Britta's Europe Photos- Amsterdam

Catching up still. I'm trying. I don't even know if anyone cares, but I don't know many other people posting pictures and stuff all about their life, so maybe its interesting to someone.

Here's some interesting residual photos of the semester that my classmates took. Lots of pictures of me, which is nice since obviously I couldn't take any like that myself :)

The first few I dunno who took em. These are my friend Britta's photos. Since I have my friends' photos grouped by who took em, that's how I'll post em. Oops there's a lot of them. She took most of these with her wide-angle lens, which provided for some amazing photos, especially the ability to get large groups of people and buildings in one shot. I was very jealous. But hey, it also cost hundreds of dollars.

I'm gonna try and do these with minimal text. I've already told most of the stories.

Here's the lobby of our hotel. The LOBBY. Really narrow. Only place we could get wifi. At least they had comfortable velvet seats. And we could smell pot from outside drifting in the door pretty much any time of day.

It was rainy and chilly. Actually a nice contrast to Chicago in August...

This was a great car-park. Drive in, leave your car, press a button, it goes downtstairs.

This is a big building by the water. Random steps and huge concrete column supports. Jessica and I. You'll see a lot of the same faces in these photos...

There it is. Nice work wide-angle lens.

More wide-angle lens photos. Fantastic!

Your typical little dock area, walking around Amsterdam.

Us eating some lunch on our first day- we found a little grocery store, bought some yogurt (whipped!) and sandwich stuff. Me, Kat, Katie, Jessica, and Janis.

"Het Schip".

Us standing and listening to the tour guide. Britta took good people photos.

Very similar to Het Schip. A former residence.

Outskirts of town, more contemporary buildings. Nice shapes.

Wide-angle lens to the rescue.

This is in an old hotel in Rotterdam. Me and Jessica. Tiny chairs in this niche. Weird.

Similar chairs and steps.

A tiny window. We could see down to the adjacent floor that was like 3/4 of a floor below. Really weird.

A little class meeting.

We went out for Persian food. Good idea, professor, except it was bloody expensive...and it was far from the only time he decided to get expensive food. We're talking like 20-25 euro for dinner.

Mosaic glass tile table.

Hilversum, a smaller city- a cool building with a colored translucent facade.

And an ORANGE HALLWAY!

More interior, same building. A canyon in the middle. Really interesting.

Apparently this is the girl's bathroom...

Outside, the colored facade and dramatic supports.

Auditorium of sorts. Love the orange.

Us eating outside by the reflecting pond. Particularly glad that Britta took so many pictures with me in them! Jason, John, Dave, Me.

Group shot before we left Hilversum, sitting on the steps.

Dave uh, got a little tired. He had a big day.

This is in Almere.

Wide-angle lens.

Great color and texture!

On to Lelystad. UN Studio theatre. What a shape.

I think this is the interior of the same building, but we did see multiple theaters...

Back in Amsterdam. Dutch pancake place. Katie's find. 25 minute walk (the first time, cause we were wandering) but worth it.

We were starving, and these giant "pancakes" didn't disappoint. Basically thick crepes, like pizzas, and you could get em in dessert form (chocolate, bananas, strawberries, etc) or meal form (bacon, eggs, cheese, etc). They were AWESOME. So much food. I finished mine and helped two other girls finish theirs :) Katie, Shawna, Kat, Jessica, Me, Alex.

Poffertjes. Small doughy fried dessert things in powdered sugar and syrup. Delicious. We ate there twice. And got poffertjes on the street too. So good.

After dinner. Happy and full. Britta, Kat, Katie, Shawna, Me, Alex.

Some foot bridge. With embedded glass blocks. Cool.

Museum in Amsterdam. Had this courtyard that was painted crazy. And this cage thing in the middle, that was mirrored so it was hard to tell what was inside and what was reflected...it almost started disappearing.

InSIDE, it actually had a soccer ball and two small goals...and Britta took a picture through the bars RIGHT as I kicked it- and I'm looking at the ball about to apologize to Britta for hitting her camera. Dave, Kat, Me, Alex's leg.

Another meal break. Britta, Me, Kat, Jessica.

More group shots. Shawna, Jessica, Alex, Kat, Me. Jessica was cold. I think it was actually cold and windy, but she's always cold anyway.

Our bike gang.

Near the waterfront. Periscope building.

Trampolining!

The bridge in Rotterdam, from down below. Great shot.

Me trying to balance on the teeter-totter.

That bridge in the distance. Scott, Me, Steve, Janis, and I think Dom down there.

Spinny things by the restaurant, by the water. Headache inducing. Wobbly. But fun.

Wide-angle lens, what can I say, best things for group shots ever.

