Going home!

currently im at boston airport, waiting for our flight to iceland.... and then to... amsterdam, the netherlands! after 9 months we now go back for christmas!

above you see another city, utrecht.. where we certainly will go as well, as i prefer it over amsterdam... this view is from the food/dining area of the V&D (a warehouse comparable to Macy's, i guess); i used to always drag everyone to this place as the view is so magnificent (and, if you do it secretly, you can bring your own food and just buy a coffee/tea while enjoying the view). look how different it is from usa.... :) in the back is the "dom" the most beautiful church in utrecht; every time  i look at it i am amazed by its beauty.. even after having lived in that city for 5 years. it is the tallest church tower in the netherlands, built in 1382 (!!) and it used to be the tallest building in utrecht; until 1 or 2 years ago, it was not allowed to build a building exceeding the length of the tower... but they recently started to build a huge bank building.. (maybe it got finished during the time we were gone?)  perhaps you can see, or not, but behind the church tower is the other part of the church that is not (anymore) connected to the tower. due to a fierce (found that word on wikipedia!) storm in 1674 that part was destroyed, probably due to bad construction; they had put all their effort to create that beautiful tower..... :)

ah, im looking forward to go home.... how will it be after being gone for 9 months? (and take some pictures of the dom with my new fancy camera!!)

Christmas lights

on tuesday we went back to the decorated house. i really wanted to see it in the dark... ofcourse we could not find it at first... driving around we actually saw many many houses with a lot of decoration. whenever there was, it was not just a bit, but always many lights.. on trees, on the porch... everywhere possible.. but all of those many lights were nothing... compared to the house above. sooooo much!!! it was impressive, and in the dark actually quite nice, although over the top. on the photo you cannot see how much it was, unfortunately... you can see a car standing there; they were watching too! luckily it was not a supercrowded street, but not entirely empty either, and most cars driving by reduced their speeds to have a look at the sea of light, some even stopping entirely... could be dangerous!

while taking pics lights started to go off.. thats why i choose this pic, despite the car; it has the most lights still on... maybe the electrical current got overloaded with soo much needed to light all this?!

the house next to it did not have one light... :)

No crime

although you are not allowed to watch inside the great hall when the freshmen have their food, its no crime to look through the window when its empty, right? above what me and my camera saw... doesnt it look like harry potter? :)

as for the harvard library urine incident: it happened actually already a few weeks back, and then was reported as an accident by the person who tripped over the bottle of urine. only later it somehow got listed as a possible "hate crime" and was investigated by the university police. they however came to the conclusion that, although it were gay and lesbian books, was "just" an accident, and there was "just" a bottle of urine located at the wrong place. nowhere it was mentioned WHY there was such a bottle with pee in a library in the first place??!! now i found a post on this website where someone poses the following: it is finals week at the university, so everyone is studying real hard. possibly... someone was studying soooo hard in the library, that he/she could not even get up to go to the restroom and instead did it in a bottle. seems plausible... although... crazy?! i especially like the last sentence: "Harvard's damaged books on gay issues turning out to be a accident instead of a hate crime is quite a relief to the compus' GLBT community. Finals are tense enough without thinking someone they study with could be that nasty."

so, thats it, no hate, no crime, just harvard pee..... not very prestigious though...

Wet accident

above the memorial hall in cambridge, from harvard univeristy. according to my friend wikipedia it is now a national historic landmark. in 1877 it was completed. the hall's great room is used as the dining hall for freshmen, and you are not allowed to have a look inside (those poor hardworking students are at harvard, and need to study! they arent monkeys you can watch...). i did however once have a peek inside, and that was soooo cool!! it totally looked like the great dining hall in the harry potter movie (at least so i think..).

clearly this picture was taken when there was more sun out.. but i just read something sooo weird in the newspaper related to harvard that a harvard pic was necessary... :) according to the newspaper, 36 books, all dealing with gay and lesbian studies, were damaged by urine. urine??!! harvard issued a statement that the books were damaged "when a library staffer accidentally knocked over a bottle of urine that had somehow been placed on the shelf where the staffer was stocking books". eh? how did that get there? why? the headline of the newspaper thus is "hate in the halls of harvard?" 

surely i keep you updated if more news on this follows....

Tobin bridge

above you see in the back a part of the tobin bridge. i still do not know whether i find this bridge pretty or ugly, but surely i find it fascinating. it leads you from chelsea (where the photo was taken) to charlestown. this is only a small part of the bridge, it is 3 km long! and has 2 levels. we drove a few times on the lower level, and i find it a little scary, it all seems so narrow and low. on top of that, there is always a digital traffic sign saying "please drive safely", indicating to me that on this bridge you really have to be careful, thereby making me feel even less safe.. it crosses the mystic river, and therefore this bridge is sometimes called the mystic river bridge (but i never heard that). it was built between 1948 and 1950. so that explains why it looks sooo old! it is old! i have tried now already from many angles and at several locations to take a nice picture.. but never managed. luckily there is the internet; here is a beautiful picture of it! ah, and the internet also tells me that Tobin was a former mayor of boston and Mass governor. a less nice detail; someone once jumped from that bridge to commit suicide. and somewhere else i see someone calling it the "green river killer"... ah, maybe! depends at what picture you look!

