July 30th, 2007: camels & Den Burg

Of all the random things to run into this weekend... camels in Den Helder! I was walking between the train station and the ferry and passed a circus being taken down. It was definitely strange to see camels here!

Here are some more pictures of Den Burg - this is what town generally looks like during business hours when the shops are open. There are so many tourists here that on the weekend the grocery store often runs out of items like bread...
This spot in the middle of town is approximately a 30 second walk from the house I'll be moving to in September...

July 23rd, 2007: Happy Birthday Mom!!!

Here are some images of Den Burg, the largest town on Texel. I will be moving to a house here in September. Usually the streets are packed full of tourists (mainly Germans) but I took these pictures on Sun. afternoon when all of the shops were closed - so there were no tourists around.
The building in back of the tree is the post office. I will be living on the street that goes off to the right from the post office. It is kind of hard to take pictures of the houses in town since all of the streets are curved...



I'll try to take some picts of Den Burg when it's full of tourists so you can see the difference!

July 22nd, 2007: Happy Birthday OC!!!

Here are a few pictures from Friday night - the weather was terrible here (rainy and windy) so I found my friends Tim and Nico and we played some music together in the common room in the apartment building we all live in. We worked out a few irish tunes with the guys on guitar and me on whistle. It was a lot of fun and a good way to spend a rainy Friday evening.

In other news, I am apparently extremely allergic to mosquitoes on Texel. A few weeks ago I was bitten and had a bump the size of a golf ball on my arm. Last night I woke up in time to realize that a mosquito was bitting me on the eyelid - and now my right eye is almost swollen shut. It is really terrible. I've met two other people here (one person from the UK and one from Russia) who have the same problems with Texel mosquitoes...

July 20th, 2007: The beach

Yesterday was a really nice day on Texel - warm and sunny with relatively little wind. At work most people spent the coffee and lunch breaks outside and in the evening I went for a walk on the beach since it was so nice out. However, today is a different story... there is presently lots of horizontal rain and wind. I forgot my rain jacket this morning but luckily I found one to borrow. I will be taking the bus home later - biking in this would be miserable!


I wish that it would just get nice here for a full week... but we seem to have occasional nice days and the rest are rainy/windy/or cloudy.

July 18th, 2007: guitar and ferry

Ok - so I now have a working digital camera again and should hopefully be a bit less busy in the next few weeks so I should be able to pay more attention to the blog... I just got back from a week in Barcelona - went there to attend a limnogeology conference and also took a few days of vacation. Barcelona was awesome! Nice and warm and sunny. While I was there I found this cool music store and ended up wondering inside and eventually playing a bunch of the guitars they had there. I ended up buying this one (without fully thinking about the fact that getting it back to The Netherlands was going to involve buses, airplanes, trains, the ferry and finally, a bike ride... But, I managed to get the guitar back to my apartment and I'm really happy to have an instument again.
These guitar picts aren't the greatest - the light in my apartment is almost always bad. I'll try to find someone else to take a picture of me with the guitar soon...


I really like this guitar - it is quite loud compared to my other guitar and has a nice sound. I'm still getting used to the fatter neck and the lack of any dots on the frets...

And here are some picts of the port in Den Helder and the ferry ride. I had to go to the town hall in Den Helder (again) this morning - but I finally managed to get my official residence permit! I also got the equivalent of a Dutch social security number this week - so next month I will be able to finally get paid!!!
Another picture of the port in Den Helder.

I'm not sure why people feed the seagulls, but they do...

A view of NIOZ from the ferry. Funny, I was the only person taking a picture of the lab...

July 1, 2007: Round Texel

Hi - sorry I have been sort of ignoring the blog lately... I've been pretty busy in the lab and there was also a lot of partying last weekend for the catamaran races. Anyway, here are a few pictures of the boat races. It was pretty cool to watch - I think there was something like 485 boats in the races. I saw one flip over even before the start of the race...

I thought it was great that there was a whole bunch of tractors on the beach...
This old military vehicle was being used as the first aid center. I think the guys driving this thing were really having a lot of fun since they kept racing up and down the beach - not sure why he started to drive it into the water here...

Ok, must run to catch the bus so I'm not stuck here for another hour. I'll attempt to write more soon.