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Or, Unexpected Musings as a result of being an Expat...
Roses on my table
So from my last post, you might be getting the impression that it's a grocery paradise over here. It's not quite so easy. One thing I've noticed in the stores in Amsterdam (though not at the amazing variety of farmer's markets) is an obsession with over-packaging. We bought some crackers once that, within the outer package, were individually wrapped in groups of 8. WHY??? Certain types of fruits and vegetables are packaged on foam trays with cling film, or in plastic bags, or simply wrapped in cling film. It seems intensely unnecessary and is one definite downside to shopping at the local grocery store chain. Once we have bicycles (something I hope to find second-hand and soon), I plan to do more shopping at the farmer's market where I can bring my own re-usable bags for things. On a related note, at D's workplace, they have a wonderful sounding canteen, but for hygenic reasons have individually wrapped each portion of cheese and meat. So to make a simple sandwich generates a ton of waste.
Something else I've noticed is that, as a result of the latest obsession with being environmental by taking your own bags shopping, there seem to be a zillion new bags being made. I see them everywhere from fancy designer ones, to promotional ones, to cheap department store ones. I mean, at least they're re-usable, but still, it seems excessive and little bit missing the spirit of the idea. I can only imagine that some will not be sold and that the excess stock will end up in a landfill somewhere.
Roses
I have been reflecting recently on consumption and waste and where we find value and meaning in our lives. A lot revolves around the food we choose to buy, grow, prepare, and eat. We have been eating a lot better since moving to Amsterdam. Mostly because we are being more frugal and cooking all our meals from scratch. We never ate a lot of pre-prepared food or ate out a huge amount, but we're doing so even less here.
Making this sort of drastic, long-distance-and-short-notice move, with its associated massive reduction in Stuff, has resulted in a lot more changes than just the scenery. It's forced me to think about just about every lifestyle choice and be more conscious in choosing what I want. When you don't experience any change, it's very easy to stay within your comfort zone and not examine WHY you do or believe something. So far, I think this has been the most rewarding part of this experience and not at all what I expected. I thought it would be the travel ... which will probably be great too, once we get to that part of the Expat Adventure. As it is, I've been far more productive in writing and drawing than I had been for ages, I'm getting much more regular exercise (love the climate here!), we're eating much better, I'm feeling very content with having fewer things (though I still am excited to get our boxes with what we did choose to ship), and I feel like I'm benefitting personally from consciously re-examining my beliefs and assumptions.
(apm at March 8, 2010 15:41 UTC)
First, I’m overdue in announcing Transit to Go a.k.a. “the iPhone transit map that’s demonstrably more useful than a paper schedule” a.k.a. “your bus departure in 15 seconds or less, no matter where you are”. I wrote up a blog post about it for Mindsea’s site, if you’re interested in finding out more.
Second, all this transit excitement has made me start thinking about better routing and geometry algorithms again. I’ve been experimenting a bit with Brandon Martin Anderson’s prender framework, used by the infamous Graphserver, and have been pretty happy with the results. It basically lets you do processing visualizations in python (i.e. no Java coding required). Here’s a quick picture of it in action, rendering the Nova Scotian road network, as distributed by geobase.
The neat thing about this framework is that you can render quickly to an arbitrary level of detail, which should prove very useful when troubleshooting the behavior of some of the code I’m working on. If anyone is interested in running the framework on MacOS X (like I was), my fork of the project has the appropriate patches.
(wlach at March 8, 2010 01:30 UTC)
sausages at the market
North America is big. Really big. You may think it's a long way down to the grocery store, and in general, it is. And this is the source of many problems.
First, when the grocery store is far away, you're likely to go less often. This has two consequences: you'll buy more food and less of it fresh. Buying more food generally leads to buying things you won't end up using (it's hard to always plan perfectly just what you'll need a week or more in advance) and fresh food tends to be the healthiest. So already, you're set up to be less healthy and to waste food.
Next, for whatever reason it originally started, stores in North America carrry enormous bulk sizes of things. The smaller quantities are then priced unnattractively, so that it seems like a financially sensible choice to buy the large size. This makes your groceries heavy and since your grocery store is far away, it's not feasible to walk. So you're spending more money because you're buying more food at a time and you're driving instead of walking, which is worse for both you and the environment (and costs you even more money when you consider all the tangential costs of cars).
