Bloody hell. The idiot French guy in the Internet Cafe in Nimes I asked - nay, paid €5 - to burn my photos to CD didn't burn everything. It seems everything from Bruges to the Sistine Chapel is now gone.

And I thought lightning doesn't strike twice.

My memory card is now 1/4 full. Hopefully I will be able to recover at least half the photos.

Sigh.

My travelogue now stretches over the equivalent of about 15 sheets (30 pages) of A4 paper. I foresee that it will take me at least a month, maybe two, to finish it.

Gah.

Current location: Utrecht, Hostel Strowis

How fitting that I should spend one of my last nights in Utrecht in the same place where I spent my first.

Let's hope nothing else goes wrong before I leave.

Current location: Brussels

I'm back in the City of Piss after almost 3 months. The summer heat seems to be exacerbating the smell.

So far I've only used my sheets once. I was looking forward to using them again at Sleep Well in Brussels, but sheets here are compulsory. GAH.

I swear I get more spam when I'm on holiday. !@#$%^&*() (A normal [probably Dutch since it's like a US one except for a Euro symbol] keyboard! Hurrah!)

Current location: Nimes

After Italy, France is a refreshing change. Instead of Italians chattering at me in Italian, which I dont understand, I have Frogs chattering at me in French, which I dont understand.

For some reason I cant edit the time of this post, which shoumd be 20 July, 6:58pm.

&é"'(-è_çà
(1234567890 on French keyboards without modifier keys)

~#{[|`\^@°+¨¤ùµ§²
Funky characters are nice but they make it hard to type.

Does anyone know the significance to this song? I heard a bunch of (query sephardic?) jews singing it while standing in a circle in a kosher restaurant in the Jewish ghetto in Venice today (saturday, i.e. shabbat).

We want shayak now,
We want shayak now,
We want shayak now, and we dont want to wait!

andrew gan

and whats shayak?
footnote: visiting the jewish museum on a saturday is a bad idea- it Will be closed. Duh!

I just dropped my phone in a Venice shower and the screen cracked. Great.

12 days to returning to Utrecht and 16 to Singapore!

I love pissing off anal museum guards. I think this one took it particularly hard, since she lectured me the most of all the offenders. Heh heh heh.


Florence in July could probably pass for a level of Dante's hell. You have to be either stupid or desperate to come here in July (and probably August too). I almost regret not flying back earlier.


My brother in law took this at a Cosplay convention in Downtown East. Damnit, I want this person's contact!!!

Luckily Screwed Up Girl reminded me about the module preference exercise, or I'd have missed it. I just put 3302 and 3304 down since planning my last (projected) Economics module would've been hard in an oasis in the middle of a slum in Naples. If it can be preallocated, it probably can be had for 1 point anyway.

Unfortunately the USP one was extremely short as usual, and over more than 2 days ago.

Oh well. Time to whack hapless Year 1s with my points if I take a fancy to any of these 4:

UAR2205 Narrative and Play in Interactive Media (yeech)
UPC2305 Singapore Studies: Transportation Planning in Singapore (done my Propaganda module already but this is fun)
UPI2201 Negotiating Moral Issues (I've only heard good things about this but it may be a touch boring for me since I know something already about epistemology)
UQR2209 Game Theory (Ooh)

SNCF lets me book the night train ticket I want online, even giving me a car and seat number. Yet the woman at the counter at the train station claimed there were no seats available.

Maybe they have a quota for each category.

I'd book my ticket online but it needs to be mailed to an address.

There seem to be no beds in Avignon (I suspect the July festival is on at that time) and the camping site has a hideous flash applet for its website, and a stupid PDF that takes forever to load and crashed the browser. I'm going to sleep in Nimes for another night - it's only 1/2 hr from Avignon or so.

At any rate Reims is now out of the question. I've had a church overload already and will see some more along the way, anyhow. Perhaps I can do Chartes and Reims when I return to the Unparalleled Gardens of Versailles without the Unparalleled Idiot.

I wonder how those who travel in July not knowing where they'll be the next week survive.

It's over, got a police warning. Not going to be charged in court. End of story. Somewhat. I probably might be going back to blogging, but well, it'll be a while. A pretty long while. Till then, I guess.

The SNCF site is wonky and though they let me book the night train last night the woman at the train station claimed there were no seats (Rome seems even less English-friendly than Paris, goodness). There is a 00:25-05:06 one to Culmont-Chalindrey that I could try. Hopefully no one else is dumb enough to take such a shitty train. But Cinque Terra-Venice is already going to be a crazy night, so I might not want to torture myself some more.

Or I could skip Reims, sleep in Avignon for a night, and go straight to Bayeux. I've seen lots of churches here already, and Reims could be seen in the future with Chartes. The extra rest would be good.