Posing with...

santa! as opposed to the previous time (my goodness, was he really there already at november 7?! and wow, is time running by quickly...), now many parents wanted their kids pictured with santa. not all children were happy about it, some were crying and some could not be made posing with santa no matter what, he remained a big scary bearded man in a red suit. but look at the boys above (twins, i presume), there is so much pride in the way they are standing there! it was really fun to observe... (it was also fun to see that santa has some kind of ass-problem.. when he got up i could see he had a special kind of pillow on which he was sitting... :D)

Christmas decoration

on the road to saugus (there we have the mall with the used bookstore and quite some other shops, as well as, a little further, a huge thrift store) we passed this house today. while passing i couldnt believe how much was in that garden, so we turned, drove back and stopped to take some pictures. the light is not the best, but clearly, there is a lot of christmas decoration. its not even everything!! on the left side is a bridge entirely decorated and we were in fact standing in the other part of the garden, that was also entirely filled with decorations and lights and i dont know what. the owner was busy putting up some more... there were several notes that you should not walk on the (private) driveway; however, they did make an "observation area" (where we were standing). never saw something like that before...!

now i want to go back in the dark, to see all the lights!!

Some coffee?

 

on boylston street, when there were a lot of people out on the streets.... 

in cars, on strollers, sometimes even in the couch... everywhere there are cupholders for your beverage. i do think thats a very american thing.... :)

and your beverage of course goes into a plastic/carton cup (disregarding the few that "go green" and bring their own) that you can trash afterwards. often the coffees/ ice-coffees are sooo huge (and in case of iced coffee with sooo much ice!), i always wonder whether people finish them entirely...

and nope, that was not my cup... although.. whenever i have to give my name, i always say cat (and sometimes even spell it), but almost always it will come back as Kat, which i never understood (kat is actually the dutch spelling for cat; the pet). but then a real american explained me its because many girls go by kathy, with a K.

So tired....

..today. absolutely no energy for any blogwriting. so just this peaceful picture. its the jamaica pond in jamaica plain.

Photographing strangers...

...like these fancy ladies a few months back at boylston street (i was sitting on the stairs of the public library and they didnt notice me) is what i like most, but what i also find most scary...  for me, it also depends whats going on, if there is some kind of gathering, or festivity, i feel more free to take a picture than when its just 1 person, or especially, 1 or 2 cops; they are really too intimidating (at least to me). but, in the US, you are allowed to photograph anything, except: (1) certain military installations or operations. (2) people that are in places that are not easily visible to the general public (ie at home). (i stole this from here). you thus can photograph whatever you can see in public space (thus also police officers, or children, for that matter). it happened however already a few times that we were kindly, or less kindly, asked not to take pictures (for example in the cinema (???), or the area around my lab in charlestown, which is rather industrial and sooo cool!).

here is a link i found very useful, and actually i recently printed the statement posted there and now always have it with me (just in case). found it at this photoblog (also in boston!)

Posing proudly

when obama was in town, they released an enormous amount of police officers into boston. they were their charming macho self.... great. as for example those guys with bikes above. they were just standing there, displaying their cool.... suddenly there was this girl that asked whether she could get her picture taken with them and with some small gestures they made clear that that was fine. else they remained as they were.. the girl put herself in front of one and posed until there was a picture that they were happy with. ofcourse, when they did it, suddenly everyone else dared doing that too, so several pictures of people with cool cops were taken..... 

at least they were useful for something.... i guess....

Freaky santa

last week we went out to dinner for tims birthday. we went to a simple place (the pizza is soooo gooood!!), and the "restaurant" was sooooo tiny, i had only been there during summertime and then they have a big terrace, but inside there was space for only 5 tables.... its on newbury street in boston, a street with many fancy, expensive stores. some shopwindows were very pretty, but the one above was rather freaky, i would say..! santa's dress was moving up and down... what about children passing by? or am i too old-fashioned?

Other side

and here are the beach houses from the other side... as said, i cannot choose!!
here i had to cut off tim, he was on the left side, but i liked the pic better without him... :)

Ocean houses

im 2 or 3 days behind with blogging.... :( then this weekend i was sick so no new pictures... 

ah well.. this is in provincetown, where we went last week at thanksgiving. we passed by this seemingly endless row of houses and i made tim turn and stop there so we could have a look and take some pictures. it was deserted!! i could stand in the middle of the road and take pics... (see above). these houses are to rent on a daily basis, but only during the summertime. you cannot see that here, but they are right on the beach.... sooo beautiful!! i took many pictures of these houses, all more or less the same and couldnt really decide which one to take.

ah, its finally really getting colder, its freezing right now! and actually i saw some teeny tiny snowflakes on saturday (or was it sunday) morning... but tim didnt even see them, so...