Finally, because you've had to buy lots of food, in large quantities, you need a larger space to store all that stuff. So you're spending more on your home or apartment.
In contrast, consider if your grocery store was 5 minutes walk away. It would be more hassle to drive there and find parking than to just walk over. Then you'd have to buy less stuff because you'd need to carry it home, but if you're that close to the grocery store, you can go every couple of days. So suddenly, you can buy fresh food every couple days and be more accurate in planning what you'll use and get some exercise too. I was lucky enough in Montreal to be in this situation. There were small grocery stores scattered all over my neighbourhood, so I could easily walk to the store every few days. The one piece that still caused a problem, though, was the way small quantities of pantry items tended to be overpriced compared to the bulk sizes.
fresh scones
Something that annoyed me initially in Amsterdam was the lack of bulk sizes. I do a lot of home baking and go through flour pretty quickly. I was used to buying 10 kg bags. The bags of flour here are 1kg. However, the key difference I've realised is that I'm not paying a markup for the small package. It's about 0.58 € (includes taxes) and while I can't pop into a Canadian grocery store at the moment to check, I can just about guarantee that a 1kg bag of flour will cost more than $0.80! Once you lose the pricing incentive to buy the large size, it suddenly becomes clear that bulk purchasing is really not advantageous. It means you have more money tied up in "stuff" that you don't really need yet, for some things it means they won't be as fresh when you get to using them (or might even be spoiled if you get bugs or mice), and it means you need space to store all your bulk stuff. If you're walking home with groceries, it's also much nicer to be carrying 1kg at a time rather than 10kg!
I think many of our current problems in North America could be solved by returning to an urban model where it was convenient to walk to stores (and if we got over the obsession with bulk and "supersize" options). It would be better for our health, our pocketbooks, and for the environment. But why won't it happen anytime soon? Because it means more overhead costs for the corporations and thus smaller profit margins. Shopping at farmer's markets and smaller shops is great if you have that option. But what can people stuck with a distant, monolithic grocery store as their only option do?
I don't have the solution other than to say that it presumably works in Europe, so why not in North America?
(apm at March 6, 2010 13:38 UTC)
...at least if you measure it by counting the number of watchers on github.
It is also featured in the top 100 or so interesting github repositories, although there's no particular indication of what they mean by "interesting."
(Previously: bup: it backs things up. It's matured quite a bit since then, though, and is now usable for backing up real work that you care about.)
I don't actually recall the amount of time I slept the night prior, but it couldn't have been more than 7 hours, and was probably objectively less. John called me at 3:06 AM to ask if I had seen Victoria's cell phone anywhere, and I snoozed through the call and passed out contentedly.Wait a second. I don't have any friends who spell their name "John." And the only Victoria I know is Julian's cousin. What just happened, and why were these people at my house? Why am I referring to them on a first-name basis?
This spontaneous meetup, my friends, was the result of Canada's gold-medal-winning performance on the ice at the culmination of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games. The bars poured out, including the one I was at with my Waterloo crowd (the name of this bar was Lou Dawgs, and if you're a fan of Louisiana-style cuisine and reasonably inexpensive beer, it's not a half-bad place). Where were we headed? Who knew!
What mattered was that we had done it, our national identity boosted by winning at the sport that forms the basis for over 50% of Canadian stereotypes. By winning more gold medals at a Winter Olympics than any other nation in history. It was us, we pulled as a team, we willed Crosby to score, and he did not disappoint us. Now the wait was over, we had every right to celebrate, and celebrate we did. We danced, we yelled, we sang. As traffic in downtown Toronto ground to a complete halt we kissed, shook hands with, and celebrated with the drivers, we conglomerated in the (commercial) heart of our fair city, Dundas Square, wherein we, as Canadians, celebrated our identity and cheered like it was nobody's business.
We waved flags. We waved clothes. The party lasted for a long time. Consider that, in Eastern Time, the game began at 3:15 PM, and that we had hit bars at 2:00 PM just to get a seat... give the game 3 hours, and you've got about 12 hours of drinking intermingled with 9 hours of uproarious cheer and love.
