I booked!!

I booked my ticket today. I will leave Amsterdam at 10.30 in the morning on may 16 to fly the astonishing distance to Frankfurt, where I will catch my flight to Portland. I will return at november 7, with a stop in Chicago. So now I can start thinking about the practical stuff one has to think of if you want to spend 6 months working abroad...

Culture and science

It's been a while but I've been kind of busy. I actually still am, but working for 24h a day would be wrong (even for me). Last sunday my friends and I went downtown to take part in one of the city's "Cultural Sundays". Museums were open (and entrance was free) and there were lectures, theater, music performances and special expositions everywhere. It was all fun, but I especially liked the lecture on the comparison of microscopic photos and famous artworks.

Today I got the good news that the second guy I invited to look at my room liked it enough to want to live here and pay my rent while I am in the USA. I spend half the day processing data the wrong way. I made a little mistake in writing the script for the processing, so I spend the second half of the day making up for my mistake..

I'm finished now, so there's some time to post and relax. Tomorrow morning I'll take an early train to Roterdam and the science-circus starts again :P

Eye coil

Today was the second day of the Helmholtz Course Motor Systems. The day was dedicated to 3d-rotation of the eye, ways to look at it, calculate with it and measure it. I spend some time with a coil in my eye sitting in a cube with two magnetic fields that induced small currents in the coil depending on the position of the coil (and therefore the eye) in the magnetic field. After a couple of minutes the view of the eye with the coil gets blurry and it stays like that for about half an hour after removing the coil. Now (a few hours later) I can see sharp again with the eye but it still feels like something is in it. It'll probably wear off soon...

US Embassy

So today I had my appointment at the US embassy in Amsterdam to convince those weird americans that I am truly not a terrorist and I will just visit their beloved country, pay for everything and return home after six months. It was a sunny day and the embassy is located at the museumplein in Amsterdam near the Vondelpark, so that wasn't too bad. I saw the funniest thing; a bunch of kids just sitting around on the grass when suddenly the sprinklers started working. It was really funny watching them get surprised and run. The embassy by the way is like a fort. Double fences, metal detectors and grumpy armed men. They were pissed off because I had my mobile phone on me (but in the phonecall they only mentioned that cameras weren't allowed), then they started complaining my photographs might not be clear enough, but in the end, nothing was really much of a problem and I will have my passport back on wednesday with my visa stamped in it. In total this only costs about 175 euros and a shitload of time and patience. Now I can start looking for the appropriate flight...