the Jordaan and who knows where else

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the encouraging words about the academic side of things over here in "A'dam." Next week is a new set of classes (followed by two new ones the week after as well as the final week,) so I'm looking forward to staking out a comfort zone in those new discussions. The morning class is called "Sexuality in the Political Culture of State and Nation-building" and the afternoon one is something like "Intersections of Sexuality and HIV/AIDS." Okey-doke. More on those later, I suppose.

Today was the first "free" day any of us have had since we arrived in Amsterdam (we have three-day weekends!) and I made the most of it by breaking away from the group of SI students and exploring the city on my own for the day. It was such a perfect day, and I have a bunch of new pictures up on flickr, so find the link in a previous post and check em out, hehe. I made a point to head west toward the Jordaan neighborhood today, a more residential, postcard-perfect area of Amsterdam, near the Anne Frank House (which had an unbelievable line...I'll have to visit later in the day?) and home to a ton of beautiful canal houses decked with flowers and lots of houseboats on the canals. I started out today having lunch and a capuccino at one cafe, had another capuccino at an amazingly airy, high-ceilinged cafe called De Jaren in the university area, wandered around the courtyards of the university pretending to be a Dutch student, walked through most of the Jordaan, stopped for excellent cheap Thai food, checked out a supremely geeky (and therefore excellent) store called Kitsch Kitchen,and ended up at another canalside cafe for a beer...so, that makes for many miles of wandering gorgeous streets broken up by four cafes--sounds like a perfect day to me. I've started a bit on writing postcards to you all, too, so hopefully I'll get a big stack mailed out by early next week.

I'm sure I had more to share, but the details of the city in this blog might start tapering off now that I've seen almost all of it...! Please check out the pictures, I braved my tortoise-like laptop processor to upload them just for youuuu. Tomorrow I will probably take another day to myself, possibly visiting a few of the bigger museums, or maybe even taking a train out to Haarlem (a nearby city with a lot of cool historical buildings) or out to the beach of the North Sea! I also just learned that there's a microbrewery probably a 5 minute walk away from my apartment, housed inside a real old windmill. I was surprised that I hadn't seen it yet, but it's in the exact opposite direction as the way I've been going to go in to the more downtown area of Amsterdam. A real live windmill and GOOD local beer (Heineken is getting old)...I'll get two of the things I wanted for my trip to Holland at once!!

Oh, and I got my phone all set up, and incoming cell phone calls are always free in Europe (isn't that maddening?!) so if you want to try and reach me, call this number: 011-31-6-42943572. Keep in mind that it ain't free for you. It may also be possible for me to send and receive text messages for cheaper than a call...someone wanna try it?

Love and extra-aged Gouda,
-Laur