Dateline: Amsterdam
I'm sitting in a cafe on Beursplein, in the Beurs van Berlage (whatever that is) in downtown Amsterdam. I just had a very tasty soup. I came here looking for WiFi, didn't find t-mobile but figured out KPN (dutch phone company) and for a coupla euros, I'm hooked up once again. This is nicer than the lobby of the Ramada, where I went yesterday.
I set out this morning to go to the Rijksmuseum, but it was raining hard, and so I bought a transport pass and took a trolley (sort of indirectly). I got to the museum and decided I wasn't in the mood (plus there was a sign announcing that a portion of it was closed), so I got back on a trolley at random and visited some grim Dutch suburb (something southwest of here, I think).
I don't make a very good tourist, I guess – I'm just as happy riding public transport at random as I am visiting museums or landmarks.
I meet with Eurobob tomorrow in Utrecht. Meanwhile, mostly I'm killing time. I wrote up a a rather pessimistic review of reporting capabilities at Paradise Corp for Ravi and Tom, RE the bid for business from that large retail chain. In retrospect, I'm wondering if it's what they wanted… but if they want me to write up the solution (as opposed to a condemnation of current abilities) that's much more in depth, isn't it?
As in, you'll have to build such and such aggregate, using such and such process, and tie in data from here, there, and everywhere. Seems like a request to design reportomatic 2.0. I'm all for that, but it ain't gonna be cheap, is it?
Meanwhile, I'm reading Persiles. So you've got this guy, Periandro (later revealed to be Persiles), dressed in drag (and looking very gorgeous, apparently), looking for his sister, Auristella (i.e. Sigismunda – and one is inclined to impute something incestuous, there). But she is dressed as a man, and is about to be sacrificed because the barbarians want the blood from his (her) heart to test a prophecy of a future king. But one of the barbarians gets the hots for Periandro (who he thinks is a woman) while Auristella reveals she is a woman (to avoid being murdered) and the barbarians break out into an orgy of violence and soon the whole island is in flames. Really.
And that's just the first few chapters.
So far, Nederland reminds me of a kind of old-world New Jersey, but they talk funnier. I don't mean that as an insult, either. I think Dutch is a very cool language… kind of what I expect English would sound like if I didn't understand it. It's got similar phonetic inventory, and very similar cadences to English. Kind of like how they talk in Jersey, right?