Blog of Alexander Mamchenkov

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.

As I have posted yesterday, we were going to Nijmegen, a city to the south east from Amsterdam, where we wanted to visit one BJD (Ball Joint Dolls) shop to check what they have. I have also mentioned that we are going to take our camera with us and come up with few pics. While we ended up not in a mood of shooting much, there are few pics of Nijmegen on my flickr here, as well as few pics on instagram both by me and Yana. I have a kinda of a problem with my leg this days (probably because of cold weather and lot’s of walking for the past week), so it was a bit hard to walk and take pics.

Anyhow, on our way back I got a nice idea to do some train photography, which is about taking pics from the window of a train while it is traveling at a speed closer to 150 km/h. This is something new and very interesting. First of all, the speed of the train makes it hard to focus on something particular, as scenery passes very fast. Second, is actually catching something nice, as you never know what you will see in the next moment. I ended up watching with one eye into the camera and the second one, through the window, into upcoming views. Very interesting experience and I would definitely advice anyone who is into photography to try this one out. While few pics has blinks from the window glass and sometimes loose focus, most of the pics are pretty nice. Another thing which makes this kind of activity great is, again, a fast change of views. At one moment you can see forest, while few seconds later some river and the very next moment a road with cars or station with different people. The actual photo set from my train photography is here, so feel free to check it and give your comments.

I really hope that by next weekend my leg will recover, as we are planning trip to Dusseldorf and possible visit to Keln. So we will have time in a very fast train to shoot more things around as well as quite a few walks down there with friends of hours.

P.S.: As it was raining most the time last week and we didn’t spend much time out, we still managed to do few pics from our balcony, at home and around our office, so I put all of them in another separate photo set here. This set is pretty interesting for it’s collection of Amsterdam wildlife :-)