I guess it depends on whether the ticket is available.


It rained last night and is now too, so the weather in Rome's almost tolerable. Wow.

Due to my delaying due to wanting to save on transaction costs by booking both my night trains (Riomaggiore [Cinque Terra]-Venice; Avignon-Reims) at the same time, and waiting till Andrew was here so everything is confirmed, it seems both night trains are fully booked, so we'll have to change our plans for the first and I'll need to change mine for the 2nd. Moral of the story: book early, especially at high season.

Actually the SNCF website just let me book the Avignon-Reims night train, so there might be a miscommunication. I hope they still let me queue up. If not there's always 6:30am tomorrow.

Oh my feet. My poor feet.

I think I'm suffering from a church overload. I think I'll just go for St Peter's to wrap it up. Then again, after a Roman overload a church might be nice.

No of gelati today: 1. I got ripped off and did't feel like another.

Slices are not a good way to measure pizza consumption since they differ in size. Hell, some places sell them by weight, with prices per 100g portion.

My only major regret about today is that I didn't manage to see the paintings at the Capitoline Museum. I found a locked door in front of me at 7:35; closed at 8pm my foot.

Ah well, I've seen many paintings and will see many more.

Number of gelati today: 2 (Visiting Rome in July makes you realise why the Italians invented gelato)
Number of pizza slices today: 4

Current location: Rome

It's damn hot, but what the hell, I've spent 22 years in Singapore and 4 months on the Island of Doom.

Then again I arrived at 5+. Noon'll be a whole new ballgame.

My hostel gets me 15 mins a day free at this Internet cafe nearby. Heh heh. Much cheaper than clubbing too, even if I exceed the free time.

Current location: Bruges

3 World Heritage sites in a day. This must be a new record!

Note to self: never again forget that "rode pepers" means not "red peppers" (rode papriken) but "red chilis".

Damn French keyboards (especially with faded keys). And this computer sucks (IE was screwed so I got FF°, another doesn´t work and a third was running out of disk space; 2nd and 3rd also had mismatched keyboards/keyboard settings - no wonder this place is so cheap.

Throwing away stuff is depressing. Especially when I think of how much future tenants would like things like pillows, duvets, bedsheets, pillowcases and couches.

I was helping a housemate to move into her new place and assemble some furniture, and while we were at lunch we saw the most pathetic busker ever. He'd set up large speakers and was blasting his music. That was bad enough, but I noticed that he wasn't even singing. My housemate added that he was not even playing his guitar, only pretending to strum it, while bouncing around and pretending. What a loser.

I paid €34 (+€2,65 for the box) to ship 5,2 kg of stuff at the post office. This even though it's by sea. For all I know it's cheaper to just exceed the weight allowance at the airport.

When I told the woman at the post office where I wanted to ship my parcel to, she took out the list and her finger hovered on 'Singapore' for a while. Then she asked me if it was in China. Gah. I wonder if Singaporean Malays, Indians or Others get the same reaction.

I saw a cock car painted in orange and with its roof down (its available as a convertible too?!)

Some Dutch magazine ("Consumentenbond") actually went around rating frites places for how healthy their fries were ("Gezondgids"). This place, "Bram ladage" won.

Dutch = English + German + Phlegm

I wanted to buy some useless Orange stuff for fun, but when I went to Blokker today most of it was gone, since they got defeated by Portugal. Damn. In the end I got a "fan".

I saw this poster which was an ad for something about Leiden (probably education-related). There was a Dutch guy and an East Asian girl sitting on a bench, and he was putting a jacket on her. Guess the Asian fetish exists here too.

It's good to walk here for the same reason it's good to cycle - the land is flat.

My parsley plant was not doing well. It was like the primary school experiment about overcrowding. Well actually only some stalks were dying and had yellow/brown leaves - the rest looked pretty healthy. I threw it away anyway.

I think the Dutch are the leanest people in Europe I've seen. It must be all the cycling. Of course, they're not SACSAL size (and they *are* the tallest in the world) and there are fat people also, but overall they're all trim-ish. Interestingly I have also seen no slimming ads in the media at all, so maybe it's a curve - if there're lots of anorexic people or lots of obese people, there'll be a lot of slimming ads but otherwise no.

I saw a TV ad where 3 naked women were in a sauna (with strategic positioning of body parts, of course), and they heard men shouting. The noise of the voices got closer, until 1 woman got up, grabbed the only towel, exited the sauna with it wrapped round herself and held the door open as a horde of naked men (seen from behind) streamed into the sauna. It was a hairdye commercial. I'm still trying to make sense of it. Presumably the woman who exited the sauna had a different hair colour.

