Most people will think this is the meat of the story, but I still intend to write a hotel review too.

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I’m splitting this into four parts because otherwise it’s too long; parts may still be boring. If you only want to read about FOSDEM, Part 2 and for my hotel review/recommendation, Part 3.

Note: It’s possible that some parts aren’t up yet. In that case, please try again later.

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Spent about half an hour mending Tertia’s bike tire in front of the house.

Greeted by 2 acquaintances and 5 complete strangers who passed on foot or on bikes.

Talked to 1 neighbour (a nice old lady) when she came back from shopping.

Dragged bike out of the way of 1 delivery lorry.

Accepted mail from 1 postman who was confident that the woman in the road belonged with the open door behind her.

Asked 1 young man not to throw his cigarette end on the ground practically at my feet. Young man’s friend agreed with me and kicked it in a grating.

Declined 2 offers of help, one of them very sexist.

Showed 1 person the way to somewhere just around the corner, but hard to find. Helped 2 pairs of tourists with their maps (we live in a very confusing spot because all the road signs seem to say different things).

Got a screwdriver to fix my own bike light, but of course Tertia went to school on my bike this morning so I couldn’t.

While in the shower —this kind of thing always happens in the shower— it suddenly occurred to me that the next major station on the railway line in each of the four directions that trains can go from this town starts either with A or with Z. For people with a railway map of the Netherlands and some diligence, this fact alone is probably enough to figure out which town we live in, but as that’s not a secret and easy enough to find out by other means anyway, I don’t mind.

And when I thought some more about it, I realised that both stations on the east-west line start with A, and both stations on the north-south line with Z.

The smaller stations that not all trains stop at (and some of which are too new to be on the map I linked to) blur this elegance with letters like T, R and H, but that’s not to be helped.

View from our living-room window:

It was even more crowded before I got out the camera. When I took the picture two cyclists and most of the school kids had already gone away, and the blue lorry on the right backed up a bit. On the other hand, the representative of a posh German handbag company (with the black car) had appeared.

After the success of 2008 Fieldwork Day I wanted to do it again. And again, it was a success.

Tertia was on one of my teams though I’d asked for all-boys teams or, failing that, teams without any of my daughters. “Is that so?” Geography Teacher said when I alerted him, “let’s try to swap.” But the only reasonable swap would have given me the same locations as last year— and Secunda. So we left it the way it was.

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It’s not only a neat little city for the tourists. The moment we left the centre —first to go to church in a neighbourhood just outside it, later to walk to the Dampoort station to catch a train— we saw many more houses that were tumbledown, badly kept, neglected, than the occasional one in the centre. The point seems to be that if it’s not touristic, it’s not worth keeping up. I have a suspicion that St. Michael’s church, for instance, is kept poor by its obscurity: it’s not one of the Big Sights, though <plug> if you like churches it’s perhaps even better </plug>, much more churchy.

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(No pictures, because I lent the camera to Tertia. Two other people in her study group also had cameras. Next time it will be in my pocket.)

The second year had fieldwork day— divide into study groups of four to six people with ideally an adult supervisor, go to a designated place along the little stream that runs along the north side of town, take samples of water and soil, catch the fauna, observe the flora, draw the landscape, interview people about Nature Development, etcetera; all of this for double geography and biology credit.

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The bottle of natural rose water that we bought in Haarlem years ago was finally empty, and our quest to get it locally was unsuccessful (though now that I know the brand, I know where to try: the pharmacy section of the organic-food store). Also, we were out of Darjeeling and almost out of Oolong. And I wanted to go to the convent in The Hague and show the sisters the Life and Travels of Father Adrian web page to see if they agreed that it was ready to put online.

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