.A.S.H., and on Saturday we visited Amsterdam. We had some luck with the weather this weekend–Amsterdam was delightful to walk through. We visited the Nieuwmarkt (where she bought some lovely cheeses), De Wallen, De Dam, and we had a walk along the canals and saw may interesting sites along the way. Of course we also had a canal-tour later in the afternoon, and a wonderful dinner to finish off our visit to Amsterdam (after which she tried Jenever and decided it was enough like Wodka to like it). Unfortunately we didn’t have enough money on ourselves to pay for dinner and we could not use our cards… Aleksandra had to find a cash point outside to get some money to pay for dinner. But it was part of the fun!

Sunday I had rehearsals for Midsummer Night’s Dream but Aleksandra entertained herself in Leiden all afternoon, and in the evening we had a roast chicken from the oven for dinner. Then, on Monday we first visited Madurodam in the morning. Later we had coffee in Den Haag and saw some of the Madurodam sites for real!

In the afternoon Aleksandra wanted to visit Kinderdijk because she really likes windmills. Even though I grew up about 20 kilometers from that site, I had never visited it before. I was surprised to learn it is on the Unesco World Heritage list, it does not look very spectacular and it also does not feel significant. It’s basically just three rows of windmills (ok, some of them are old) without much information. Nevertheless, we spent a few hours there taking pictures and walking along the canals and windmills. Today Aleksandra is flying back to Katowice. I cannot visit her anytime soon because of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which premieres in one month), but I want to visit her again by car!

 

My private domain

As of today, I am the proud owner of www.makoho.nl! The site now only hosts my WordPress blogs, but I will almost certainly start experimenting with subdomains and media-galleries. Don’t go blind when I experiment with new themes–I may not get the colours right straight away : )

It means that all my new posts will no longer be posted to makoho.WordPress.com, but to www.makoho.nl.

 

My Polish Adventure

 

Aleksandra and me at the top of Sania Skala 

 

Poland is a lot more beautiful than you would think! And in some areas a hell of a lot more ugly, too. On the one hand there is Krakow: this city sits on the banks of the Wisla river, with over 1,000 years of history collected in its churches, castles, parks, and squares. Krakow is inspiring and very beautiful.
	On the other hand there is Warsaw. It was destroyed during WW II by a little angry German man with a small moustache, and in the following years it was rebuilt by a Russian man with a much larger moustache, in the prevailing style of that era: concrete, in various shades of gray. Warsaw is really ugly. Seriously.
Luckily Aleksandra and me spent most of our time in Krakow, and a few days in Zakopane: a village at the foot of the Tatra mountains, with great views of the snow-capped mountaintops in High Tatra. We went for walks in the valleys and climbed a few mountaintops, ate highland food (very salty and fat), drank hot beer, and took lots of pictures.

Yes, that’s right. Hot beer. I had no idea this custom existed in the universe, but apparently the Polish have been heating up their beers all along! There’s special herb-mixes you can buy in the shops to add to your beer as you cook it, and they make the beer taste darker and more like autumn or winter. I tried a few beers like this, but it isn’t my cup of tea. I did bring some of those herb-mixtures with me, but I’ll save it for special occasions. I like my beer cold.

	On my first day in Krakow, Aleksandra had to work but she prepared an entire program for me! First she arranged for me to visit the Wieliczka Salt Mines in the morning, then in the afternoon she planned a walk in Krakow with little assignments and questions in 10 envelopes.
I saw the Main Square with the Market Hall and the famous St. Mary’s Church, the Barbican Theatre, the Wawel Castle on the banks of the Wisla river, and some places where the late Pope John Paul II stayed (the Polish are very proud of him and commemorate him in many different places around the city). She also guided me to some of her favourite places in the city.

Other fun things that we did were:

• taking a trip to Zakopane by bus;
• walking through the Koscieliska, Strazyska and Bialego valleys;
• visiting the Jaskinia Mrozna cave (even though Aleksandra suffers from claustrophobia!);
• climbing Sania Skala (+1372m);
• riding the very steep train to Gubalowka;
• walking the banks of the Wisla river at night;
• walking through the Jewish Quarter of Krakow;
• taking some night-pictures in Zakopane.

