A week in Wageningen

I did a lot during my week in Wageningen.

Rode the European rail system (seriously, why don't we have this?!)

 Ran through the Netherlands countryside

 Spent some time in the old town (church lit up at night)

 Ate some delicious food (those are shrimp and cheese stuffed peppers)

 And some that I was a bit less sure about (that's a raw fish with onions)

Worked out, including a Hatha yoga class in Dutch (and how gorgeous is this gym?!)

 Visited the Restaurant of the Future, which is automated by my company

 Trained on our systems, including some new products

 And rode bikes through the countryside

All in all, I will take it! We were incredibly busy, but had a really great time. Here's hoping to do it again next year!

A week in The Netherlands

As I'm sure most of you know from Facebook, or hearing from me directly, I'm not in the US currently! I left Friday night to take a red-eye to Europe. Along with 4 of my colleagues, I am spending this week at my corporate headquarters in Wageningen, NL. It's a little town, about an hour east of Amsterdam, and 3 hours northeast of Brussels.

We didn't come here immediately - instead, we flew on Friday night to Brussels, landing Saturday morning. We spent the night in Brussels, staying primarily in the city center, near the Grand Place. In the photo below, our hotel was on the Rue du Lombard, just north of the Manneke Pis, which is a famous statue (about two feet tall) of a little boy peeing in a fountain.

I did take photos of this statue, but they're on my personal laptop (I'm typing this on my work laptop). It's pretty hilarious that the sign of Brussels is a little boy peeing....on pretty much everything! You see him in little souvenirs, on tshirts...everywhere, peeing. It's pretty hilarious. There's a statue that was created in "solidarity" of a little girl peeing - the "Jeanneke Pis". I do have a photo of that to share here:

Can you imagine trying to put a statue like that in the US somewhere? No way that would fly! What makes it even more hilarious is that it's designed to help promote medical research for cancer. Yet it's placed down a small alley, locked in an alcove, just up from the Delirium Cafe (which is on the map above) - a HUGE bar that we spent quite a bit of time in on Saturday night. Makes no sense, but is hilarious for us as visitors.

Both days I met up with my friend Rob for lunch. We were in the Pep Band together, and since he moved to Belgium in 2005 I haven't gotten to see him a whole lot! His wife is absolutely lovely (she's Belgian), and their kids are adorable. It was nice to get to see them for a bit, especially on Sunday when they walked around the city center with us! I found myself enjoying Brussels more than I thought I would: the food was amazing, the people were really nice, and the beer was great (I can get lambics for SO CHEAP!). What more could I ask for?

Sunday afternoon we took the train (ok, 3 trains and a taxi) up to Wageningen. It was interesting, wheeling all of our bags through tiny European trains, with only about 5 minutes to switch at each station, but we made it! Our hotel is the Hotel de Wageningsche Berg - newly renovated, just next to a tributary of the Rhine river, and really nice. I went for a run/walk this morning through the woods behind the hotel, then down next to the river - not bad at all! Breakfast is also delicious, and my room is quite large for a European hotel room, so I have no complaints.

They're keeping us busy here at the office - meetings every morning, followed by different hands-on trainings after lunch. We are getting some lovely dinners in the evenings with Dutch colleagues, and tonight I'm having a "ladies night" with 3 of the women in marketing here, who are a lot of fun. Thursday night we go to work out at the very fancy gym of our sales director (he took us there the last time), and Friday night is dinner at our owner's home. Saturday I take an early train with 2 colleagues back to Amsterdam, and then fly home for arrival Saturday afternoon. A full week, but a good one! I'll be posting some photos up here soon, hopefully - sadly, the WiFi at my hotel in the evenings is awful (the one negative of the place), so my ability to post from there is not great. We'll see what I can do as the week wears on!

Wageningen, NL

On Sunday afternoon we drove from Amsterdam to Wageningen, a little over an hour south-east of Amsterdam. The drive was very pretty, through some local farmland.

We checked into our hotel and went out to the the "happening" town of Wageningen. It's a quaint little town with shops and restaurants around the large church in the city center.

One plus of being so near Belgium is that every restaurant we went to had a lovely fruit beer for me to drink! I did get a decent amount of teasing from my Dutch colleagues, as well as a waiter one evening, for my liking of super sweet beer, but I can't help that it's fantastically delicious, can I?!

Below is a photo of some of the restaurants that surround the church; we ate in one of these on the first night.

