Photos from Antwerp

The second day in Belgium, I went to Antwerp. First, I went and looked at Pelikaanstraat (Pelican Street) near the train station, which is lined with diamond stores. Most of the diamonds sold in the world actually pass through Antwerp at some point. It's a fun place to go window shopping for a few minutes. Later I saw the Diamantmuseum (Diamond Museum) which examined the process of mining and cutting diamonds.

Here's a view of the great market in Antwerp, just to give more of sense of Belgian architecture:

On the walk into another part of town , I passed through a nice park. Suddenly, I noticed one of the rabbits in the park, and I thought it looked like someone's escaped pet rabbit or something. But looking around, there were a lot of large, colorful rabbits living in the park.As I watched them and took photos, a woman came along and fed bread to the rabbits as well as some pigeons and chickens in the area.
Then, I went to Antwerp's Church of Our Lady. The main part of the interior is below, but on the sides there were a great number of paintings out for viewing, largely by Rubens and contemporaries.
The following two photos are the exterior of the cathedral, the tower and then one of the entrances.

First of the Belgium Photos and Moving Out

I'll be leaving the UK at the end of the week, so I've been wrapping up some things around Cambridge. Today I went to request a bunch of transcripts since it's easier to request them now while I have my bank account in pounds and I'm in Cambridge. At Grinnell, whenever I requested transcripts, I walked into the large and airy Chrystal Center, filled out a form, and handed it to one of the friendly people working there. Requesting official transcripts at Cambridge, on the other hand, was mildly like going to see the wizard of Oz.
First, I couldn't find the Student Records Office in town because despite being at 10 Peas Hill, the building is not actually on Peas Hill, it's on a cross street facing it. When I couldn't find it I had to go ask at the tourist information office which was very close. It felt a bit embarrassing and for some reason I felt obligated to mention that I wasn't a tourist when I asked for directions. Then when I got there, once I went through the large wooden door (Cambridge has lots of big intimidating doors on old buildings), there was a tiny entryway barely large enough to stand comfortably in, and the next door forward was locked. There was an intercom to the left of the door, and I pushed the button for the student records office. After I pushed it, someone answered and asked me what I wanted, and I said I wanted to request a transcript, and the disembodied voice said to look to my left for the transcript request forms, and then I could drop it off in an envelope through the slot on the main door when I filled it out. There was a little folder of the forms mounted on the wall. I had to leave since I didn't have a pen.
Anyway, I thought I'd go ahead and post some photos of my trip to Belgium which I took mid-June. These are from the first day, which I spent in Brussels. Below is the Erasmus house, a residence where scholar Erasmus spent some time, which has now been converted into a museum. The museum was really hard to find and it was raining, and then it was not terribly interesting inside, although Erasmus is pretty interesting. He was a contemporary of Sir Thomas More, and I translated some of his letters in a Latin sight reading group. In one letter I read Erasmus recounts meeting the young boy who would later become Henry VIII; Erasmus describes as a spoiled little demanding kid.



The next two photos are of the Grand Place or Grote Markt in Brussels, a big main central squre with lovely historical buildings. Locations in Belgium tend to have both a Dutch and a French name (sometimes confusing) since those are the two languages of Belgium. There are quite a lot of linguistic tensions, actually. People speaking one language often feel discriminated against by speakers of the other language. This tension was present historically as well, as French was considered to be the language of art and education, but then after the industrial revolution that started to reverse itself.
Brussels (as I experienced it, anyway) is largely French speaking, and I typically started conversations in French and then they changed over to English since Belgian people almost always speak much better English than my French. But the other cities I went to were mostly Dutch-speaking, so there I started conversations in English rather than irritating people by trying French.

Then I went to a brewery museum; Belgium is very famous for its beer. The beer below isn't just red looking from funny lighting in the photo; it is actually a lambic made with cherries (called kriek bier on the menu). It's quite sweet from the cherries but has a beery finish and tastes very good served nice and cold.

Finally here's the front of the Cathedral of St. Michael

in Brussels. After visiting Brussels, I went to Antwerp, then Bruges. I hope to post photos from those days very soon!

Ducklings!

I have finally finished my masters here in Cambridge. My exams went fine and in about another week I'll visit a friend in Ghana for three weeks. After exams I rowed in May bumps, had a short trip to Belgium, and went to a May ball, which was all a lot of fun, and I'll probably post photos pretty soon.

But until then, I thought I would post a few photos of some of the ducklings we've had in the pond out front of Churchill College. One of the nice things about being near the river Cam is seeing all the baby birds. On the other hand, there is a swan that's been very aggressively defending (as in, it thinks that best defense is a good offense) its mate and nest that lives in the part of the Cam where people row. It puffs up its wings and swims menacingly at pacing eights, and it went after someone in a scull and made them flip. One of my friends went out sculling around that time and the swan grabbed one of his blades in its beak; fortunately he was able to get away. Several articles about the swan, which got named "Mr. Asbo" were written, including the following: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5119527/Mr-Asbo-the-swan-attacks-unsuspecting-rowers.html

"ASBO" stands for "anti-social behavior order," which is given to people in Britain by police for disruptive behavior.

