From Osnabruck

we are away for a bit. we are now in osnabruck, germany, where we staying at the house of a friend and former colleague (while they are enjoying some time off in the netherlands). jaaajjjj!! the house is gigantic. there is a piano, and i already cannot count the number of hours tim has played... good its a free standing house...

photowise.... this is all i can show you from osnabruck. yep, thats quite bad.... but... we have had quite some rain and im not good at balancing my umbrella in one hand and the camera in the other. this i took from the car. this traffic sign tells you that you can only enter the environmental zone of osnabruck when you have the green sticker on your car. to get the sticker, the car needs to meet the german/EU pollution standards. even if your car meets the standard, no sticker means you can get fined, regardless whether you have a german or foreign car. so.... luckily it was quite easy to obtain the sticker at a local inspection zone (providing the license plate was sufficient, together with a payment of 5 euros).

today its raining again, but lets see, perhaps i will take some more interesting pics!

Ladies only

the first stop on the german highway (when we went for a little getaway last month) had 2 parking spots that were for women only (it says "women's parking place. please keep these 2 spots free"). tim didnt read and put the car right in the second one... and had to repark because i said so.... here he tried to pose as a lady with my shades on. but well....

wikipedia tells me its a typical german thing (although in the netherlands they have them too; but i never saw them). its so that women who are alone have the best lit places and dont have to walk too far at night when its scary out. many parking garages have some right near the exit, or placed such that they are in sight of the security guys....

here in the netherlands we get more and more parking spots that are only for electrical cars (they are charging points at the same time). in our street 2 spots have been sacrificed for that. it made parking even harder for those non-electrical drivers. but i must say, they are often used.

They read?

this store sells all kinds of appliances, but they dont like it when dogs urinate on their displayed goods. the yellow note says: "doggies, you can look, but do not piss on it!" in dutch it sounds like a silly rhyme for the "kijken" (to watch) and the "zeiken" (to piss). but i just didnt know dogs could read... :)

the weather has cooled down again. buuuuuhhhh. now we are back to normal temperatures for this time of the year.

BOLO boost

as i was writing this post yesterday i got so bored by it, that i forgot to post it! its still boring, but now i post it anyways... :D

see the grey in this picture? thats the dutch weather. mix it with some wind and lots of rain.... its not cold, but neither is it pleasant. it rained a lot today, just as it did yesterday, and i think the day before that...

i took this picture for the pink poster. it says "know that BOLO is more and more becoming SOHO", indicating that BOLO (the neighborhood that we live in, its an abbreviation for bos en lommer, as i wrote previously) is becoming a cool place to be/live, just like SOHO in new york. i can imagine it once happening, but not yet.... in our street they are renovating several old apartment blocks and selling them for too muchh money; previously they were cheap, badly maintained, crappy apartments (just like ours). so yes, i guess they do that to try and turn it a bit into SOHO here. this poster is for the local television station "AT5", apparently they are not doing well and need more viewers. we havent had a tv in almost 4 years now, but i actually liked to watch the local amsterdam news. when looking up more about this particular advertisement, i stumbled upon a blog that discusses the lower "sentence"; "weet je stad". translated literally, it says "know your city". i guess i did just that and didnt think about the bad dutch. in dutch its not a sentence at all, indeed! it should be "ken je stad". now, there is also a blog called "bolo boost", which is reporting about anything cool/interesting etc happening in our neighborhood.

now, i know nothing about the yellow ad. its something about parking and "man, go bricken". i have no clue what "bricken" is, and im sure this post would be even more boring if i would go and find out....

Speed limit

this is a picture i took while we still had a car....on many highways in the netherlands the speed limit depends on the time of day, like above. here you can go no faster than 100 km/hr between 6 in the morning and 7 in the evening. after that time you can go 120 km/hr (i think). i think it makes driving a bit more complicated than it already is. theres a stretch of road close to our house where you can go 100 before 7pm and 80 after (or the other way around, i never can remember, but its indicated on the traffic signs. however, there is no clock underneath that sign! we were using the car of tims parents this weekend and only when everyone around us was going faster than we did, did we remember that the clock in the car was off by 5 minutes (it was around 7). tim has been looking for cars ever since he sold ours! we checked out 2 of them this weekend. the first one was just not interesting, the second one had "a slight red bull smell" the seller said. when we took it for a test drive, that slight smell turned out to be red bull mixed with dirty dog. it was so horrible that we drove just a few hundred meters with the windows open as far as possible. just thinking about it makes me cringe again...

