Author: Alexander Mamchenkov

We are in Dusseldorf for this weekend. Photos and report should come on Monday :-) Now beer and fun with our friends! See you in few days

Since our office is in Science Park of Amsterdam, right next to the University of Amsterdam, sometime people go to the university cafeteria for lunch. It’s been some time now I wanted to check out the place and see student’s life, so today I agreed to join my collegues and have a lunch there.

First impression is very good: large hall, lot’s of students, all looks friendly. So we went for trays, and were looking around to choose what we gonna eat. There were quite a few serving tables with different things on them. At the first one I saw some soups like tomato or onion. Second table had some green salads and cold spaghetti, third had plain tomatoes, cucumbers and so on, one more table had sandwiches and so on. While we were going around I first tried to find proper meals with meat and some fries or whatever, but I was told there is none. OK, when I was studying in Nicosia’s branch of Intercollege, we had a place with proper meals, but in Limassol we could have only mixed sandwiches, so I thought to get one of those here to have at least something, but then I failed as well: only slices of bread with cheese. After few minutes searching and asking my friends we realize there is no meat at all.

And now is a question: how come can you have a college cafeteria which has no any kind of meat? Not even ham or similar :-(((

Ended up having some green crap and cheese, feel like my stomach is fool, but I still feel very hungry. While it is OK with me and I will have some meet and beer in the evening, but I feel really sorry for the students. In the times when I was studying, we used to spend quite some time in the college and all of us had proper sandwiches with ham, cheese, chicken and some more nice stuff if not everyday, at least few times a week.

OK, today I decided to drive a car from home to the office. Not that I had no other option to get to the office, but I just wanted to try it out while I had a person with experience of driving here next to me. The other reason for getting to drive a car was that my leg is still fucked up and walking gives me some amount of pain, and getting from home to metro station is around 15 minutes walking at normal speed (which will make around 25 minutes for me in current condition).

Anyhow, first thing to note is a different car. While I am used to my Suzuki SX4, here I we have Mercedes B-Class. It is approximately same size and form-factor (bit longer and higher), but it feels completely different. First thing to notice is that it is diesel car with automatic transmission. There is a two second gap between the moment you push acceleration and the car actually starts accelerating. Second is the heavy sound of the engine. Third is the view from the drivers place: you can’t see much at all. Not talking about small side mirrors as I am used to bigger ones in my car, but they are generally bigger that normal size.

While that was about the car, driving is also weird. Driving on right side is one thing, but all those bikes, pedestrians and so on makes it a hard task to get to destination without killing someone. Especially this is dangerous when turning right, as bikes may be coming from back of the car to cross your way. I think that anyone on the road has more rights than a car, and it doesn’t matter if you drive while having green light and all the rest have red.  The width of the driving lane is also quite low, compared to Cyprus. Traffic lights are confusing from the first look, but after some time you get an understanding that each lane may have it’s own signaling light.

I will definitely have more chance to enjoy local roads in the coming days, so I might get some more info, but this just a first impression from the short ride.