So, here are the ducklings outside Churchill when they were quite young, in all their fluffy glory:

For a sense of scale, here's one of them next to its mom (sorry, its mum, it's an English duckling) and dad.

Here are some of them all cuddled up together, after they've gotten a bit bigger:

At this point, I still see the ducklings around sometimes, and I would say that they're roughly at the teenager point of development. They have some adult feathers now, and they're getting pretty close to their parents in size.

Kew Gardens and Boat Race

Lent term came to an end about 2 weeks ago. I gave a presentation at the end of term about some of the mathematics for the essay I am working on. I felt it went well.
Also, I will not be attending any more lectures this year. However, this doesn't really mean that i suddenly have more time on my hands. Actually, now that I'm not going to lectures, I can finally figure out what happened in the lectures I went to before.
These last few days I've been trying to finish up a draft of my essay to show to the setter for comments. However, this morning, I got rather stuck with both pieces of mathematics I was working on and decided to give up for a little bit and do something else.
So, I thought I'd post about the most recent non-studything thing that I did. Last Sunday I went to London for the Oxford-Cambridge boatrace. During the morning I went to Kew Gardens, which is fairly close to the part of the Thames which was used as the race course.
Kew Gardens is a really nice park area with:
some redwoods (smaller than the California kind but still big)
Lots of birds that I wasn't able to recognize:

There area also some buildings and lakes and stuff on the grounds (I realize, very descriptive).

It was a really pretty day. It had started out cold but warmed up by midday when I was walking around Kew.

Then after leaving Kew Gardens I walked all the way to the starting line of the boat race, which was at Putney Bridge. The first and second mens' teams from Oxford and Cambridge raced. Tens of thousands of people were watching the boat race and five of the eight guys rowing for Oxford were in the last Olympics. I'm told that it looks likely that a lot of the Cambridge rowers will be in the next Olympics. This year Oxford won both races. There was a really big screen on the other side of the river so we could see the entirety of the 7k race. The main race was pretty exciting.

The boats raced side by side, and the Cambridge boat looked like it was going to pass Oxford. Once one boat can get all the way in front of the other one that effectively means the boat in front has won because the boat behind is stuck in the water behind them, which is harder to row in. But, as Cambridge started to make a move to pass Oxford, the boats clashed oars. It disrupted both boats, but it was worse for Cambridge because it was their 5 and 7 but only Oxford's I think, 2 and 4, and the 5 and 7 are more technically important for the boat. Cambridge pulled it back together, but they ended up getting passed by Oxford after awhile.

It was a fun day, and I thought it was particularly funny to watch people cheer as the boats came past, because for all the rivalry between the schools, everyone was really polite, just cheering for their school, not saying bad about the other team (unlike what Americans usually do).

Middle of Lent Term, and more Paris photos

I haven't managed to post in a really long time since I've been so busy with term. I'm attending two classes and working on my essay, which is about coherence theorems in category theory. The essay should be around 20-30 pages when finished and I have to read three mathematics papers and summarize them to write it. That may sound fairly straightforward, but it is a lot of work to understand the material in the papers enough to write about them, and I am expected to fill in details on proofs from the papers. I'm still rowing, but other than that I'm trying not to do anything other than mathematics.
In other news, the days are getting lighter, which is nice. However, we've had snow a few times, which usually melts right away, but English people seem to be completely thrown off by snow. One of my friends was irritated to find out a post office in town was closed down because of the snow, and the snow had already melted and the streets were clear. Also, people tend to walk with umbrellas in the snow, which I think is kind of funny. Since there's so much rain here, I suppose this is just how they respond to precipitation in general?
So, eventually I will finally get the photos from my trip to France back in mid-December up....
After Sandra and I had our day in Strasbourg, we went back to Paris first thing the next morning. We started out at the Arc de Triomphe and walked all the way down the Champs-Elysees to la Place de la Concorde. It was pretty early then, and very gray out (photo faces toward the Tuileries):


Then we were very disappointed to discover that a few museums were closed that day - some places don't have hours on Tuesdays- including the Musee de l'Orangerie des Tuileries, which holds Monet's waterlilies. So instead, we went to the Musee Rodin, which was wonderful. There is both an interior as well as a sculpture garden outside. Here is the Burghers of Calais:



and the Gates of Hell, which is inspired by Dante's Inferno:

Then we went to the Notre Dame and had a long walk around that area:

Then we made it, very exhausted, to the Latin Quarter, where our hostel was. On the way we made several stops, including the Luxembourg Gardens, which were very barren.

Our hostel in the Latin Quarter was very nice. We were right on the same street as an open air market so once or twice we just went and got stuff from the market for a simple dinner.

So I hope that I can keep posting in the next little while. I don't have a photo of myself yet, but a couple of days ago I went into town with one of my friends and we found a hairdresser and I got my hair cut to shoulder length, so I suddenly have a lot less hair than ever before. Other than that, things have been pretty uneventful lately.