This morning when I woke up, I could hardly believe it had even happened. A Service Canada representative was at my door at 10:00 AM to verify my identity and get EQL Data signed up for filing Record of Employment forms online rather than using paper filings. He was crisp, professional, and when I asked him if he had celebrated last night, he shrugged his shoulders and mentioned that no, he hadn't really been out very late. He looked a little put-off by the state of my living room, what with several bottles of vodka scattered precariously over the foosball table, the whole house smelling of hops and lees, and jackets and blankets draped over every piece of furniture. Courteously, he mentioned that his other colleagues might not consider this a very professional meeting.
Throughout the day, this bizarre obliviousness to the happenings of February 28 only deepened. Kat said it best in a text message: "Vancouver was a gong show! Love it. Back to reality today, fuck." As I took a subway later that evening to visit Liz, reality really depressed me. Older women who smiled happily and whose cheeks I would jubilantly kiss last night leered at me from beyond raised copies of Metro, disapproving of my tattered jeans and unkempt haircut. Professionals in suits sat quietly playing with their BlackBerry phones, when only yesterday they would high-five and whoop. Girls who flung their arms around you and danced to the tune of being Canadian stood bundled up in their coats, nodding along silently to their headphones. The train was quiet and demure. We were no longer Canadian, all sharing in the full joys of this word, we were girls and boys, we were white, black, Asian and brown, we were rich, poor, we were professionals or plebeians.
The jubilation, the love, the exuberant joy was gone, we were back at work contributing to our GDP or lost in our own problems.
After a quiet dinner spent enjoying shawarma sandwiches and x-rays of Liz's new hand-bone fractures (acquired in an inebriated game of soccer during the post-Olympic gold celebration), I went home, demure and introverted, reluctant to leave the emotion of yesterday behind, but not wanting to immerse myself in what was only a dream.
As I walked up the stairs from St. Patrick station towards University and Dundas, I was quietly whistling O Canada to myself. As I passed a boy and a girl going in the opposite direction, the boy suddenly excuses himself, turns towards me, and begins to match my tune, our whistling finding a common octave. I turned around and, for what was probably the first time today, smiled broadly. Ironically, this ended our duet, but just for a moment, we had both connected, and our eyes relived the magic.
Maybe it wasn't all a dream.
Olympic gold medal hockey game, Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. Canada 3, USA 2 in OT. Thanks for the memories.
(The photograph is courtesy of Steve Gircys, whom I bumped into late into the evening. You can also see that even our hockey game can't get in the way of my mildly leftist agenda.)
(lkosewsk at March 2, 2010 05:08 UTC)
I mentioned it briefly in my previous post and I thought it might interest others to know what's in my Mini Travel Art Kit. Here it is all packed up:
travel art kit
And here it is, all unpacked:
travel art kit unpacked
Clockwise, it consists of a small sketchbook, some watercolour brushes, 2 black pens, a refillable eraser barrel, the blue plastic pencil box (containing a mini-sharpener, a gum eraser, a kneaded eraser, and an assortment of pencils and pencil crayons), large pencil sharpener and eraser, watercolour paper postcards, a strip of paper with my pencil crayon spectrum of what's in the box (42 colours), a box of watercolour pencil crayons, and a box of pencils.
As you can see, there's certainly some duplication, so it could be smaller. I used to have fewer of the loose pencil crayons so that the box of pencils also fit in the blue plastic box. But this has grown organically with things I liked to have available. For example, I prefer the pencil sharpener that catches the shavings to the mini one that fits in the box. And I do like to have a big range of colours in my coloured pencils... overall, it's still pretty compact.
travel art kit
If anyone else reading this has a travel art kit, I'd be interested to hear what's in it! If you're thinking of making one, I highly recommend having a hard-sided pencil box rather than a fabric case, so that your art supplies are protected (and if anything is leaky, it's contained).
On an unrelated note, nice weather in February (ie. hovering around 0°C), often with no snow, is amazing. I'm usually feeling quite downtrodden by the grey, cold weather in February and know it will continue in March. This year, it's been unusually cold and snowy in Amsterdam, but that translated to balmy for us, in comparison to a Montreal February. And March is starting off with a glorious sunny day! After this blog post, I'm off for a walk, maybe to one of the numerous year-round outdoor markets.
(apm at March 1, 2010 09:13 UTC)