merpel

The past week Leiden celebrated its annual Jazz festival. Unfortunately I’d been travelling around too much to catch any of the concerts, except the one on Sunday by Kim Hoorweg. In fact, I didn’t only go to the concert, but also to the accompanying workshop in which she taught about 14 jazz enthusiasts about jazz improvisations and we also studied some background choirs to ‘Lady be good’. It was a bit scary since I’d never really done improvisations, and I also don’t really sing with other people usually but everyone was very cool and relaxed. Even though some other people were also not that experienced at improvising you could already notice that everyone had their own style, probably influenced by what they listen to?

Anyway, the concert itself was supercool. Steve and Alex were also there, and even though we’d bought tickets separately we could still sit together. What’s so great about jazz is that they take the time to give everyone a solo, not just the lead singer and the musicians really seem to enjoy listening to their partners delivering some superb solo. At some point Kim got the audience to stand up and sing along, which I think is pretty wicked in a 300 year old theatre, it’s usually more of a festival or standing concert venue thing :). Besides some of the great jazz standards there was also some fresh and humorous work written by Ms. Hoorweg herself as well as some rock/pop songs in a jazzy coat (marvellous cover of ‘Message in a Bottle’). Nearly at the end of the concert the workshop people were invited onto the stage to show the audience what they had learned during the workshop. Needless to say it was dead scary, but I did it, and even fairly graciously (I think, I hope) survived my 15 second solo and actually enjoyed it :)

After the concert Steve, Alex and I went to the Asian restaurant on the Beestenmarkt for a ‘quick bite’. Little did we know that the Japanese part of the restaurant is actually a hibachi grill and thus offering 3 hours of entertainment by a skillful chef with knives accompanying a delicious meal. We didn’t mind that it didn’t turn out to be a quick bite, as it was just amazingly good. When I got home at 22:00 I nearly immediately passed out after a hell of a good day.

• I’m 40 pages into my thesis
• As you saw from the photo in my previous post another chocolate fondue took place at the Zouterwoudsesingel, this time with Judith and Steve. Naturally there was chocolate and fruit, but also whiskey and music :)
• The TiCC PhD Day that I helped organise went smoothly with lots of interesting presentations and discussions
• my presentation went well too :)
• Christmas! Good food, good company.
• My brother Hans visited me in Leiden, and beat me at the Catan cardgame (3 out of 3 times already!)
• Wiskey with Judith
• Paul was here! Which means lots of coffee, tea and hot chocolate at nice cafes in Leiden, good conversation and hugs
• With Paul I travelled to Groningen to visit the Waterhouse exhibition at the Groninger Museum, absolute must-see!
• Travelled on to Heerenveen to spend some hotel vouchers there. I think I would have preferred my own bed and the Leiden scenery…
• Spent 2.5 hours at a copyshop to get a poster for a conference printed
• Put together conference programme booklets and conference bags
• Manned the IWC-8 registration desk
• Spent 2 hours phoning back and forth with a print shop to get another poster printed, this time for a conference participant (thanks Ryanair for losing the original poster!) I know suspect there’s a bug in Powerpoint which messes up pdf exports…
• Had the IWC-8 excursion and dinner, thank god it went well (Breda was a bit slippery and cold, but prettier than ever!)
• Presented my poster (had some good discussions)
• Whiskey with Steve, Judith and Bas. Interesting discussions :)
• Went to Groningen again, this time for CLIN 19
• Since no-one else showed up at tennis on Friday I basically had a 2-hour private lesson :) Exhausted afterwards though.

Although my thesis hasn’t progressed much lately I’ve had many good reasons to not update my blog the past month, since a lot has happened:

• I wrote two papers for two workshops (IWCS-8 and BioDivGrid-08)
• I turned 26, so for the first time I threw a big party in my tiny apartment in Leiden
• in preparation for my birthday I ordered my groceries off ah.nl, very decadent, but necessary due to severe time-constraints
• my parents gave me a Philips Wake-up Light for my birthday, so getting up is easier
• I started reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem
• My sister performed with her dance group (and I watched in awe)
• Paul and I spent a great week together around Leiden and Amsterdam
• while Paul was here the heating in our house broke down
• thankfully we could take a shower at the hotel in Amsterdam where two of his friends were staying
• I visited the Anne Frank house
• I saw Rembrandt’s Nightwatch (was actually a bit disappointed, I guess I’ve been spoilt by the Louvre and the Vatican museums?)
• Paul and I quietly celebrated being together for a year (in different time zones again unfortunately)
• I presented my work at BioDivGrid-08
• I said goodbye to Arthur who’s moved to Skye
• My sister Sara turned 17
• I’ve watched many episodes of “How I Met Your Mother” (my latest little sin)
• We celebrated Sinterklaas at my parents

The past week happened to be very rich in musical events for me and all brought some insights. On Wednesday there was my singing lesson, and learning to sing is still full of surprises, as with any physical activity you’re learning (such as dancing and as tennis as I’m also finding out) you realise that you do not have that much control over your body as you thought you had, resulting in your body displaying unwanted and sometimes unnoticed behaviour (in dancing your hand not moving in sync with your feet, in tennis moving your wrist in a reflex and in singing starting to stress muscles around your voicebox). I’ve been singing for a while now (coming quite a long way from being absolutely chicken shit about people possibly hearing me to an addiction to Playstation SingStar at parties) but I still sometimes find myself accidentally stressing some muscles or forgetting to move the tip of my tongue to the front of my mouth…Still. I’m getting better at it, it’s just a very interesting learning process.