Lent term approaching and Strasbourg photos

Last night my visiting friend from Grinnell, Olya, left, so today I am starting to face the fact that term is restarting Thursday. This term is called Lent term, which I feel adds a sense of penitence to course selection (e.g. "I'm planning on going to the Topos Theory lectures for Lent").

The most forceful reminder that term is restarting was getting back to rowing this morning. There's nothing like cycling 15 minutes through the dark, rain, and chill to the boathouse, and then going rowing at 7 am in the rain. Telling myself that I'm getting to be a tiny part of Cambridge's 200 year old rowing tradition helps motivate me, but only so much.
I got to test the new socks I bought over break this morning, and I highly recommend men's football socks. The artificial fibres are really warm. Mmm... toastier toes through technology.

Since I now have a backlog of photos from traveling in England the last couple days, I'm going to try to finish up posting about my trip to France.

So, after the day trip to Luxembourg City, we had a day trip to Strasbourg, which is in France, but is in the Alsace region, which has been passed back and forth between Germany and France over the centuries. So some signs and names of things were occasionally in German, but pretty much everything I saw was in French, so I could get by.

Strasbourg has a cathedral, the Cathedral Notre Dame de Strasbourg, which has the wonderful qualities of being way too huge to get into one photo, and being very pink, which just comes from the type of stone used:

Here's a photo of one of the rose windows in the interior:

Traveling in this region of France in mid-December was neat because at that time the cities we visited had Christmas markets (marches de noel). Strasbourg has one of the most famous Christmas markets. There were a lot of tourists at the Christmas markets. I could occasionally hear other Americans as I wandered through.

Every square in the city center was full of market stalls, which tend to look like cute little log cabins. The stalls often sell christmas ornaments, cookies, jewelry and seasonal food. In Strasbourg I bought a necklace, some wonderful cookies, and nutella crepes and mulled wine, which is heated wine with spices added. Here is a little bit of the Christmas market that was right by the cathedral:

Otherwise, Strasbourg was a very picturesque city. The river was quite scenic. Mostly we just walked around that day, but we also saw the city museums of art and archaeology.

It seems like all the cities where we went have little archaeology museums since whenever they build a new building or road they wind up accidentally unearthing something historically significant. Everything in the US seems so much more recent. Out here cities have been settled for centuries or millennia... one thing that I thought was particularly funny at the Luxembourg City museum was a descriptive caption about the founding of the city, saying that undoubtedly the most glorious time during the city's history was when it was a Roman city. This seems very different from the American sense of history and patriotism to me.

Here are a couple of views of the river in Strasbourg:

A fixed laptop, and photos of Metz and Luxembourg City

Happy New Year!
Right before the end of the year, my computer crashed and wouldn't reboot. The university technology office didn't open until January 5. They told me that they couldn't look at my laptop until a week later, but fortunately the computer office here at Churchill was able to look at it and fix it. But anyway, between having my computer broken and being worried about all my files and the heating being turned down since fewer students were around during the break (meaning only intermittent hot water and, occasionally, only intermittent heat), being in Cambridge was a bit depressing.
But, now my computer is fixed, the hot water is getting more reliable, I took a break from studying to go out to a club in town with friends for New Year's Eve, and I have a Grinnellian visiting, so things are looking up.
I still have another week or two until classes start, fortunately. So anyway, now that I have my laptop again I thought I'd take a moment to post another set of photos from my trip to France.

On the trip to France, at the end of the first full day, which we spent in Paris, Sandra and I took a late train out to Metz and then to the smaller stop of Rombas-Clouange to see our friend Alex, who is teaching English at a French school. This area is kind of in the northeast of France, close to the borders with Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

Our first day there, the three of us went over to Metz, which seemed like a nice city. I enjoyed being outside of Paris, and it was nice to get a sense of what another part of France is like.

Metz has a particularly beautiful cathedral, the Cathedral St. Etienne. Here is a view of the main entrance.

Here is some of the stained glass at the cathedral:

I think it is particularly difficult to get good photos of stained glass, but you might be able to tell from this picture that this window looks more modern. Mid-20th century, Marc Chagall and Roger Bissiere provided designs for stained glass windows. Most of the stained glass in the cathedral is from the 14th and 16th centuries, but some modern ones have been added. The one above, I believe designed by Bissiere, was especially striking.

The next day we went to Luxembourg City, the capital of Luxembourg, a teeny tiny country which was a convenient half hour train ride away from Alex's place.

This view is from a bridge we walked over on the walk from the train station into the center of town. This clocktower was pretty, and I think this view gives a sense of what Luxembourg looked like in general.

Here is the top of the Notre Dame of Luxembourg (the main door is kind of cut off at the bottom of the photo).

Luxembourg City was very beautiful, much of it situated in a valley. Unfortunately, it was too icy that day to walk down on the steps which lead around the edge of the valley and the remnants of the city walls, but I think it would be a great place to visit again in spring or summer.

Here is a view of an area we didn't go into, but it's some of the newer, more modern European Union Luxembourg:

Otherwise, we went to the city and fine arts museums in Luxembourg City.