In Delft, at the architecture school. If you look closely, you can see the exterior walls of the original building- this was a courtyard that was enclosed with a metal roof and this massive orange thing, which is auditorium seating on the outside, classrooms underneath. Brilliant. This was all built when the school moved into this building, when the architecture school's other building burnt down a year before...

Look at how tall this doorway is!

Oh YEAH. We always found cool stuff when we started wandering, snooping around, opening closed doors. This was a piece of furniture, sorta. Perfect for a group photo.

The new library at the school.

Looking straight up into the core of the pyramid part of the building- those are multiple floors of balconies.

The massive wall of books.

Us eating fried cheese (kaasesouffles) from the vending machine. They were so tasty.

Main plaza in Rotterdam, us taking a little break on the benches. Scott, Katie, Ryan, Dorit, Steve, Sarah, Marcella, John, Janis.

Waiting in the lobby of OMA for our tour (architecture firm- pretty famous one at that). Tired after a long day. Right before our meal of expensive Persian food.

This is the ING headquarters- as in ING Direct bank. Except they have real brick-and-mortar bank locations in Holland and elsewhere in Europe. CRAZY looking building.

A great picture of a Steven Holl building.

Dave doing Dave kinds of things.

Dave and Carl taking a snooze. Shortly before they politely asked our class to leave, because we were loitering- even though like 10-12 people bought things, and it was post-lunch-time on a weekday, and the place was empty. But whatever.

FRIES!

GREAT looking building, with colored balconies on one side and...

...giant cantilevers on the other.

Half of Britta's head in a bathroom mirror, I dunno where. But what is with that little extra sink on the side?

Hard to see, but this is looking up to multiple balconies, with us overlooking.

Previous photo was inside this building. A library. Another university campus.

And a small bar/restaurant. Cool steps.

Now this was crazy. This was a rounded end of the "Educatorium" on the Delft campus, covered in plywood, and my classmates were running up, sliding down, flipping, etc. Amazing no one got hurt. I took some good video of it. That I'll post some day.

Same building, multiple levels. OMA, whose office we visited, built this.

They also had weird transparent glass over one of the floors. So we went up there and took funny pictures.

Dave doing Dave things again. Climbing a tree. Me making sure he doesn't fall and die. I pushed his feet up there. Oh, actually that was Jason...

A fantastically ugly car. Citroen, I think. Kinda like the Ghostbusters car...

Me, Shawna, Alex, Dave, Jason, John relaxing.

Another class dinner, this one was a noodle shop of some sort. Cafeteria style seating.

The last class photo of Amsterdam, we got everyone to the sign, and climbed all over it. I was on the middle part of the T, standing next to someone who was on top of the T. Only possible with a wide-angle lens! And it was taken right before her battery died on the camera...

A close-up, so we could see everyone's faces. Yeah climbing up on the I was not easy.

Our last meal of fries! Jason, John, Alex, Dave, Janis, Me, Shawna.

Thoughts About 4 Months in Europe.

I feel like it'd be good to document my overall experience and feelings and thoughts about all my travels, for myself or for whoever actually reads this. Most of my Europe entries became so much about the tasks at hand and what I was doing day to day that it was only in those in between times that I'd have a second to stop and reflect about everything- which is probably like most peoples' lives when they're not even traveling :)

At first of course, it just felt like I was on a trip, a vacation of some kind- it was the end of the summer, we all met up in Amsterdam (which was amazing that it actually worked, but you have to remind yourself that people still did things like that before email/internet/cell phones :). We traveled around for awhile and it just felt like a vacation. By the time it dawned on me that I'd been gone awhile and seen a ton, it was time to go to Barcelona, a new adventure, and start school. That occupied a couple weeks of marveling at new experiences, and then it was time to begin the real travels. So really for most of the time I was gone, it just seemed like a series of 1-2 week vacations strung together, with bits of class and homework here and there :)

And also, coming *home* to Barcelona from all the other trips started to make it feel less foreign, and also make it feel less like I was gone or NOT home-home in the US- and though I of course intellectually knew, my body and subconscious slowly adapted to my new environment till it just started feeling *normal*. I wouldn't doubt that most every classmate of mine by the end of the semester was missing/craving something from home/the US, either a person, a food, their own bed, whatever. I don't recall really having a longing craving for anything- I in fact was quite content every week, for the most part.

