merpel

So after almost two months of living in Amsterdam the novelty is slightly wearing off. I’m not getting lost anymore on the way to work (which is handy) and I’m also shortening the time it takes to get to work (going from 40 mins, although that included putting my bike chaing back on twice to just under 32 minutes).I quite love being able to cycle to work again, especially towards the end of my project in Tilburg I was on trains too much. And it’s a great way to see more of the city. My new job is really nice too. It’s taken a while to get going, as I had a lot of reading up to because it’s not a computational linguistics group or a computational linguistics project, but it’s nice to work cross-disciplinary. We’re still trying to figure out exactly what direction the project should go, but I already have some ideas (too preliminary to share though).

Other than work, not much has been happening. The last week and a half of September I’ve been travelling back and forth between Amsterdam and Tilburg to discuss my thesis with an additional unofficial supervisor. This week I will see my supervisor again, so fingers crossed.. Last weekend we had our housewarming, where a lot of our new colleagues showed up as well as some of our new neighbours, so we had a house full of people. I think there will be many parties thrown at this house as it seems to have all the features for a good party location (space, close to the supermarket and the `glasbak’, easy to clean the next day, just parking is a bit of a pain). To be honest, I haven’t seen much of the Amsterdam city centre yet, or any of the pubs or cafés, which is a little bit of a bummer, but will sort itself out once we get Paul’s bike fixed. We’ve mostly been hanging around Zeeburg really, which is quite cool too. The last weekend of September there we got to watch the iShares cup,  an extreme sailing contest, just around the corner from where we live, how cool is that?