Day Trip to Leiden

I went on a day trip to Leiden, which is 40 minutes' train ride away southwest of Amsterdam. It is a university town.

 The entire Netherlands is still in lockdown so I could only bear a couple of hours of walking around before I got too cold and needed to go back to Amsterdam. However, it would be nice to come back and rent a bike to bike around.

When I got off the train, I needed to go to the washroom. The washroom only accepts payment in the form of debit card, and having none, I decided to explore the town via finding a washroom.

A creatively windy path along the river.

I got to the city centre easily and was willing to pay for something at McDonald's to use their washroom. I was just surprised that it was still open and it was free to go to. Also in downtown: The Hudson's Bay Company, all the way in Leiden!

 By this time it was already pretty chilly on this cloudy day so I bought a warm tea and walked around town with it.

So many nice places to go into and have a sit...if only they were open, which they were not.

I had an idea to listen to an audio walking tour of Leiden while walking around. I tried to find some on YouTube, but there were videos of people filming themselves walking around the city rather than a tour of its history and such, which is more what I was looking for.

I went to one of my go-to places to check out some quick history of the town, wikitravel.org There, I found that there are over 80 mural poems across the city on the side of its buildings! I had came across one earlier and took had taken a picture. I tried to go on the website for a route with an itinerary of these poems, but no luck.

 

 

 

One of the poems in the city.

Another poem.

  I even found plaques around town that indicated a website that I could go to that promised audio guides of the city describing various features. But the website looked like it had been taken down long ago.

A plaque promising an audio guide on the website. If only the website still existed!

Finally, I downloaded an app that I could use to discover the history, people and places of the town. But once I did, I thought, who would want an app for this? The point is to wander around and complement the wanderings (with audio), not to look down at the phone and trip over a cobblestone while my eyes are on a screen.

I wonder if this is what the archaeology of tourism looks like: a digital graveyard of websites taken down, broken links, and real-life indicators that point nowhere.

While I was busy looking at my phone after taking a picture of a poem on the wall, just above the phone were two webbed feet.

Like this.

I had never seen feet like that, silver, scaly with thick digits. It turned out to be some sort of bird that wasn't scared of me at all and was expecting something of me

It turned out to be this fellow. Looks indignant. Found out it's a Eurasian coot. "Extremely territorial."

Cute herb/vegetable garden with cards.

Oh, and this is the birthplace of Rembrandt.

GDPR

 

This is a GDPR privacy notice from slate.com that I had never seen before my computer connected to the Internet stepped foot into the EU. I really appreciate the options and, although annoying, lets me choose which ad companies follow me. Funny, Facebook did not pop up with any of this message when I went to it...

City of Cyclists and Joggers

 I was intending to post last time I visited Amsterdam in August 2020, but life got in the way and now, 1.5 years later and still in a pandemic lockdown, I'm here again.

A note on travelling during covid - especially when you're in a more locked-down country, travelling exposes you to a world that is not the same. The plane was full. People were privileged enough to wear N-95 masks on the plane, but everyone of all sorts were going here, there, everywhere - families, backpackers, etc.

The plane ride this time around, I was unable to doze off completely so when I finally got into the city centre, bleary-eyed and jet-lagged, dawn just starting to peak through the blanket of dark, I stepped onto the street and almost got run over by a train of bicycles. That woke me with a jolt. I always forget that bicycles rule the cities in The Netherlands.

After taking a nap, I saw that it was sunny outside so my first inclination was to go to my favourite place from last time I visited: Westerpark. Past a shopping street, across a roadway is a long park that runs along the river and then widens out again, going for kilometers onwards. In it, there are kindergartens, shops, cinemas, restaurants, playgrounds and more fields. Of course these were all closed due to the lockdown. I noticed many more people out and running than last time, it looks like during a lockdown and after two years of pandemic people had taken up jogging. It reminded me of somebody who says to concentrate on what you can do (in a lockdown, as well as in life in general) instead of what you can't or can no longer do. In Canada during a pandemic, do winter hiking. At 3-6 degrees in sunny weather in Amsterdam, go jogging if you're able to.

A Little Free Library...in the middle of the park!

 

Gnarly tree branches on a tree with a great big trunk.

A cow in a field, with a Pontsteiger hotel across the IJ river.

 

The way the faint sun interacts with the buildings, along with the temperature, really make it feel like springtime in winter.

Springtime-like sunlight

After that, the day was pretty much spent napping and then going shopping for groceries. No ingredients too out of the ordinary, I thought. However, I was surprised to find the eggs on a store shelf, and when placing groceries away, I was tempted to put them in the fridge before I remembered that they don't have to go in there. The salad that we had was crunchy and fresh-tasting even though it had been in a bag, it must be from somewhere near here instead of transported from thousands of kilometers away. Also, I couldn't stop eating the small new potatoes. They were sweet and waxy, not bland and chalky, and the skin was alright to eat as well without having that acidic taste. After dinner, when I was watching a movie, instead of going to grab the chips, I grabbed a few baked potatoes out of the fridge and munched on those instead. Such tiny details, but they were things that jolted me awake, not unlike the bikes.