There was another TV commercial on which looked like a rock concert, but keywords flashing onscreen let me know the truth. The German housemate who'd returned to do some admin asked if I knew what it was, and I answered in the affirmative. He said American christianity was invading Germany too.

I saw a man on a bicycle and a woman on a motorcycle. He was holding onto her shoulder and being dragged along. Bah.

I have a feeling that many people think that the Netherlands, being the land of pot, hookers and euthanasia is a seedy place. Some might even think it dangerous. In fact, as a barometer, outside of the Amsterdam red light district, pornography is less openly advertised than in other continental European countries (descriptions may be found in previous travelogues, often by searching for the line: "Gotta love these Europeans). An especially graphic example is the postcards of topless German women and the Pope. Amsterdam is slightly different in that even outside the red light district, they sell naughty postcards, T-shirts and other souvenirs. Yet these almost always depict stylised, cartoon nudity or naughtiness.

One local student was saying that although the Chinese here blend in quite well, they integrate rather than assimilate, remaining a distinct group. However, they don't "stand out" and "cause trouble". She singled out 2 groups which did - the Turks and Moroccans.


Bottles from all over Europe


Someone was saying her friend had a 3.9 GPA in University College Utrecht, but when this person went to Singapore his GPA plunged to 3.1 (I hope it was not CAP).

UCU, the honours college here, is less slack than the main university. They have small classes which are more seminar sized, and one student complained skipping 6 lectures would get you in trouble. But they all live on the same small campus anyway, so it's not so bad. And it's still not as anal as in some places.

Some of the PRCs asked the tutor to let them zap the answers to some tutorials. Unfortunately, although the questions were in English the answers were in Dutch.

Someone was saying pair work is the best because when you do it alone there's no one to consult and give feedback, and when it's too big there's the free-riding problem. I must add that in big groups there's co-ordination and monitoring costs, and that in pair work each can easily motivate (read: harass) the other to dothe work.


We got an evaluation form for one module asking us if:

- we have a sufficient command of english to follow lectures (there's a "NA" option, presumably for those who skipped all)
- what percentage of the lectures and tutorials we prepared well and attended (I was confused, since I didn't prepare well for some I attended, so I gave a partially weighted average)
- how many hours a week we spent on the course excluding lectures, tutorials and other gatherings (the maximum option is 99 since you shade a box each for the first and second digits. Wth)
- if the lecturer's english was 'sufficient to properly convey the course content' (this is a good one. We need this in NUS, which needs to ask this question more than Universiteit Utrecht)
- If the course co-ordinator was easy to contact
- If the course content fit the description in the catalogue ("What you learn in University: never believe course descriptions.")
- If there's a coherence between the different elements - lectures, tutorials, assignments, group work and individual study
- 'The required efforts of the course are useful" - ???
- If the examination was an appropriate test for command of the content
- If we expected to pass (note: not our expected grade)

This is real module feedback, since it's almost totally anonymous (they're not as bo liao as to track down who filled in what).


I don't like to bake - it doesn't give instant (or near-instant) gratification and it leaves horrible stains on the pan, but it gives such a lovely glaze to meats basted in sauces. I should try it more when I return.


Sauerkraut Fried Rice
I had sauerkraut leftover after making stamppot so I threw it in this. "Mild" sauerkraut is too mild for me - it wasn't sour enough.


Mutant pepper


Zacht en Luchtig Vla
I didn't realise this was special Vla until I tasted it - if you look closely you can see bubbles. It's been aerated so it's light and fluffy.

Jolide - Even Dutch snack bars have gone online, with delivery services. I saw the delivery man downstairs today.

There's this snack bar called "Cafeteria Smurf" which I sometimes patronise, due to its being near UCU. Usually I only see the man, who looks Indonesian-Chinese, but two or three times his female assistant (I assume his wife) has come out. Today I noticed her reading a Chinese novel, so I asked the man if they were from Indonesia. He said they were from China. Damn, and all this time I'd been attempting to communicate in broken Dutch (about the only English word I've heard him utter is "takeaway?", when I didn't cathc the Dutch equivalent).


Quotes:

[Student: Was it common for caravans to expand along the journey?] Baby camels.

carer'wairn (caravan)

[Tutor: Market failure is the main argument for government intervention.] That's chapter 10, not chapter 11.

