8- Utrecht

Beard-face. (DAMMIT, its beard-fah-SAY!)

By the way I finally finished my snack that had been sustaining me during the days- Trader Joes chili pepper mango slices. Those have been my daytime subsistence. I had my last one a couple days ago. Sad face.

Today we caught one building we missed. MVRDVs WoZoCo building. Sweet cantilevers, more color again. Glass balconies. On the way back to a bus ride to the University of Utrecht we stopped at Albert Heijn XL, basically the super grocery, which here basically means almost actually as big as our normal grocery. I got some more whipped yogurt. Rock on. And some stroopwafels. Wafer-y cookie things that have been soaked in like csrmelized honey. Yum.

Balconies

And more balconies. A lady who lived there who said her English was bad asked if we liked it, cause she lived there. I said "yes, and my Dutch is bad."

Backlit by the gray sky, they look pretty cool.

I have like fifteen minutes to finish this blog.

Look at all the cantilevered apartment units!! Amazing!

This one was falling down though.

We walked around UU for a couple hours, seeing Will Arendt's university library, OMAs Educatorium, and after walking right by it (*I* saw it but didn't know we were looking for it) went to UN Studio's something building. We looked for it for like thirty minutes, skipped going in a cool building that I ASKED to go in, that WAS cool because when looking for the other, I went inside real quick.

Arendt library exterior.

Windows up close.

Windows up closer.

Top floor had a tree garden. And some guy in the window with a camera.

Soaring spaces, all black, white, red.

Squishy furniture.

A random colorful building.

OMA's building. Concrete and glass.

Same building. Shapey! See those curved spaces? That's where the upcoming pictures will be from of body-surfing...

Jason holding up Jessica. This was taken at an angle- cause Katie's feet down below are on level ground. Still cool though.

The body-surfing ramp inside. Oh wait for the videos...

Some cool building connected to OMA's

There was some opaque glass in the floor, over another floor. We decided to take pictures. You can't see anything from above because its darker below, but from below you can see a lot! Pretty cool. Me and Jessica...

Me and Jessica

Me and Dave

Me and Dave

A walkway over the street to the black library.

The auditorium. Colorful seats. Man I like color.

A sort of skateboard bowl with stairs.

This is a building!! Basically a giant bridge- and basically the same thing OMA showed us a model of that they designed as a gateway to Dubai....uh, did they not see this one?

The building we didn't go see. Since there were clearly three glass tubes on the roof probably extending through the building, I wanted to investigate.

Sweet atrium up to a skylight in the roof, with big red stairs in them.

The atrium from the other side...

Instead we saw another Neutlings & Reijdik building that was ugly outside and not working inside. Was supposed to have a giant pool slash fountain that cooled the building, and was empty. My theory is we didn't see what I wanted cause it wasn't on the list and we didn't know who built it. Lame.

The kinda cool inside, with seating booths......

And the ugly outside, that basically had worms embedded in the surface.

After too much walking and waiting in the sun, we got onto a triple bus (two accordion hinges- pretty common) that was ridiculously packed. We hadta ride it for like twenty minutes.

We got to historic downtown and saw a front half of a church built in the 1400s, a plaza built where the middle of the church used to be, and a tower that was the back half. Weird.

The tower from afar

The back half of the church that we couldn't go in...the middle of the church doesn't exist.

Then we got some food (creamy mustard soup and cherry beer for me) and headed home. Tonight is my friend Jessicas birthday. She wants a candle in a brownie.

My cherry beer, and my roommate Dave.

I also noticed some very clearly lean-y buildings today:

Crazy.

7- Amsterdam Free Day

Facial hair picture.

Today was free day. Slash recover from last night day. Most people got home at 5am or later last night. I woke up at 8am because the maid banged on my door, because my roommate Dave was asleep on the floor in the hallway- because his key wouldn't work and I didn't hear his knocking I guess and he didn't wanna bang real loud. Oops. So my alarm went off at noon, we swore at the fact that it was that late, and then fell asleep another hour till 1.

At that time we got up and went for pannenkoeken again- pancakes, that are basically giant crepes with whatever topping on top of it. I had the poffertjes, which are tiny fluffy pancakes soaked in butter, powdered sugar, and syrup. Amazing. And reasonably cheap. A nice side benefit is the people who had pancakes couldn't finish em anyway, so I got a good full meal after mine was gone!

I also tried my hand at eating a lemon peel rind, since my friend Kat does it all the time and insists its good. Fine, i tried it. Not bad!

Our pancakes. The one is just basically a plate of chocolate sauce. Tasted damn fine.

My poffertjes.

Happy people with their food. Alex, Dave, Jessica L-R

A sweet Ben & Jerry's Vespa delivery. By the way I scratched the screen on my camera today. Its officially broken in. I dunno how because I'm really careful with it. Working on getting over it. Man.

This was apparently an "antiek" sled.

This is a tiny delivery truck, and our tiny friend Dorit.

After pancakes a good contingent of us, like 10 people, walked to the museum campus. Van Gogh Museum and National Gallery of Art, where there's a huge quad as well. Cool.

Shauna and I didn't wanna go in and spend the time or money in the museums so we walked around. Went through a monstrous city park, lots of little rivers and grass and such. We also walked down the fashion district apparently, and there was a fashion show going all the way down the street. Didn't get any pictures cause it was just ending. The beats were loud. The people were...fashionable.

They also had some new Jaguar I've never seen before. Pretty sweet.....

Here's a bay window that was being held up by a scaffold. It was trying to collapse off the building.

The National Gallery

A cool water fountain, with an axis that went all the way across the park.

The "I AMsterdam" sign from the new Amstel Light commercials...

...that was fun to play on. And easy to climb.

More climbing... Jason will climb anything.

Jason about to jump from the top of the I

A weird alien creature thing, with a weird alien appendage down there.

Some other giant swing that we enjoyed.

That is all I have to say today. Might go get some more fries, split em with Shauna. People are at dinner now (at like 10pm). Probably going out later. I don't think I'm interested. We'll see.

Tomorrow we go to Utrecht and see the university there, and cool buildings as usual. Adios.

Two days until we fly to Barcelona and I guess start class then. But lets be honest, we might not even start class until Monday, who knows. I DO sorta feel bad for my classmates in Chicago. We have like a 12.5 week semester her instead of 16. Maaaaaaan.