Rotterdam (or Anywhere)

Two weeks ago, when I was in London with Paul, we went to Brighton for a day. On the way we stopped at Devil’s Dyke to admire the view. You can see really far from there. They do a lot of paragliding there, but when we were there it was too windy and the place was deserted. This is the view:

And they have devils there too….

After a short stop we continued to Brighton, and parked at the Marina. We wanted to see the white cliffs! Well, I really wanted to see them, as they are very famous and I had never seen them. From the Marina, there is a concrete walkway underneath the white cliffs, sometimes with a beach underneath, sometimes just rocks – and then the waves actually crashed over the walkway sometimes!

The chalk from the cliffs is really soft, and bits of it fall off – fun for writing with 🙂

We also played with the self exposure of the camera to get some touristy photos 😉

After a few kilometres, we came across a tiny cafe serving tea and (amazing!!) home made cakes. Mmmmm……

From the cafe, there were stairs to get on top of the cliffs and to the road. We walked on top for a while, the view was quite impressive! The mill is on a golf course, that’s why the grass is so green in that photo…

From there, we took a bus into Brighton town centre. This is the Royal Pavilion – it looks Indian and I thought it was built recently for tourists – but it’s actually from early 1800 and belonged to King George IV. A very pretty building! The gardens surrounding it are also really nice.

We walked through the narrow lanes for a while, a maze of tiny streets with little shops (a lot of them jewelry stores) – very cute. We ended up on the beach, to watch a very impressive sunset! The building structure you can see in the sea is the remainder of the West Pier, which was awating renovation since 1975 and since then was falling apart, until finally it burnt down in 2003.

They do have another pier though, a typical English one full of arcade games and fun fair rides. I walked around on my own for a bit, while Paul was parking the car. It was surreal to walk around alone, in the dark, nobody around, among closed fun fair rides – I felt like I was in some kind of computer game!

I really enjoyed our visit to Brighton! I always like visiting beach towns in low season when it’s deserted and has a special kind of atmosphere. Brighton gets really crowded in Summer, as it’s so close to London – must be a different experience then!

That’s all for now. I hope to upload more photos soon, I still have a lot of photos of London, and I also took some photos yesterday at the fireworks in Cambridge – though because of the low clouds and the smoke coming from the fireworks, only half of the show was visible!

I’ve been in Norwich for 2 weeks now and mostly been working hard. This is my last month as a paid PhD student, then I have another year to finish and submit. I hope to submit sooner than that though! I’m feeling the pressure now… but trying not to get stressed while writing as much as I can.

I don’t have a camera at the moment… Paul took my SLR on his cruise, and my compact camera is being repaired at the moment. It had a small hair (or rather a bit of dust) inside the camera that shows up on every photo, very annoying. It’s costing me half of what I originally paid for the camera… But I’m quite attached to my camera and this model is not made anymore. So I decided it was worth it… it’s taking forever though and it’s quite strange for me to be without any camera!

In a week’s time I’m going to Tromsø for 10 days. Paul will be back from his cruise (if they don’t get stuck in the ice again!), and then we’ll finally have some time to get used to our new home and also to find some furniture for it. I’m looking forward to it! New updates will have to wait until I’m there, and until I can find an internet connection – might be another 1-2 weeks…

And because I can’t write a blog without any images, here’s a funny cartoon that Gert-Jan sent me. It’s from a Dutch paper, so I have translated it into English… 🙂

Today I finally finished my work (for a meeting tomorrow morning) and I had the afternoon off! It was really sunny so I went for a walk around the lake at campus.

I played with the macro function of my camera, always fun! I came back with lots of photos of dandelions… I finally know it is actually pronounced dandeLIONS and not danDElions, the version I used for a long time! Paul thought it was funny and instead of correcting me he started saying it like that as well, which was very confusing! In the end I really didn’t know which version was right and I had to ask other people, hehe. I still think my version is prettier though 😉 what have they got to do with lions anyway? Though in Dutch their name means horse flowers which also makes no sense. Ahh I just found the origin of the name here, interesting!

Another funny story about dandelions is that my grandfather thought they were weeds and should be removed from the garden, and my mum didn’t agree with this at all, she thinks they are pretty. Every time my grandfather came to our place, he would complain about the dandelions in our garden and my mum thought that was funny so on purpose she never removed them (2 stubborn people 😉 ). She once gave him a framed photo of my brothers and sister and I in a field full of them… so this was a joke that kept coming back in my family!

Anyway, the best ones are the ones with “parachutes”!

It was really nice to spend some time in the sun! It will be strange to go back to the cold tomorrow… Well Tromso actually had temperatures of up to 18 degrees last week, hard to believe! But in Svalbard temperatures are still below freezing so that will be a bit of a change from English spring time…