and well, so much for posting everyday in 2014! i just missed 3 days! no excuses, just laziness and that horrible dog smell that knocked me out... ;)

Wheres that?!

well, yes, on a huge parking lot with no bike in sight, hahahaha! this we saw last march when we spent a morning in portland, oregon. we actually didnt see many bikes while we were there. and to be honest, we were not really enchanted by the city. but maybe we werent there at the right time or right location. and yes, we only spent a morning....

most certainly, if portland is the bicycle capital of the US, it still needs a whole lot more bikes to beat any given city in the netherlands... :)

Biking restrictions

i had no clue what to post today, and then i saw this one... no! its not in the netherlands. i dont think such a restriction on bikes could be possible at all here. this one is for the boardwalk at coney island in new york.

Crooked trees

i like this traffic sign for crooked trees! but i like the trees even more, its like you drive through a green tunnel, so pretty. and all trees are bending over at the same angle. there are tree tunnels for either direction of car traffic, and a tree tunnel for the bikes (which i have shown you before). it turned out to be difficult taking pictures, in real its so much prettier! we drive/bike here whenever we visit tims grandmother. im curious if fall colors are present by now.... (but perhaps i expect too much after experiencing fall in new england for the past 3 years)

It's time...

for my american red shoes...! unfortunately not to trudge through mountains of snow, but to avoid wet feet. it has been raining like crazy the entire weekend (as well as friday, and perhaps thursday, i dont even remember), and it will rain tomorrow as well.

while tim suddenly had to come into work for a few hours today, i was deciding whether i would just spend the entire afternoon on the couch or do something useful.. that was until i suddenly saw quite a puddle of water in front of the old-fashioned heater. water? is the thing now spewing water?? hmm, highly unlikely. is it perhaps condensation....but from what... the drying laundry? (i can be a little slow) then i finally looked up and saw it was coming from the ceiling.... buhuhuhuhuh. water was dripping down and quite a bit!! its coming down from that ugly plastic ceiling that tim cleaned back in july. for once it was a good thing we have been extremely slow with filling the cupboards we bought a little while ago. they all needed to be moved to not get wet. it has been dripping all afternoon and evening (worsening a bit). for once i was also happy we werent out all day, i think we would have come back to quite a mess! tomorrow someone will come and check. no, they couldnt come before dark today. and as he said on the phone "you know, its the rain. there is a lot of rain coming down right now, and lots of rain gives lots of leaks, but its just the heavy rain you know". hmppf. great...

(and no, i dont know whether the neighbors really have better stuff. i do hope for them its less wet than in our place..., i also hope the ugly ceiling wont come down or something... you never know...)

It's closing!!

of course i still follow the news from boston every now and then... but the news that the above restaurant is closing i first saw on facebook... when i saw it posted here as well, i knew it was true... this is on route 1, in saugus, not too far from our apartment, and so we drove by it quite often in weekends. the lawn is decorated with lifesize cows, and the place (just like the cactus) is gigantic. at first we were hesitant to visit the place (after the cows and the cactus we were afraid what would be inside), but once we finally did, we kept coming back every now and then. for me it was not so much about the food (the vegetables were absolutely awful, even the corn!! but tim loved the baked potato), but more the "experience". i think the decor has never changed since it was built (the 2 story restaurant opened in 1961), and i wouldnt be surprised if the waitresses were still the same as well (once our waitress asked tim when we got seated; "whats the matter son, you hungry or somethin?!" with that typical boston accent). there is crazy carpet on the floors, beautiful booths to sit in and weird cowboy-stuff on the walls. i think some of the guests had been coming there since its opening as well, so every time we were there i just couldnt get enough of watching around... if only i had been brave enough to take pictures from the inside, had asked people for portraits... but well, i didnt... (here is the last burger i had there).

