Piled Higher and Deeper

This comic has been keeping me from quitting school for a few years now.  It's called Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD for short) and though it's mostly about the trials of being a physics grad student, it's entirely too relevant to students in general.  

Yesterday I ran away.  This was my mother's advice, and I decided to take it.  Around noon I headed to the train station, picked a town at random, and went.  I chose Utrecht, for no reason other than I had never been there.  I had rather hoped the ride there would be longer, but it's less than an hour away.  I think I really wanted the train ride more than I wanted anything else.  I'm tired of being trapped inside, but it's just too cold for me outside.  So a train is a very nice compromise for the traveling lizard inside me.

Utrecht would probably be much cooler if I had a friend along, or if it weren't snowing, or if I hadn't already had 2 cups of coffee and wasn't hungry.  The problem with the Netherlands is every city has the exact same shops.  I've been to about 5 or 6 small towns in this place, and every single one of them has an H&M and Vroom and Dreesman, a Blokker, a Hema.  Where's the regional diversity, people?  

The coolest part of Utrech is this little "street" of restaurants by the canal.  Like, literally, beside, or, rather, sort of INSIDE the canal.  The canal opens up, and there are little restaurants snuggled into the canal wall.  Stairs lead down, and there's a narrow little sidewalk connecting them all.  Tres cool.  Perhaps I'll get a band together soon to explore these places.  They seemed gezellig.

There's also a really cool tower in Utrecht, but I'm afraid it might be magical.  It looks like a huge chess piece (rook, if you were wondering) but no matter how hard I tried to find it, I never could.  I'd see it rising above the rooftops, but as soon as I turned down a street that should have led me to it, it would vanish from sight.  Sigh.  Maybe Saturday would be a better day to go.  The signs (yep, I followed the signs and still couldn't find the magic tower!) said that there's a market there "'only on Saturday'" (this was written on the sign in quotes, thus the double quotations.)  

I sort of get the feeling that the Netherlands is just a bad place for magic, and that in each town the magic bits just huddle together in one spot to try to stay dry.  In Leiden it's the Burcht, in Utrecht, it's the Dancing Rook Tower, apparently.

Janos had a movie night last night and we watched "Mirror" which is a Russian film with no discernible plot.  It was very beautiful in parts, but mostly it was sort of depressing and dark, and there was a lot of snow (set in Russia) so it made me cold.  

There was an amazing part where a woman appeared suddenly, drinking tea, and just as suddenly vanished, tea and all.  She left behind a small ring of condensation on the table where her tea had been.  The camera watched the condensation vanish, and it was breathtaking.

After the movie (and discussions of things like how American space rockets are based on Roman horses, and a certain nude model and her complicated relationship with an artist and his apprentice) Andrei (Romania) and Gonzalo (Chile) and I went to Einstein.  I promptly lost the boys when I saw my ISN-R girls and Carlos.  Not that I wanted to lose the boys.  The girls were just around the corner, so I was just going to say hello.  But, crowded bars have distances of their own, so I got lost.  I found Andrei a bit later, and we hung out and life was pretty good.  

I was home by midnight.  I thought I heard voices all night, and can't decide if it was just the wind, the water in the pipes, or someone's television.  It could, of course, be the whispered voices that used to live in my closet, but I haven't heard them in years.  (Up until about 3 years ago, I would often hear voices whispering in my closet before I went to sleep.  For a few years there was even a man I would see if I left the closet door open.  This never actually scared me at all, and I even thought the man was probably watching over me.  I was often annoyed by the voices, because they whispered all night, and I couldn't sleep.  I found them to be rather rude.)

Lolpod: A man with long dredlocks dressed in a red body suit stopped in the middle of the shopping street.  He was also wearing a Darth Maul mask.  He started dancing.  Most people thought he was sort of strange.  I think he might just be insane, I've seen him around before.  But it made me smile.  :-)