My biggest problems were school and relationship. School got intentionally compressed into 3-4 days a week because I was constantly traveling (and choosing to not do any work during the weekends) and so the 3 days a week that I was in Barcelona were usually quite stressful. Tiffany was only able to talk during the weekends because of class and work, and I was only able to talk during the week because of traveling. I won't go into the details of those problems :)

I think it was because I was traveling so constantly, and going somewhere different each week, that sorta hindered my mind from realizing that I had been gone so long, but also aided me in experiencing each city/country to the fullest- I thankfully never got to the point where the concept of "experiencing something new" became routine- some people got sick of traveling. I never did :) Seriously. I got into a great routine of weekly packing and unpacking, and it was really nice to have the bare essentials needed for living, and to not hafta worry about all the everything else in life, just how much time we had that day and what we wanted to see and where we were gonna get our food :)

Like I've mentioned, going home at the end, from Dublin to Chicago to South Bend, was thankfully very easy because I was meeting my friend Matt's Japanese girlfriend Shuko, and going home to immediately celebrate the holidays and see family. So I had more events to look forward to. But if I had gone back like the second week of January, to nothing but school starting or something...I mighta been kinda depressed :)

The real question though is, how long could I have done this. Because of future ideas Tiffany and I had talked about, and because I knew the state of the economy in the US, and because there's some pretty sweet architecture firms in Europe, every city I traveled to I was thinking "what would it be like to live here?". I think be abroad and traveling was easy because I had a limited time frame with a definite ending. I knew that I'd be going home after 4 months and life would go back to normal- so it was easy to stay short-sighted and know that I had 4 months to get the most I could out of my time, money, and travels. So I think it was easy to be positive, task-oriented, focused. The real question is, why couldn't I wield this frame of mind in real life, and be much more focused and happy on what was currently going on in life day-to-day and week-to-week, rather than thinking about the future and all that garbage. Life was even like that to some degree for all the years I was in school- you only looked ahead one year, or to next summer or next break, or maybe if you were in junior high you looked forward to high school, or if in high school you looked forward to being a senior.

I remember when I was a senior in high school, realizing how much I had blinders on. I really hadn't thought past senior year of high school- it seemed like the culmination of schooling, the end-all be-all, since I was in middle school. I really didn't know where I wanted to go to school or what I wanted to study. I really was just living life one year at a time. And suddenly I had to think about the next four. Which was no match for graduating from college and suddenly feeling like I had to think about the next REST OF MY LIFE all at once. I still sometimes feel like that to a degree, which is easy to do when there's always talk of savings and IRAs and paying for your kids' college and all that crap.

Before I get to be rambling too much, let me talk more about my experience directly. I had gotten very used to life there, even if life was different from week to week. There were always common experiences (unless we were in Morocco). Same currency, some same foods (like Nutella), generally the same cars. Though I did like seeing the cars change from country to country- lots more SEATs in Spain (made there), lots more Fiats in Italy, and more Audi/BMW/Mercedes' in Switzerland. No big surprise I guess.

These similarities helped me more focus in on the differences from country to country- cuisine, cost of living, architecture, climate, etc. My favorite was always exploring the old city centers, and seeing the pedestrian shopping streets, old architecture, and sometimes things like old city walls. How the cities related to the nearest water (usually a river) was always interesting. What the public plazas were like, the public parks- where in the city, how big, how much there was to do in them, how many people were using them. One thing common across Europe- people like being outside much more than Americans. Or at least they actually go DO it. They eat outside, play outside, walk outside, sit outside. People all over the place all the time, USING the public spaces (something that frustrates American architects trying to design similar spaces in the US). Restaurants will have people sitting outside well into the cold months, kept warm by those tall lamp-looking things that have propane heaters in the top.

It was amazing how foreign/new the US finally seemed when I returned. Of course the big cars, but the highways, the fast food, the newness of everything. It just felt like everything lacked history and tradition and culture and interest- very homogenous. The first thing that struck me when I came out of the train stop in Chicago was the buildings. I had been in a lot of big cities in Europe but most buildings top out at 5 stories, or 10 or 12. And here in Chicago there were just CANYONS of buildings, it felt like a sci-fi movie, the city of the future, buildings touching the sky with the tiny people and cars down below. Shocking.

Another thing I really enjoyed was the constant interaction with my classmates. Going into it I was very excited to be living and studying and traveling with the same people for 4 months. I knew it would be great getting to know some of them so much better, spending practically every waking moment of weeks on end with some of them who I lived with or near, studied with, traveled with. So I was looking forward to making new/better friends, especially since the past two years in school had been spent largely with my Chicago friends, when I wasn't studying or spending time with Tiffany. So this was finally classmate time. Which is why I was disappointed by a few people who didn't come abroad :/

Finally coming back was weird because everything felt normal but foreign- like an old life. And it was hard to believe that 4 months had gone by in a flash. That something I dreamed about for a couple years was now just another memory, a set of photos and ticket stubs and stories. That I think was the most sad to me, knowing that one the biggest opportunities/events of my life was over with. THAT is why I always save the biggest present for last on Christmas :)

Its probably time to move on and post pictures of 2010.