Posted on August 3, 2014 at. August 3, 2014 by Drea Fekety

In a previous post, I talked about the IRES team’s visit to the Eindhoven Technical University and what we saw during our lab tour. However, that was only one day out of a 3-day trip to the Netherlands in which we hopped around from Stuttgart to Amsterdam to Eindhoven, and then back again. I’ll describe our visit to Amsterdam in this post, since Eindhoven was kind of the “work” part and Amsterdam was the “leisure” part of the same trip. I think out of all the travelling I’ve done during this 9-week program, the time I spent in Amsterdam was my favorite.

The first day we were there, Micah and I went to the Vincent Van Gogh museum in the southwestern part of the city. On our way there, though, we spotted this –really awesome–  little shop full of nerdy/geeky gifts and trinkets. The store was called “A Space Oddity”, and it had hundreds of figurines and toys for Star Wars, DC and Marvel comic book heroes, Star Trek, various video game collectibles, mangas characters, and anything else you could think of. I ended up getting an awesome Lieutenant Commander Data figurine, and almost bought a Batman action figure too before my wallet reminded me of the Swiss Franc to US dollar exchange rate.

We arrived at the Vincent Van Gogh museum with plenty of time before closing, which was good because the place was huge and had a lot of Van Gogh’s art and biographical history on display. I discovered Van Gogh when I was an art student in high school and learned more about him and his work through college, and he’s always been one of my favorite painters. After visiting this museum, my appreciation and admiration of Van Gogh grew two-fold as I came to understand his work and struggles in more detail. I highly recommend this museum to anyone even remotely interested in art or art history because the experience that the curators designed for their visitors is invaluable. I could have easily spent a whole day there if I had the time to do so.

Conveniently, the World Cup match between the Netherlands and Costa Rica was going on the first night we were in the city. So we decided to find a pub downtown that was showing the game and watched the Netherlands beat Costa Rica in a tense overtime penalty shootout. This was immediately followed by the whole city going nuts and celebrating all night.

On Sunday we met up with Bastian and Dominique (from the HCI lab) who were in Amsterdam as well. There was heavy rain during most of the day but despite this we thought it might be a good idea to rent a small boat and navigate our way through Amsterdam’s insane network of rivers. During the course of this 2-hour boat ride (where we were navigating the boat ourselves), we managed to crash the boat, get lost after our maps got drenched, nearly run over (does “run over” still apply to boats?) a family of geese, navigate ourselves under a bridge that was about 5cm taller than our boat, and find a literal message in a bottle which contained some guy’s phone number. That was probably the most memorable part of the whole trip to Amsterdam, and words cannot sufficiently describe how odd of a boat ride it was.