On Thursday Steve and I went to see Mogwai at the Melkweg in Amsterdam, a Scottisch instrumental band and on Saturday I went to a Latin fiesta concert for the celebration of the Day of the Dead, organised by Colores de Mexico. It’s refreshing to listen to different music styles and to soak up the different atmospheres at the different concerts. So, at Mogwai I felt a great distance between the audience and the band and people were kind of getting more introvert and less interactive as the melodies were woven into walls of sound of complex and seemingly endlessly repeated patterns. According to Steve one of the band members had said in an interview that their music was the perfect music to get high to, and although I can’t speak from experience, I can very much imagine so.

On Saturday night the music was (strongly) inviting people to dance, sing along, clap along, etc. Let’s say more “share the music” (and more music was shared until well after the concert as the musicians just didn’t want to stop making music, but maybe more on that some other time). I think I prefer the latter. Not saying that the Mogwai concert wasn’t good or anything, it was splendid (although next time I’ll bring earplugs as it was a bit too loud for my taste), but I think music is meant to bring people together, not isolate them. Anyway, all three events were interesting and most definitely worth it in their own way :)

I can deal with not living near the beach anymore and not surfing every day, but I just hate it when it’s still dark when I have to get up, such as now, and as it will be the rest of winter. In LA it was just always light at 7….much easier to get up..

The week of 6 – 12 October was a bit mental. I’ve been running to and fro to get to work, a concert, to my dance class, a party and to the Belgian Ardennes to recover from it all. So on Monday I travelled from Leiden to Tilburg to work there as we had a paper due on Friday and it was just handier to be in the same building to do this. On Tuesday I travelled from Tilburg to Rotterdam for the Queen concert, on Wednesday from Tilburg to Leiden to pick up some stuff and go to my dance class (and I just needed the exercise) on Thursday I only travelled between Etten-Leur and Tilburg. Worked til 3, got up again at 7:30 to go to Tilburg on Friday, worked on the paper, got most of it done before my professor’s inaugural address at 16:15 (well, 16:45 in the end because of some organisational complications). The address was great by the way, you can find it here by the way (it’s in Dutch but it has cool animations). After the drinks I finished up the paper (with help from Steve), submitted it (it’s not perfect, but hey it’s something) and around 22:00 we made it to the party somewhere in Tilburg (actually at a really cool place, we just had trouble finding it because of course we’d forgotten to take the address and look at a map beforehand). After some well deserved glasses of wine, some dancing and gossiping I ran back to the train station to catch the last train to Etten-Leur. Around 02:00 I fell asleep, only to wake up again at 08:00 in order to catch a train to Vielsalm in the Ardennes where my parents and my youngest brother had rented a holiday home for the week and I was joining them for the weekend. The train journey took me via Liège, which has a beautiful new train station, and through gorgeous forests. It was good to be away and relax without a phone or internet, and just have time to read a book and sleep. Which I did plenty, on Saturday night I fell asleep around 22:00,  I woke up briefly at 10 the next morning but fell asleep again until noon and after a lovely walk in the woods I had a little nap again on the sofa. After which it was time for some splashing around in the swimming pool again :).

The past week was a bit crazy again as well, as I of course had to come back from the Ardennes, although my parents drove me to Liège so that saved me 2 hours on the train or so. Two days later I was on the train again to go to Antwerp for the yearly meeting of my research group and the Antwerp and Ghent Computational Linguistics groups. So on Wednesday Steve, Sander and I left Leiden train station at 07:19 to make it to Antwerp before 10 but unfortunately we missed our connection in Rotterdam, and then our next train was delayed too so we were 1.5 hours late…The meeting itself was cool.  It  was held at an old nunnery that was turned into a conference centre + hotel. Lots of cool presentations. My presentation went pretty OK, although it would have been better if I had actually prepared it. The thing everyone looks forward to at ATILA though is the social programme. This year there wasn’t only a great dinner, but we also went bowling for a few hours :). During the lunch hours I also managed to go out and walk around Antwerp again for a bit, as it had been ages since I’d been there (we used to go shopping there when I still lived in Brabant).