Macau, December 2016

This is something from the Japan/Hong Kong trip that I'm posting only now, almost a year later.

On December 21, 2016 I went to Macau for a longer period of time than I have in the past (two days instead of one). This is what I wrote:

Reminds me of Nicaragua - the flora, the climate, the type of building and the same sort of wear of tiles. Which isn't to say anything.

Stair names in Portuguese and Chinese!

View atop a hill in a park we went to...I forget the name of the park.

I feel like - in my lazy one-day analysis of here - Hong Kong and Macau are cousins - both colonized, have the same language and handed back to China around the same time, but with different economic consequences and realities. It's like that iconic movie Isabella. Going to Macau actually feels like living that movie. I feel people here are bitter. The restaurant worker remarked that our party of 11 ordered so few things (rightly so). The taxi driver from the story below. Well, when the main source of income is casinos, big huge ones...yes I'd be bitter too. But so far I see less old women begging on the street (maybe they're invisiblized), parks with more amenities, and people actually stopping to converse on the streets, unlike in Hong Kong.

Here's the conversation the taxi driver had with my aunt as he drove us from the harbour to a restaurant:
Taxi driver: You're coming from Hong Kong:
Aunt: Work must be busy for you, unlike us. You were given lots of money to develop by China.
TD: Hong Kong has a booming economy and culture. You can't complain.
A: But no one can buy an apartment.
TD: Same in Macau.
A (to me): Look, there's The Venetian.
TD: Wow, and you speak English.
A: Just like everybody else. It was imposed on us.
TD: What about that ambassador Leung Chun-ying and those councillors. So embarrassing. You send your children to get proper schooling and they turn out like this. Their mom and dad can no longer save face. Hong Kong tourists are propping up our economy, if it wasn't for you, we would be out of jobs. Hong Kong had a lot of mainland tourism but they said you don't welcome them so it's lessened now.
A: That's just some people.

Moral of the story is, I should take taxis and talk to their drivers more often.

--

Casino Town - Las Vegas redux/Las Vegassed

After having visited The Parisian casino and many Eiffel Tower replicas, Google reminded me that 8 years ago today I had visited and taken photos atop the one in Paris :)

Las Vegas, or the replica of Las Vegas? Or a city in its own right?

Japan

Finally, I am posting about Japan almost a year after my trip!

 My sister always thinks that we're Japanese. Even after I got a DNA test and showed her the results, she still says that the DNA test could err and that we could be Japanese. Then again, a friend of mine from Japan says that my parents look Japanese. But this doesn't mean anything, really. Except it does put into question colonialism and wars and identity.

Moving on...

Notes from my travels

December 11, 2016

• Industrious - trucks
• Older - older people doing jobs I usually see young people occupying
• Surprising number of signs are in English
• Older people in tourst shops of Megome town - hope they don't rely on tourists for their livelihood (where are all the young people?)

I wanted to eat as many matcha-laden snacks as possible on this trip. On the first night, I got matcha mini Oreos.

Breakfast with natto in the background.

Downtown Tokyo. It's much quieter than I expected.

Vending meals

When we were going to Senso-ji temple, a TV station went up to O and asked him what he thought of Ronaldo the footballer. Unfortunately for the TV crew, he doesn't watch much football.

I'm in a bus of tourists from an array of Chinese diaspora. On such tours, usually I'm the only one who is foreign born. This is the first time I've experienced a diaspora with varying levels of languages ability, and from USA, Australia, and so on. Wouldn't it be cool if it were from an even wider array of people from the diaspora? It's interesting to observe parent and children language uses, and the uses between Mandarin and Cantonese.

In Tokyo the first day, traffic people were lining us up to wait our turn to get in the tour bus, and some horrifying deja vu-like lining up to go to an internment camp or to be shot ran through me. Blind sheep.

It's a surprisingly carcentric place. I fall asleep after seeing a Yamada shopping outlet, an Aeon mall and a 24-hour karaoke entertainment center in Nagoya. I wake up hours later to a Yamada, Aeon Mall and 24-hour karaoke center. The world just got a bit smaller.

• Narita - the Soviet Union
• Tokyo - Portland on steroids
• Hakone - Salzburg
• Nagoya - Montreal

Kindergartners are wearing orange caps on a day trip, being pushed in a cart.


Store greeters, when they have a spare moment, step out to pick up garbage and wrappers in front of their store.

Nighttime in Hakone

I think this is a bridge passing into Kyoto. Technology will be able to geolocate this.

Yet another matcha find.

Nara Deer Park

Todai-ji Temple - it's huge!

Osaka

Nighttime in Osaka, the city train can be seen outside our hotel window.