Last time I didn't finish writing about where exactly we ended up for the night of museums.
We ended up at Optofonica, a center for contemporary "scientific art". We stood in line for a long time. In front of us were some dudes dressed in some kind of "soft toy" style costumes, eating something weird-looking out of little cardboard boxes. Seryoga dubbed them slugs, but didn't ask what they were, so later he spent a long time looking for where you could buy such slugs. Never found them, alas. I think it was just traditional Dutch french fries with a mayonnaise-like sauce.
French fries, by the way, are called "chips” by the English (totally off topic), "pommes frites” by the French, and "french fries" by Americans. Russians, as we know, call them "kartofel fri".
And only the Dutch and the Belgians call them the way they should be called - "Vlaamse frites", that is, Flemish, which kind of matches the region where this dish originated.
I'm generally not a big fan of potatoes, although I can eat fries occasionally. I don't eat mayonnaise at all, except very rarely in salads. But I bought this dish - I had to try what the locals love so much, after all. Overall, the experiment was a success: what is often called mayonnaise turned out to be a mild-tasting sauce, resembling sour cream with spices, or maybe yogurt. Apparently there are several different sauces, they'll put on whatever you ask for, including ketchup.
I won't be buying Flemish fries again, but the test didn't induce any gag reflexes either.
Since we're on the subject of fast food, I'll mention that I also ate a croquette from a FEBO vending machine. You drop a coin in, pull a meatball from behind a little curtain.
We don't seem to have a dish like this back home, so I'll explain. Inside this meatball is minced meat or potato, pretty runny and mixed with some kind of sauce. I think I had one with mustard, judging by the color. It's an acquired taste, but then again, it's interesting to try what the locals scrape by on in tough times. Once again, the taste wasn't as sharp as you'd expect from mustard.
Let's temporarily wrap up the culinary theme here and get back to culture. At Optofonica, we saw a few installations.
In one of them, a girl was lying on the floor and breathing into a sensor, and the software took the percentage of carbon dioxide in her breath, turned it into black flies, and displayed them on a screen. The flies swarmed across the screen in time with her breathing, and kept multiplying (since new ones were added with every exhale).
Fun, but you can't stick around for long since there are no benches in the room. I liked that the interior throughout the Optofonica building looks like a laboratory, white and clean, and the staff wear retro-futuristic costumes.
This is the girl who took us up in the elevator, the pic isn't great, but what can you do.
There was also an installation in Optofonica where the process of water decomposing into oxygen and hydrogen was illuminated by a green laser. It was beautiful, you can't deny that. When two laser beams intersected, the process seemingly sped up; at least a punk was loudly admiring this. The installation description, however, said it was an illusion, you just see the gas bubbles better when the lighting is intense.
We didn't look at anything else, because new installations were opening slowly in Optofonica, we didn't want to wait around, and we left. Felix Kubin was supposed to play that night, but we didn't feel like waiting in line again, plus we hadn't arrived for the start anyway, since everything doesn't happen that fast, moving around the city I mean. Still, it was pretty good — this kind of contemporary art connected to science is very much to my liking. I think even its fiercest haters wouldn't criticize this specific approach too much — with sensors, liquids, and lasers.
I don't know what this is, a figure on a wall, there were a lot of these. Cute
Someone asked about maps in the last post. I'll answer before I forget. I had GPS on my iPhone, but it kept losing the satellite and lagging, so its usefulness was questionable. I also had printouts, but they were rough.
In general, a simple way to navigate without a map is to ask the locals. It's not hard, thankfully almost all Dutch people speak good English (which is surprising). Interestingly, they don't really like signs in English though, and such signs are relatively rare in instructions and names. Ticket machines, luckily, have English menus too.
There are only a few problems with asking locals questions:
1. There are places where it's nothing but tourists
2. I'm shy
3. It's not always easy to explain and understand what you want, even in English
Naturally, all Dutch people are always friendly and ready to help, unless they're in a hurry. Europe, what can you say. In general, the Kingdom of the Netherlands is one of the most developed countries in terms of tolerance and universal humanism, just like the Scandinavian countries. In a sense, it's the most developed. For anyone living in an info-vacuum, I'll clarify that in the Netherlands the following are legal
1. same-sex marriage (2001, first in the world)
2. euthanasia (2002)
3. prostitution (2000)
4. soft drugs (partially, "policy of tolerance")
Plus, they have one of the lowest levels of religiosity (about 30% believers, 40% neither fish nor fowl, the rest atheists).
For conservatives all of this is, without a doubt, a sign of Europe's moral "decay" and its imminent demise.
I'll remind you, however, that Holland has an extremely high gross domestic product, standard of living (top 10 by most metrics), a relatively high birth rate for Europe, and a high level of self-reported happiness among its residents.
Draw your own conclusions.