[On Brandon-Spencer analysis and a subsidy for Airbus increasing EU welfare at the expense of the US] It's a clear beggar thy neighbor policy, but then again, who cares?

mail tea laterns (multilateral)

[On digesting articles in the reader] Just read the article, think about it, have a wine or a beer. [Student: I fall asleep]

July plan:


30 june Leave Utrecht, Sleep in Bruges (Train - €22,70)
1 jul - Bruges/Ypres (Train - €10,80 - weekend return), sleep in Bruges
2 jul - Ghent (?)/Antwerp, sleep in Antwerp (Train - €12,40)
Monday - 3 jul - Go to Eindhoven (Train - 1 hr 45 mins). Fly to Rome (14:30 flight)
3-4 jul - Alone in Rome. Sleep in Rome.
5-7 jul - In Rome with Andrew (Andrew comes)
8-9 jul - Naples/Pompeii/Herculaneum. Sleep in Naples. (Train, 1 1/2 hrs - ~€5)
Monday - 10-11 jul - Florence (Got a room in a camping site. No choice. One hostel in the city only has girl beds. He doesn't want to buy a wig. The rest are super expensive - the price of procrastination) (Train, 3 1/2-4 hrs - ~€21)
12 jul - Florence/Riomaggiore in Cinque Terra. Sleep in Riomaggiore. (Train, 2 3/4-3 hrs, ~€4 if not by ICPlus)
13 jul - Cinque Terra. Night train to Venice (Train, €31,50)
14 jul - Venice. Sleep in Venice.
15 jul - Venice (Andrew leaves). Sleep in Venice.
16 jul - Venice/Ravenna. Sleep in Ravenna. Dante Museum closes at 6pm. (Train, 3 hrs - €10,50)
Monday - 17 jul - Ravenna. Dante Museum closed (Tomb open). Sleep in Milan. (Train, 3 1/2 hrs - €13,80)
18 jul - Milan (Last Supper tickets sold out till 2 Aug. One day I'll go in April/May). Sleep in Milan.
19 jul - Marseilles (8-9/13 hrs from Milan; both Trenitalia and SNCF suck so I had to use Deutsche Bahn to find the schedules, but I've no prices). Sleep in Marseilles. (No cheap hostels online, 1 HI hostel fully booked, the other: booking online not possible. When I called - reception closed from 3-5pm. When I called again
they claim they don't accept reservations so I should show up on the day itself. Maybe I'll have to camp again.)
20 jul - Arles/Nimes. Sleep in Nimes (HI). (Train, 1 1/2-2 1/2 hrs - €16,10)
21 jul - Avignon. (Train, 1/2 hr - €5,80) Night train to Reims. (€70 excl couchette)
22 jul - Reims. Sleep in Bayeux. (Train, 5-6 hrs - €33,60. 2 trains; 10:21pm, 12:25pm) (They asked me to fax/send a letter. Reservations by phone/email not accepted. They claimed there'd be beds if I showed up on the day itself. If not I can always go camping again)
23 jul - D-Day Beaches/Bayeux. Sleep in Bayeux. (D-Day bus service - website down)
Monday - 24 jul - Bayeux. 5 hrs train to Brussels. Sleep in Brussels. (Train, 4 1/2-5 1/2 hrs - €60)
25 jul - Brussels. Sleep in Luxembourg. (Train, 3 hrs - unknown cost €0 due to a ticket xxoos gave me.)
26 jul - Luxembourg. Sleep in Vianden. (Train+Bus, unknown. If you believe them, the train to go to Vianden from luxembourg goes through Germany and involves 2 buses. Wth)
27 jul - Vianden. Sleep in Utrecht? Bunk with former housemate (till 29). (Train, 6-7 hrs. No fare information)
28 jul (Fri) - Utrecht. Close bank account.
29 jul - Finish up Utrecht. Bum. Get luggage from friend (or earlier).
30 jul - Fly at 12pm!


To do for July trip:

- Book night train


Damnit, the Gmail interface is horrible when you are forwarding multiple documents.


To do before leaving:

- Print itinerary
- Deposit luggage with friend
- Pack, repack
- Write, print and send Eurolines complaint letter
- Mail someone her card
- Change address, email address (can't find the field) in Osiris Online
- Return XS card
- UU/ESN shirt
- Look at De Rode Brug, other Utrecht stuff
- Close my bank account

Done:
- Buy new 15-strip strippenkart
- Ship stuff home
- Get orange souvenir
- Return library books
- Remove batteries from charger, pop in new set
- Finish, do a final read through and then submit book report, no thanks to someone
- Powder the straps of my bag
- Charge other set of batteries
- Study for hard open book exam (Sorta)
- Detach, return keys
- Final cleanup of room
- Throw away shit, including stuff in Kitchen
- Appelflappen (Partially)

- Eurail? Check prices
- Print out all that shit
- Finish blog backlog
- Backup files
- Final laundry
- Book Marseilles hostel

I imagine that there're many patriots traveling on the Belgian rail network ("Reduction [on fares]: 'Patriotic reasons'"].



God, what have I done?!

(The stupid system doesn't understand that a 1/2 hr bus ride to Ettelbruck saves me 8 hours of travel. So much for the French front end to the Deutsche Bahn system [yes, I recognise the layout. Sneaky buggers.])