Aleksandra is coming to Holland in October, for 5 days, to stay with me. I think I will go back to Krakow in the near future to see her, and there are many places I still want to visit (Auschwitz, for example). The story will continue.

Here are some of the pictures I took. There are none of Aleksandra (except the one above) as she prefers not to be on display on the Internet.

Me at one end of the Koscieliska valley

Interior of a cafe in the Jewish Quarter in Krakow

Wisla river by night

 
Part of fence in the Jewish Quarter in Krakow

 
Courtyard of the Wawel Castle 

The sink full of bubbles from the Jacuzzi, in our hotel room, Zakopane. 

Album “Krakow en Zakopane“

 

Korte Vliet at night

22/09/2008 

10/9/2008

 

Toverlei weekend

So I lost a bet with Pieter and Manuela, who said I would get drunk on Friday night when I had said I would NOT get drunk. I suppose I was begging to loose that bet. Now I have to take them to a sauna someday in 2009. But that’s not too bad!

The weekend was a great success, with a boat-trip, a barbecue, an evening of hilarious sketches, and a lot of beer. Some things that I remember are looking out from the top of Fort Penningsveer in the middle of the night when the fort was bathing in moonlight, playing rounds of improvised sketches on Saturday night and walking around the room as a dress-up boy dressed in plastic bags, laughing until we spilt our beer talking about porn-channels and genitalia, and seeing Lorien take the rudder of the boat in front of ours, losing any feeling for direction, speed, and danger, and managing to  almost drill her boat into the side of the 150-feet wide canal.

The fort itself was rather nice, built in the early 1800’s and a part of the Amsterdam defence line organized in the early 1900’s, and serving as a camp to detain NSB members after World War II. It is no longer a military complex since 1950.

Here are a few pictures of the weekend:

   

 

Toverlei weekend preparations

The Toverlei weekend in Haarlem starts this evening! I’m picking up Marieke and Joop tonight and we’ll drive to the Fort Penningsveer. As I’ve still got a cold I won’t be partying too much. I want to be fit when I fly to Warsaw next week to meet Aleksandra. We met at John Lennon Airport (Liverpool) when I returned from my Lake District holiday, and we’ve been planning to meet each other again since the last week of August. I’m flying to Warsaw, then take a train to Krakow where she lives. We’ll spend two days in Krakow and three in Zakopane, a small town at the North side of the Tatra Mountains in the Southern area of Poland. I am flying on Wednesday, and it is hard to wait!

Anyway, the theme of the Toverlei weekend is Improvisation. Thank goodness we don’t have to dress up like last time (its theme was Glamour), but they did ask us to bring some kind of decoration to hang on the walls.

I found, in one of my closets, a huge picture of myself that was used during the performance of the Three Penny’s Opera in 2006. I fiddled around with bits of paper and glue, and I quite like the result. Here’s me being happy with the decoration I made:

(it says: Big Brother is Watching You)

 

Greetings from the couch

 

Haar Leven Haar Doden

Last Saturday I saw a show with Tilly, in the V&D in Leiden. De Veenfabriek performed “Haar Leven Haar Doden”, a play that is performed throughout the warehouse and also in the areas where shopping visitors can’t go. I never knew that this warehouse houses an additional staircase that is reminiscent of old-style hotel staircases, but is hidden from the masses and resides in a dark place behind the counter at the shoe and sock department. It is rather exciting to climb it as it creaks and you have absolutely no idea where it is heading.

It is a bit too complex to capture on a blog, but I found a small youtube video of the song they perform in the middle of the toys department (but that does not show on the video):

One of the fun things about this show was that people were still shopping when it was going on: there was one scene next to the escalators, where people were coming down throughout the scene–to find two actors in front of them and 60 people looking at them. Most of them had to laugh, some were very shy, and there was one little girl who stood aside and watched the rest of the scene wide-eyed with interest.

The show lasted 2 hours but was not tedious at any point. Changing location for different scenes helped in this respect, but the fragmented story of Anne carried enough momentum and information to keep me interested anyway. It was the first time I have ever heard a woman say “Long live porn!”!

 

New books!

