Luxembourg

In Europe, there’s not much in the way of physically delineated borders anymore. Usually just a sign. However, between the Netherlands and Belgium, there’s no need for one in order to know where you are, because it’s immediately obvious when the red-brick, neatly arranged houses disappear and the view becomes hilly, with a mish-mash of [...]

Mobility events

One thing I must do more often is read the paper. There are a lot of interesting things going on, but I seem to find out about them afterwards. As a result, I now have a trial subscription to nrc.next, and am quite enjoying being able to read the paper over breakfast, not to mention [...]

Gifts accepted

Birthdays here have a habit on going on for ages. I usually start the celebrations the day before (as technically I was born the day before my real birthday in this time zone), and then by the time you have a party and take some pie to work, it’s a good month later. Today was [...]

Border crossing

In May I visited an old friend in Hasselt, Belgium. Hasselt lies directly south of Eindhoven, with a straight line distance of ~60km. It sounds all so simple. Here is how I travelled to Hasselt on a Saturday:

Caught a train at Eindhoven in the direction of Maastricht (currently ~60km away).
Alighted in Sittard 45 minutes later, [...]

Christmas and related activities

So Europe appears to have a) gotten cold and b) gone Christmas mad.
Last week was Sinterklaas in the Netherlands. This is a bigger celebration than Christmas here, in terms of presents. The story goes that Sinterklaas arrives from Spain in November on a boat to prepare for handing out presents on December 5th/6th. Naughty children [...]

Diamonds and chocolates

[Jan 2008: I'm transferring some posts from a discontinued blog. Since I wrote this, I've discovered the Leonidas shop in Eindhoven (even the locals don't know where it is).]
Due to Thursday being a public holiday and Friday being a forced day off for the university, I decided to take the opportunity to travel somewhere for [...]