Friday, April 7, 2000

Yesterday afternoon went to the airport, and found out that our plan to use frequent flyer miles to upgrade to first class was not going to work. Oh, well. The flight was normal (cramped, hard to sleep) but we made it to Schiphol just fine. I entrained the rolling suitcases with great success, we bought treintaxi ticks (take the train to Utrecht, then a shared taxi to our destination), but the taxi driver growled between long draws on his reefer (if we had doubted that we were in the Netherlands, that would have settled it) that we had more baggage than he was going to put in his Mercedes, so that was f15,00 down the drain. (About $6.50, as there are about f2,3 per US dollar. Note that the symbol "f" is pronounced "guilders", which is confusing if you have just gotten used to calling it "forints" in Hungary.)

Fortunately, we had also purchased "strippenkaarten" in the expectation that we would at some time use the bus system, so we found the correct bus and the bus driver made no objections to our luggage, and we were off. Using the bus merely meant that we had to haul our entrained luggage not just through train stations but also nearly a kilometer across Universiteit Utrecht campus. We got more than a few strange looks, particularly from passing motorists.

The dorm rooms were clearly not set up for married couples. :-) We are taking up two rooms, one as a bedroom and the other as an office cum dining room cum sitting room etc. We're up a steep staircase which is even more precarious going down. (I'm clearly getting old if I'm thinking of staircases as precarious...)

We found that the cafeteria (the "Educatorium") has reasonable food at good prices (we had lunch for about f10 total), found out where to get food, and found out that the other residents of this house do not clean the kitchen nor do they take out the trash.

The arrangements seem a little odd to an American, and there are a few flies in the ointment, like Kim and I are sharing two rooms, one as office/sitting room/etc and the other as a bedroom, but they are clearly not oriented towards married folks, so there is only one key to each room, and while we were told that we should put the two beds together, we found when we tried that the frames could not fit through the doorways. Oops. Fortunately, I found a blade in my leatherman that would turn the allen screws and we partially disassembled one of the frames to move it around. Another immediate problem is that phone access is much more problematic than I was lead to believe before coming here. I am starting to think that I'll have to pay a king's ransom to have a private phone line hooked up in order to have reasonable internet access while I am here. I think we'll survive for the 6 weeks or so we will be here.

The rest of the day we spend simply trying to stay awake in an attempt to reprogram our internal clocks. This involved, among other things, taking the bus downtown and then discovering that we were very hungry and there was only one open restaurant in our immediate vicinity, a Chinese restaurant. We guessed at what we were ordering, and happily, we guessed right. On the bus ride back, we found where there are more restaurants.