Huseyin is working at TU Delft for the summer and let me crash at his place while I was there. The first night I got there, he, I and his other two friends Hassan and Alper went out in den Haag (the Hague) which is about 15 minutes away. We got rejected from a few clubs (told we were too old...thats a first!) so just chilled at an outdoor bar and dodged rain pouring off umbrellas. The next day, we all went to Amsterdam. I've never experienced anything like it before and its pretty unique in the world I would say. During the day we visited the Rijksmuseum and just wandered the city. At night, we hit up some bars and a really posh club that played nothing buy terrible techno all night long. We got back to Huseyins apartment around 5 and slept well into the next day.
For the next few days, Huseyin had to work, so I spent some time wandering around Delft and den Haag, meeting up with Huseyin in the afternoons. Delft itself is very cute and old fashioned, despite having one of the most advanced scientific universities in Europe located there. Its famous for its Delftware, which is painted porcelain. The technique was originally copied from the Chinese and became Dutch.
Den Haag is the seat of the International Court of Justice and is another beautiful town where old meets new. I visited the MC Escher museum here and it blew my mind! If you don't know about Escher, look him up...half artist, half geometrician, all exacting and mind warping. After the Escher museum I found a bunch of sculptures in a city park which were also very cool. I then went into a photography museum and modern art museum, which were respectively lame then lame, weird and juvenile, especially when compared with Escher.
I walked from the town center out to the ocean town of Scheveningen. The wind was blowing really hard and I saw the biggest surf of my life. The kite surfers were eating it up though! Right next to the beach, there were these great sculptures done by an American artist (forget the name). Later, I met up with Huseyin and we went to the Madurodam miniature museum. This place is a huge outdoor miniature world. Lots of my photos from the place look like shots from a helicopter flying over something. The only giveaway is often the real trees in the background.
One of the coolest things for me was the bikes in Holland. Bikes bikes everywhere. I saw girls my age dressed for the club, riding right up to the door, then hopping on again when they leave at 4am. I think I could get very used to a society build around riding bikes, with bikes lanes everywhere...if not for one thing. There's not a single hill, cliff or anything resembling them in the whole country!!! So I decided not to set down roots in Bikeland, and headed back into Germany.
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