Right now I’m in Leiden again, yesterday my brother Hans came to Leiden with me and we went out to dinner at Djebena, a cool little Eritrean place where you get to eat with your hands. It was a bit fortunate that my tennis class wasn’t on, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to go out to dinner there, and actually I wasn’t looking forward to alternating between hitting balls and wiping my nose because I have a terrible cold…Today we went out into town and we baked muffins and tomorrow we’re going to the natural history museum. We’d actually meant to go to see Tropic Thunder this evening but I found out that cinemas actually won’t let 16- in on a 16+ film even though this rating is an advice (cinemas can get sued if they do let them in, since when does advice mean law?) Anyway, we’re fine, Hans is actually working on his website now :)

On October 7 I got to see Queen + Paul Rodgers (basically 1/2 Queen and some other good musicians) in Ahoy in Rotterdam (thanks to a colleague still having a spare ticket). I’ve always liked Queen, although I was a bit skeptic at first, I mean, Freddie Mercury mainly set the tone, but Brian May and Roger Taylor are still great musicians and the songs are still great, so it turned out to be a great night out. I reckon Mr. Taylor and Dr. May must have thought that people who would normally go to a cover-band’s performance to hear some of these songs might as well go to them, because who could cover their songs better than they can themselves?

I thought Paul Rodgers did a great job. I think it takes balls to sing these superwellknown songs to an audience that still has the original band members in mind (judging from the vintage shirts), but he had made the songs his own and he has a nice style of his own, more of a storyteller than a drag queen (I mean that in a good way!) I would say. The solo performance (well, with the audience) of Love of my Life by Brian May was goose bumps inducing, as well as Bohemian Rhapsody with May and Taylor playing their parts along with Freddie’s voice while he was projected on the big video screen above the stage (no need to start yelling like the Freddie fan in front of me though). Another highlight was Roger Taylor’s skillful display of drumming on a double base, very cool.  I should do these things more often :)

“Time flies” I know I use the phrase quite often, but it is true: time flies. Tomorrow it’s exactly a year ago since I left the Netherlands to start my internship at ISI in Marina Del Rey, but it’s still as fresh in my memory as last week. I can almost not comprehend how much has happened this year, how much I’ve learnt and that I had my proposed promotores sign the application for assignment of promotor form today and that already almost a month ago my last year as a PhD student started (this also means that I hope for time to go a bit slower every now and then in order to get all the work done that I want to do to bring this project to a good end).

My private life has also changed quite a bit. I swore I would never get into a long distance relationship again, but here I am emailing, skyping, iChatting, sending (and receiving! (see image)) postcards and hunting for cheap flights. But it feels good, I’m happy (with the person, not the spatial arrangement, but that’s only temporary). There have also been some less happy developments the past year concerning the health of some of my family members (for some odd reason it’s easier to share good things so I won’t elaborate…). I’m just hoping everything will work out but some things will never be the same.

There is so much I could write about, such as my first tennis class last week (and the ensuing 2 days of pain, but I’m going again on Friday), how we got told off for using our MacBooks at one of our work locations, how cool my dance classes are, random thoughts about everything and more and stuff that happens to me but I won’t. At least not for now, and I’m also not sure how frequently I will post in the near future as I will be devoting most of my time to my work (don’t worry, I’m very excited about it, it just takes up a fair bit of my energy and time). Frankly, most evenings the last thing I want is sit at my laptop after having spent already most of the day at it and when my fingers will be sore from typing intelligent sounding stuff about ontologies, information extraction and sharing…and you probably don’t want to hear about that anyway :). Actually, for a while I’ve also been thinking about what to actually do with this blog. I kind of started it as a travel diary, as an easy way to keep everyone updated of what I was up to on my worldwide travels or in the smaller space of the Netherlands. Maybe the format needs rethinking…

Anyway, I won’t go completely offline, so check back every month or so (or start using RSS damnit!) for reports on the status of my life :)

…especially when it’s something as important as your PhD thesis. But the first 4 pages are written now (of course they still need 50,000 revisions, but it’s something).

Today I also baked my first bread. Unfortunately, I didn’t read the instructions properly so I had it in the oven for too long which burnt the bottom, but it’s tasty (the upper, non-black part that is).

I’m sitting in a comfy chair in Terminal 5 at Heathrow now. I just brushed my teeth and I actually had a pretty decent sleep on my Transatlantic flight so I’m feeling pretty good. I arrived in London half an hour ahead of schedule, so that was good, but there’s still not enough time to finish this blogpost because I have to board now…

Part 2: Greetings from the Netherlands! I’m back home in Leiden, where we have new carpet in the staircases. Again I had a really annoying Dutch couple behind me, who were so surprised that we went to gate 8 instead of 14 at Schiphol airport because this flight “always goes to 14″ urgh…Anyway, it’s raining here :( and unfortunately the MITCH dinner we’d scheduled tonight is off because half of the team is ill, but in a bit I’m going to go to Steve’s for dinner :)