Boston landmarks

these are 2 boston landmarks, at least in my opinion... :) the sand & gravel, and the bridge behind (and there are us flags everywhere...). the bridge has a long and complicated name i always forget... i had to look it up: Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge. ok, who can ever remember that?! but i like the bridge a lot. it apparently is the widest cable-stayed bridge in the world and carries 10 lanes of traffic. it cost over 100 million dollars and is part of the "big dig", it was finished in 2003. what i like is that the two tops of the bridge resemble the shape of the bunker hill monument in charlestown (that we still have to climb); when taking the ferry from boston to charlestown, you can nicely see that indeed the shapes are exactly the same as the monument, a bit further away.

these 2 landmarks were also shown in the movie "the town"

whenever we are driving, i try to take pictures from the car, but usually they dont turn out well.. this one is an exception....

At home

buuugggghhh... thursday morning i got the second shot for hepatitis B vaccination (as for the type of work i do its better to be vaccinated; i also got a flu shot! in fact here they strongly advise every one to get a flu shot (why?!!), and i heard from a real american that hepatitis B vaccination is required to get into college (?)). thursday evening was a fine evening full of american culture (i had my first eggnog and we saw the tree lighting at the boston common), but thursday night i got high fever, terrible headache, muscle ache and i dont know what... :(  1 in 15 people get some side effects from hep B vaccination, so probably im this 1 person.... didnt get out of bed the entire friday... and also today i spent most of the day in bed....

havent been this long in our apartment yet! above it is.. not the best pic, but currently its even more messy, so therefore i choose not to take another picture. its a real american apartment, with a bar, and fancy (yellow) barstools. i also like our dinnertable and red chairs a lot. the table comes from a yardsale, and the chairs we got for almost nothing on craigslist. we also have a map of the US (found in the messy basement of our previous apartment), and underneath is a bench we bought for only 40 dollars. its sooo beautiful! it originally was a bench in a ship, you can open the top and we keep our shoes in it.. the bookcase we got for free, as well as the couch. also the wall was painted purple (i choose the color) for free, since we work for "preferred employers".. (whatever that may mean). although it probably looks messy in the pic, i very much like our apartment and am very happy we managed to get such nice furniture for almost nothing.... :)

ah, the big lamp we bought new at ikea last weekend, as you can see there are no ceiling lights at all in the living room, and it was much too dark...

At work

this is close to harvard medical school, but i dont know what kind of students these are... but surely they are students doing some practical course as judged by the neatness/emptiness of the lab, the amount of people and them all wearing labcoats.... when i still worked at the other lab, i  often passed these windows and was surprised that even around 7 they still seem to have classes...

im about to leave work, and no inspiration for a picture... thats why i choose this one. generally i dont wear a labcoat, its too hot; only when i might get dirty or when working with mammalian cells. as a student you have to buy an (expensive labcoat) and you have to wear it, no matter what stupid thing you are doing. and then you are released into a real lab and very surprised that none of the real scientists are wearing labcoats.... :) in the lab where i did my PhD we were actually obliged to wear a coat, and often they came to check whether we did so (but usually we got informed about inspection beforehand, so.... ). funny.. from my experience, it seems labrules are much more strict in the netherlands than in US...

ok, i guess all that was not very interesting to the general public, off to home now!

Forever 21

above a shopwindow in a fancy mall we went to last sunday. there was a little girl playing with the silver ribbons, but i was too late to take a picture. so instead tim posed for me. as much as i liked all the shiny-ness of the shopwindow, i didnt feel the urge to check the clothes... :)

anyhow, only now (at another photo i took) i saw this shop is named "forever 21", which is funny since its tims birthday today. and nope, he did not become 21.... however, he can just pretend to be forever 21, i guess.... he reached a special age and he was not too happy about it.. (21 + 9). and worst of all, i dont even have a special present aside from a birthday-candle on his donut this morning (yes, i know, thats very very poor). the books i ordered still did not arrive... ehhhmm.. what about going out to dinner tonight?

Cant ignore...

christmas around here..... in our perfect apartment complex, several people planted a christmas tree in their house (as deduced from the tree needles every where on the stairs (is it needles? i dont know. in dutch its "naalden" so i just translated it literally)). christmas lights and so on decorate the outsides of many houses, and also in the lab i heard christmas songs the entire day. pfffffftttt. there is apparently one radio station that plays only christmas songs since the day after thanksgiving until... yes, christmas...

above is on boylston street, the entrance to the prudential mall. the have been throwing some gigantic chrismas balls every here and there.....

no way that you can ignore christmas. (but i already said that) my goodness, everything is always bigger here than i think... :)))

Snow & Ice

its getting a little colder here in boston, but its still well above 0 degrees celsius! today it was arond 8 degrees and very sunny. this picture was taken at october 28, when it was sooo warm that i went to work without jacket and we ate lunch outside.. i then had a walk around and saw this sign which was so funny in the bright sun....

we came here in april when the weather was not that bad and the summer was hot and sunny!! coming from a country where the winters usually are not that cold, and snow is a curiosity (except for last winter) i feared winter, but so far it hasnt shown itself (herself/himself?). in the netherlands, on the other hand, its freezing!! and snowing!! it has been freezing that much, that the first crazy ice-skaters have been on the ice already, and they expect to have the first ice skating marathan tomorrow.....

in the meantime, im actually happy its still not that cold here... :)