according to this article, at its top days, the hilltop employed 50 cooks, 180 waiters and served 5000 meals a day. when we were there, it was usually not too busy (except the one time we took someone there and had to wait over an hour). this picture was during our last drive on route 1, we had just had to bring our couch to the dump and i was frantically photographing all that crazy american stuff on route 1 one more time... for us foreigners, this was really a typical american place, like we see in the movies, and if we were ever to visit boston again, it would be a place to go back to. but.... they are closing october 20th already!! i wonder what will happen to it. i hope at least the cactus will stay.... (and they should make a museum out of the place!!)
here you can see a video about the closing (they interview 2 guests inside the restaurant)

Private property

last time me and tim were in new york, we saw this little sign on the sidewalk for the very first time. it was somewhere around times square and this is what it says; private property. permission to cross revocable at will. i had never seen such signs before and thought it was just a joke. but some googling told me that they are all around new york (and other cities too? i havent found that), and are for real! they are indicating the property line of the building, so the part of the sidewalk that belongs to the building... hahaha.

today we finally got to painting the bedroom. that was quite some work. but at least the ceiling is purple now and the walls are white....

Climbing allowed

this is the I Amsterdam sculpture in amsterdam (actually, there are 3, one at the museumplein, one at the airport and the one above, which apparently changes location every now and then. here its in amsterdam north. the entire sign says "i amsterdam", with the i am in red. climbing is optional. a small note on the side of the sculpture actually says that climbing is at your own risk and that its not made for that, but everyone does it anyways. not like similarly large sculptures in the US, where climbing is not allowed and where that is strictly enforced (like with this sculpture that was really a huge climbing temptation for many).

the girl crawling around on the top had some trouble getting off the sculpture again, but not before her mom had taken several pics!

In Amsterdam....

... the manhole covers are also labeled with the name of the city you are in... just like in boston where i thought that was just so odd...:) "weegels" is the company making these covers, and they are located in "weert", a city in the south of the netherlands. and "DWR" is the company taking care of whats going on underneath; the sewer and water etc....

then there are my blue suede shoes and my (currently favorite) pink bag! i havent yet unpacked all my shoes, as there is no space to store them! we put 2 shoe racks just outside of the front door, but its not enough.... (and thats just a small selection of my shoes (and a few of tim's)).

Whats that?!

saw this sign at the edge of a parking lot in amsterdam. no clue what it means!! special attention zone for all people there? or...?

Weird sign!!

in the us i was always looking for weird signs, and i found plenty. so i was glad to see that weird signs are also present in amsterdam. this is next to the terrace of some hotel in amsterdam, and the sign says "vetafzuig", which literally means "liposuction". eeehhh?! tim tried it by lying on top of the wall, but nothing happened..... too bad! (perhaps you need the key to that box in the wall..?)

yesterday we went to ikea as i needed a new mattrass. so sad, since i had just trashed our perfectly fine mattresses in boston... :((( we needed some small stuff too, so we ended up going twice, by subway, to ikea (no more huge car). it took more or less the entire day and gave us quite the workout (and public transport is so expensive... buuuh, that certainly didnt change in my absence).

i tried to bake my first bread, but the yeast i had was different and the bread didnt rise.... but well... lets see... :)

Homeland security

homeland security.... i think thats a very funny term, and something you probably will only see in america. what other country assumes that naturally anyone knows what "the homeland" is? if this car drives to canada, would it provide homeland security to the canadians...? :)

i have a list of things i still want to see, do or photograph while still here. this i can now cross off my list.. its funny how you see some things every so often and always think; hmm, i should take a picture of that! but before you know, 3 years have passed and you still think that.... 

wikipedia just told me that "homeland security" is "an American umbrella term referring to the national effort to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, reduce the vulnerability of the U.S. to terrorism, and minimize the damage from attacks that do occur". the term came into use after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

my sister arrived today from the netherlands and to protect the homeland, she had to wait in a very long line, proving she is not of any harm to this country. i knew the plane had landed, and waited, waited, waited... i guess some 1.5 hour. when it was finally her turn, the guy protecting his homeland asked her very important questions like "what are you doing here, how much money did you bring, do you have a creditcard, where does your sister work, what is her status (really??!! he meant whether i am allowed to work here, but still... grrr), what kind of work do you do? and the weirdest of them all; why is your sister (thats me) not married to her boyfriend (that would be tim)? really...?!! really?! she answered that she didnt know.... hahahaha. and after that, he finally let her go without another word. i dont know how i would have reacted to that question. these "homeland" officers really tend to piss me off, and i often have to make the greatest effort not to show how awfully annoying i find them. i guess they do it on purpose. just because they can...

anyways, i feel a lot safer now. i think my sister wont be a threat to the homeland.... 