I’ve spent the better part of this afternoon in the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht, visiting the Boekenfestijn. John and Anik (and their son Rowan) met me there and they drove home with me. We spent well over two hours roaming the bookstands, going through thousands of titles. Making a first selection is pretty easy; you just scoop up all the titles that you find interesting, and put them in your trolley. Then, when you think you’re done, you shift them into the standard software-feature categories: must-have, should-have, would-be-nice-to-have, don’t-bother-with-this-one, and I-didn’t-put-that-book-in-there! It’s up to your budget and carrying facilities to decide which categories to leave behind.

My first round harvested books leading up to 65 euro, so I made a stricter selection and ended up with the following:

• Polish language, a quick-guide;
• Vernon God Little (DBC Pierce), a novel;
• Continental Drift (Russell Banks), a novel;
• Travels in the Scriptorium (Paul Auster), a novel;
• Ojo (Sam Kieth, Alex Pardee, Chris Wisnia), a comic book;
• Oversight (Phillip Hester), a collection of short stories in comic format;
• Wide Angle (National Geographic), a photography book;
• Holland From the Top (Karel Tomeï), a photography book;
• Binder folio;
• Agenda 2009.

That’s not bad. Not as spectacular as some visits to the Boekenfestijn have been, but not bad at all.

 

Den Haag: There and back again

I saw Hellboy II yesterday with Carlijn in Den Haag. What a wonderful movie! I thought it missed some of the originality and humour of the first instalment, but was nonetheless a surprising movie with a lot of action and special effects. Carlijn disagreed and thought the second instalment was better than the first.

I had some problems getting home, though. My bike was in the secure section of the bike-parking facility, and they close at 1.30 am. The trouble is, trains from Den Haag back to Leiden leave with a one hour interval from 0.30 am onwards. I thought I would take that 0.30 am train, but the movie finished at 0.32, much later that I had anticipated. There was no way to get back to Leiden in time to collect my bike. And I always thought I live in a well-organized urban area…

After considering our options we decided to have a few drinks.

We leisurely walked to the station at around 1.45 am (after the terrace was closed), said goodbye for the evening, and I waited for my train. It was a bit weird as the hall was almost empty, save for a few souls waiting for their trains:

I got to Leiden at around 2.50 but had to walk home as I couldn’t get to my bike. Normally that isn’t a problem but I was wearing my Sunday shoes and they’re not cut out to walk on comfortably for more than 15 minutes at a time. It took me almost 35 minutes to get home, but I really enjoyed the solitary splendour of Leiden in the deep of the night. It surprised me that there were still people around–although admittedly one of them dead drunk trying to bike in a steady line, or at least roughly between the edges of the pavement.

Today I collected my bike after getting a free ride on the bus (carried only a 50 euro note and had to pay € 1.20, so the driver kindly let me in without paying), and hung around in the city as it is really lovely weather. If I’m not too tired tonight I think I will take out my camera and tripod and capture night scenes again.

Another thing I did yesterday was book a flight to Warsaw. More on that later : ).

 

Smilies in Live Mail

I’ve been using Windows Live Mail (WLM) to manage my hotmail accounts ever since Microsoft launced it, and I like the lightweight feel of the application and its ability to handle multiple hotmail accounts in combination with ordinary POP3 accounts.

But, I’ve hit one problem that I find seriously irritating. I like to use smilies in my emails, but I don’t want the MSN-type icons to replace the good old  : ) . When WLM sees a colon and a right bracket it automatically replaces it with an icon, which usually results in an enlarged lineheight and messes up the format of your paragraphs:

It looks really horrible.

There isn’t a switch for this. It just happens. But I have found two ways of keeping the characters in your mail and not having them swapped by WLM:

1. Use a plain text format for your emails (but that means you can’t use Italics, Bold, Underline, or any neat formatting at all);
2. Use the Undo function just after WLM has swapped the : ) with the MSN icon. You can press Ctrl + Z to do this. The characters : ) will reappear.

 

Lake District 2008

 
After getting myself together on arrival at home, getting some sleep and doing some household chores, I’ve taken the time to organize the pictures I took and reflect on the experience of hiking in the Lake District.

