Brief note from the Air Canada lounge at Heathrow [amended and appended on Wednesday back in the office]. What a wonderful trip! Chronologically (backwards), I rented a bike yesterday and pedalled 20km north to Edam, a lovely city with a very beautiful church. I managed to catch an organ recital, which was very nice and Bach-y, had an ice cream, and then belted it back to Amsterdam against the wind. (Windmills turning quickly all around.) The Dutch countryside turns out to have canals everywhere so that I imagine there are very few places inaccessible by water. Houseboats, too. It was a beautiful day, but I had no had or sunscreen so consequently am feeling somewhat burnt today. [Peeling today. Yuck.]<\/p>\n
Saturday Ivy and I spent the day touring museums & walking the city streets with Katherine Hill. We had a wonderful time: the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh museum are both packed with wonderful artwork, and Katherine introduced us to pannekoeken<\/i>, familiar pancakes but with unfamiliar (and wonderful!) fillings. (I had bacon and apple in mine and the ladies had cheese and apple.) We ended the day with a fine Malaysian meal near the railway station, and a visit to the Alto jazz club in the Leidseplein area. Ivy and I stayed for three sets by a wonderful local group, and inhaled way too much (only tobacco, though; despite Amsterdam’s reputation the drugs are not omnipresent).<\/p>\n
What else? I stayed in a fabulous bed & breakfast for the weekend, the Ambassade. It was rather too expensive, mind you… Still, great location, massive breakfast buffet in a wonderful setting overlooking the canal.<\/p>\n
The course: great fun, but I didn’t know as much about web servers as I should have to be an instructor, so I had to do a lot of cramming. Teaching it is a very good way to learn the material! The students were from all over, with varying experiences, and I think everybody got a lot out of the experience.<\/p>\n
All in all, a wonderful trip and a great break from the project work back in Toronto. Nice to get home to see the cat and my friends, of course.<\/p>\n
I’m still thinking about the Flexleave thing. I might take six months off work, but I’ll have to work out what to do with my time. Suggestions? Also, I would have to figure out what to do with the apartment… Hmmm…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Brief note from the Air Canada lounge at Heathrow [amended and appended on Wednesday back in the office]. What a wonderful trip! Chronologically (backwards), I rented a bike yesterday and pedalled 20km north to Edam, a lovely city with a very beautiful church. I managed to catch an organ recital, which was very nice and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}