Stop texting!!

good news: we sold the table today!!! jaaajjj!! maybe selling from craigslist is easier if you put a phone number there (before we didnt); today several people called. or maybe it was the lower price... :) it was actually quite low, including the 4 red chairs. but.... the guy coming to pick it up told us he had just lost his entire household in a fire..... he asked whether we had more stuff, but more or less everything is gone now. except the couch and the bed.... but the bed we will have to trash (we got it for free and it is really broken in several places), and the couch we will probably then bring to goodwill this weekend.

anyways, i didnt want to write about that! look at this traffic sign!! had never seen it before, but this we saw in brooklyn, NY, this weekend. and they are right. its so often that people are in my way, walking slowly, because they are busy looking at their screens, while walking. if you look around you in the subway, most people are on their phones doing some kind of game, texting, or facebook indeed... i always wanted to take a picture of that, but never dared. nobody seems to read anymore, these days!  i dont have a fancy phone, and dont have the urge to check it every 5 seconds... same when in the cinema, many people check their phones during the movie (very annoying!!), and almost everyone gets out their phones as soon as the movie is done. no talking with your friends that are actually there how the movie was... no, checking the phone whether friends not present have to say anything.... grrrrr.... am i getting old...?

Germs everywhere!

i have gone through quite some packs of these the past days. something you probably didnt want to know... ;) today i finally went in to work, but i still feel and look like someone who is sick. its going around, as many people in the lab apparently dont feel well. tim has a bit of a cold, but not nearly as bad as me.

i like these packs, arent they cute?! and the advice "wash your hands to keep the germs away" & "cover your mouth when you sneeze" is very american!! first time i arrived in the us i was surprised to see this advice everywhere in the restrooms at the airport. only to discover its plastered everywhere, not just at the airport! it falls into the same category to me as the sign in many restrooms (in restaurants, malls, hospitals, etc) thats says "employees must wash hands before returning to work". to me this all seems very logical, why do you need signs for that? do more people do it because of the signs? also, in my "welcoming information packet" when i first starting working here was a brochure entirely devoted to the art of washing hands... (with pictures and clear instructions on how to apply the soap, how to wash your hands, how to rinse and dry them...).

something you definitely do not see in the netherlands...i think americans are much more germophobic than the dutch. there is hand sanitizer everywhere here! literally everywhere! wipes for the carts in the supermarket, a pump at every counter (be it the bank, the supermarket, the hospital, the clothing shop, at customs at the airport). but i still got sick... ;)  (and yes, im getting extremely frustrated!! it just doesnt seem to end!!)

Cape disappointment

when we drove through washington state, we passed by cape disappointment. of course, we didnt want to be disappointed, and decided we should go there for lunch. but.... it turned out to be a disappointment after all. we couldnt park anywhere without a permit, and we didnt have a permit.... :( but at least i now know that there is a place called like that!! wikipedia gives 2 reasons as to why it may be called like that, and it also mentions that its one of the foggiest places of the usa. when we were there it was bright and shiny!

so far, this week has been a disappointment, too. i am sick... :((( it started saturday with a bit of a throat ache, which turned into high fever overnight... now its mostly fever during the night, and ache everywhere all times (ears, throat, nose, muscles). buhuhuhuhuhuhuh.....!!!

Sacred & Profane

yesterday we made a little trip into new hampshire. we hadnt driven around boston for the longest time! first we drove to manchester, to the currier museum where we had free entrance with our bank of america card. they have quite a big collection of dutch paintings from the 1600 and 1700s.... while driving back home we drove through goffstown and passed the above bookshop. that as quite interesting! the owner was just leaving, but opened the shop again just for us.... tim asked why the books were sacred and profane, and he told us that approximately half the books are religious in nature and the other half not...

and well, today we went to the museum of fine arts for free (again with our bank card.. :)), where they had an exhibition of drawings by michelangelo, named "sacred and profane"! half of them were of the human body, and the other half were architectural drawings. that was quite interesting, especially to think that those drawings are 500 years old!!