Though it was (very) wet, cold, and sometimes very lonely, I had a wonderful time being by myself! The silence of valleys, lakes, mountainsides and small villages is such a relief from the noise of everyday. The physical exercise emptied my mind completely and I feel as though I’ve been away for two months. The people were very friendly, most of the accommodation was good, some of the food too (an English breakfast, for example, is best left to the English), and the pints were all great except that pint of Strongbow cider at the airport.

Here are some of the highlights of my holiday:

• Climbing the 1,000 foot Stake Pass and entering the Langstrath valley;
• Crossing flooded streams in that valley by jumping from stone to stone;
• Travelling from Lancaster to Ulverston by train, along the coast of a dry Morecambe Bay;
• Being attacked by a bird of prey defending its hunting grounds between Bassenthwaite and Orthwaite;
• Losing my way in Lowick and feeling very lonely when it began to rain;
• Crossing the Skiddaw mountain range in the mist;
• Playing scrabble in the Royal Oak in Rosthwaite, where allegedly Wordsworth himself has stayed;
• Meeting Alexandra at John Lennon Airport.

 
A view into the Langstrath valley from the head of Stake Pass

  
Me in the Great Langdale valley

 
A view of the village Grange near Rosthwaite

Ruins of the Howk factory near Caldbeck

My Picasa album: Lake District 2008

 

Pre-holiday thrills

I’ve just finished my last working day before hiking across the Lake District. Tomorrow is left to get a haircut, buy some last-minute things and pack my backpack. Then on Friday morning Easyjet will fly me to Liverpool!

I’ll take Norwegian Wood by Murakami with me for company, and I’ve bought this lovely Moleskine journal to write down what I did every day. The picture of the Cumbria Way route I have added for decoration:

 

Cronenstein

I’ve visited Cronenstein park yesterday evening. I had wanted to make pictures during the “golden hour” (when the sunset spreads a golden light), but I was just a little bit too late. That didn’t stop me, though. I think I’ve made some pretty pictures using the fading sky as a backdrop for silhouettes:

 

I did catch something during the golden hour, but it wasn’t the park. There’s a small patch of green across the canal and alongside the tracks, and I was lucky enough to see this lightbeam. Not so lucky capturing it, but here it is anyway.

 

Wasting cpu cycles

I’ve been wondering–and so have you, haven’t you–what it looks like if you build a matrix of numbers, and determine for each of these numbers if its digits are in ascending or descending order (or neither). That is to say, a number like 13689 has its digits ordered from low to high (ascending), and a number like 86652 ordered from high to low (descending).

Is your stomach burning with curiosity? Do you want to know what it looks like? Well, I did. First, I put the numbers from 1 to 10,000 in a 500x 500 pixel grid in Processing (where each number is a 5×5 square), and looped through them to determine the sort order of each of these numbers’ digits. Here’s the first result (resized; click to see full-size):

This actually triggered my curiosity and so… I did the same thing, but with the numbers from 1 to 500,000, in a 1000 x 500 pixel grid. Don’t ask why. Well, if you insist, I was simply curious about what patterns would emerge from something silly like the order of a number’s digits. It took my laptop (2GB, 1.8GHz) 135 minutes to complete the task, and the patterns one can see in the result below just don’t live up to the expectations of the exuberant amount of cpu cycles this diagram usurped:

Each pixel is a number. Each row contains 1,000 pixels. There are 500 rows.

Before I ventured on this plan born out of boredom and unhindered curiosity, I made a lot of progress on another Processing project: Perceived Discourse. Although I am happy with the results so far, it’s not quite good enough to either share with the world, or explain what I’m doing.

Just to remind myself that I also have a life: I went out for beers and dinner last Saturday with Diana, and we sort of agreed to go to Madrid for a weekend somewhere later this year. We also drank a few Irish Coffees after dinner, and beers at various locations around Leiden and her place. I biked home at two in the morning in the still warm air and the surprisingly quiet city.

Also, coming Saturday Carolien is throwing her birthday party, and yesterday I ordered both an infrared remote control and a cable release for my camera, so that I can take better pictures at night and of myself (although, admittedly, pressing the timer-button, running to your position, waiting for that delightful click of the shutter release, then walking back to see the result and repeat steps 1 through 4 if the result is not as desired, may in fact be a lot of fun sometimes!). They arrive tomorrow, so I have ample time to get to know these accessories before I go to the Lake District. Only a week away!