My week at our Dutch office was jam-packed; we were exhausted every night. Here are some of the highlights:
- We met our many colleagues at the BV (our internal term for their office; it's basically the same thing as Inc here in the States), both those we had met from their trips to our office and those we had yet to meet.
- We received a day of hands-on training on our two main products (which was incredibly useful and my favorite day of the trip!). The photo below is the final setup Kristin and I created - we've got a video camera for recording, computer running our software, and part of an 8-arm radial arm maze that we set up and automated with our software. Having never done half of that before, we were pretty proud of ourselves!

 We took two "field trips" while there; the first to the Restaurant of the Future, which I believe I posted about before. It allows for research into what type of food choices people make in a restaurant setting, and to also alter parameters of food presentation. We equipped the whole restaurant with A/V equipment and our software for coding behavior and reading facial emotions. Pretty cool!

 Lastly, I had to share this photo that I took at my loaned desk space. I had brought Rufus Whiskerton III with me, as well as my notebook (which I would be unable to work without!). I got the apple at lunch one day, and they had given each of us a mug. I had to share - I do enjoy our Noldus green!

Amsterdam

It's finally time to write about my trip to The Netherlands from September! I've got hundreds of photos that I took there, so of course it's not possible to put them all up here for all to see. It's not even possible to put a 1/10 of them here. So, I've decided to write just two posts here on the family blog, and put some of my more "artistic" photos up on the photography blog. First up: Amsterdam!

My colleague Kristin and I arrived in Amsterdam on Saturday morning. We spent the day walking around to try and avoid sleeping (to deal with jetlag), and saw a good chunk of the city, which is beautiful. It's probably the most green city I've been in; there's just so much vegetation everywhere! And the canals criss-crossing through the city are stunning.

One of the stops we made were to the massive Flower Market. We knew we wanted to purchase some tulip bulbs to bring back to the US; it took a while to choose which ones we ultimately wanted. We all settled on some blue ones that you can't find here in the US, as well as some that are on the "approved" list. I gave away most of the ones I brought back, and I'm looking forward to planting my own, which needs to happen soon!

 We also had to hit the red light district. I didn't take any photos of the girls, as that just seemed terribly creepy, but this statue shows how much the city is known for its legal prostitution. The whole thing seems depressing and desperate to me, but at least the girls have a number of organizations that look out for their welfare. Even so...it's just not something we here in the US are used to!

One other thing we saw was the Van Gogh museum. I had no idea of the breadth of his work before going there! Unfortunately the museum was in the process of moving (that site permanently closed the following week), so we didn't get to see everything but I think most was still on display. Even worse, however, was that they did not allow any photography! I understand why, but for me it was still quite frustrating. I'll just say that his paintings are beautiful...and wow was he messed up in the head.

 On Sunday, our colleague Paige arrived, and our colleague Matt (who was already in the NL) drove to Amsterdam from Wageningen (where our office is) to spend some time with us and drive us out there for the work week). Here are myself, Paige and Kristin on the canal boat tour we all took that day. It might have been touristy, but it was a really great way to see the city and learn a little history.




We had to switch boat lines at the Amsterdam Central train station, which is huge and beautiful!

 I tried to find a photo that exemplifies travel in Amsterdam, and I think this one does: bridge, canal, and bicycles. While there are plenty of cars driving around, most people travel by bicycle. On average in the Netherlands there are 2-3 bicycles per person. And the accessories! Carts, wheelbarrows, kid seats...it was pretty great. And strange to see kids zipping around in a major city without any sort of protective safety gear.



A large number of house boats also reside in the city. I couldn't get a good photo of them from the canal boat tour, so this is one that I took from a bridge.  The house boats are fairly stationary (many had so many plants and outdoor furniture on top there's no way the boat could move without losing all of it), but they're all occupied, and looked very modern from our glimpses through the windows.

Kristin and I then returned to Amsterdam on Friday night, after our work week, but I was feeling somewhat miserable from a cold I picked up on Thursday, and we only had a few hours. We stayed right near the train station and red light district, so got to see what that looks like on a Friday night (basically, crazy). We then had to be at the airport by about 8am on Saturday to fly home, so I don't have any photos from that last night except for these two that I took with my phone.

LEFT: Amsterdam at night

RIGHT: taken from a "specialty shop" in the red light district. I don't even want to know how that thing works, but it was displayed so artistically that I had to take a photo and share it here. Oh, Amsterdam!