Research Party!

I gave my talk yesterday (comments: "That was the fastest talk I've ever seen"; "You've reached the point where you don't know what you're doing any more") which meant today I could just chill like Broca and Wernicke over here:
I also got to explore the posters at leisure, and they were mostly delightful:Afterwards we headed downtown, spotting our only Dutch windmill from afar:

APhL closed out our journey together with a putative lab tradition (and longstanding Pud tradition), special tasty pizzas.

Edutainment

Our hosts took us out for a night on the Nijmegen, where we got to see what I want all of my walls to look like:

...while visiting the museum built around Nijmegen's oldest wall-slash-cesspit:

They had pretty scary monster statues, too, except they turn out to be plague-doctor statues:

Then it was off to dinner at the armory, where everything comes with goat cheese and every beer is Belgian:
Then a few of us went out to chase bikes to a 600 year old pub. I can think of few better descriptions of Holland.

The Hajj

Today we made our first pilgrimage to one of Psycholinguistics' holiest sites. I can only barely believe that it's real: A federal-level research institute in my subfield. Hosting a conference on my thesis topic. It's hard not to think of it as research paradise.

Favourable Exchange Rates

If somebody on the street asks to buy a cigarette off me, I usually just give them a cigarette. If some people on the street offer to give me a beer for a cigarette, well....

Nightlife

Charlotte and Tyler are here! I showed them the winter wonderland/nightclub district near the hostel, where all the bars were packed. And all the chairs on the street were packed:

... because it turns out that the soccer game the high Australians invited me to watch was kind of a big deal. Fortunately Tyler and Charlotte passed a nice quiet street-corner cafe on the way to find me, so we went there to catch the rest of the game. And to have smoooooooth Belgian beers. Yes indeed.

Leaving the World

Amsterdam! Which I've been left to explore on my own for 36 hours. Few photos of this period have turned out to be postable. But here's one of the surprising store names:

And here's a store that I've seen _as often as McDonald's_ in the entertainment districts:And here's the bar-hotel-coffeeshop I wound up at later in the evening. Someone from Amsterdam, tell me this is a place where the hipsters go. I walked by not thinking about it, and suddenly it was like an alarm went off. A hipster alarm. I went in. To investigate.

Loyalty Rewards

I got this latte for free, maybe because I spend more time at this cafe than some of the employees. Also, at Transcend 'latte' doesn't just mean you spent too much for that coffee. It means you spent too much for that coffee and it's f*cking delicious.