I saw a woman walking her dog by piloting a small motorised vehicle (I'd describe it as a buggy but that isn't the word - it was basically a chair placed on top of 4 wheels and a motor).

I bought a goat sandwich from a Vietnamese hawker. He said he was housed in a refugee camp in Sembawang for 4 months in 1980, and gave me a discount on my purchase. I was always under the impression that the 1980s was the time when we caned and sent boat people back, so I was wondering why he had such favourable memories of Singapore.

I was very pissed off. I bought a handful of what looked like deep fried prawns at the market, only to find out that they were actually cunningly shaped and coloured pieces of surimi (what's in crabstick).

I came across a budget CD shop, selling CDs for as low as €2 a piece. The selection was limited, but they had Melvyn Tan, Roger Norringotn and Swingle Singers "Around The World" CDs for €5 each. The most expensive CDs were, I think, €7.50 each. There were also 40 CD composer-themed boxsets retailing for €30 - "Handel/Beethoven - The Complete Masterworks".

I wanted to go to a Piotr Anderszewski concert last Wednesday with 2 Mozart works, 1 Bach suite and 1 Szymanowski piece. Unfortunately, even though CJP (youth card) tickets were available for half the usual price (€14 instead of €28 or so), Piotr Anderszewski was sick and someone else was filling him for in. I'm not very big for brand names, so this wasn't a problem. What was a problem was what that person was playing - 2 Rachmaninov pieces and 1 Shostakovich. There were also 2 Schumann pieces, but that wasn't enough to make it worth my money, so I passed on the concert.

The weather is amazing. On 20th March we were still having winter-like temperatures, but when I woke up on 21st March it was as warm as Spring (or as warm as I expect Spring to be) - the temperature jumped at least 10 degrees in one day; within a week, Amsterdam went from -2 degrees to 12.

Jiekai was bored and messing around with the universal convertor which I brought from Singapore, and somehow managed to get it to work - I'd slotted something the wrong way in, which was why something else couldn't be combined with it. So now I can use my laptop and Palm charger at the same time. He (sometimes) deserves more credit than I give him.


For some reason there're a lot of Argentinian restaurants in Amsterdam.

I asked what the apostrophe s in some words means (eg "half 10 's ochtends" [9:30am]). It turns out that "'s" is "des", the equivalent of "Der", "Die" and "Das" in German, but in Dutch this has been mostly done away with, so I don't need to remember what the gender of the table is. Well, actually there's "de" and "het", but there're only 2 choices here, and the language is somewhat more consistent in which nouns get which article.

"Friday" in Dutch is "Vrijdag", which roughly translates as "Free day". This probably explains why so many places either don't open or close early on Friday.

They have funky chairs in some of the computer rooms at my University. Most wheeled-chairs have a lever letting you adjust their height, and some have a lever letting you adjust the angle/tilt of the back of the chair. But these were the first chairs I remembered allowing you to slide the seat forwards and backwards.



Fried spaghetti
This was fried with onions, mushrooms, courgettes, egg, soy sauce, vinegar, ham and the magic ingredient - (Jong Belegen) cheese. Yes, the cheese complements the sourness of the vinegar very nicely, and the onions lend it sweetness.


Quotes:

[Teacher on rejecting a request: How do you say because [of some reason]?] 'I don't speak Dutch'.

Here are some figures for 2004 and 2005 which I stole from the World Development Report.

This link is completely severe'd (severed)

If there's a puzzle, ten economists jump out of the woodwork and start working on it.

International Economics gives us silly examples about bread, and wine, and shoes. So here's another one.

In the 70s you drove a car from Detroit... If you drove anything else people would laugh at you.

Here's my favourite example - the 1980 Ford Pinto... 8 out of 10 cars had to be sent back to the garage within 1 week because there was something wrong with it... A unique quality: if someone hit you in the back, the gas tank would explode, and everyone in the car would die (them)

[On technology transfer] Once McDonalds invested in the Netherlands, other Dutch restaurants improved. Not necessarily for the better.