I'm impressed, I'm really impressed. They cut out the bs plot knowing they can't write a good plot anyway and just focused on what they do well, which is action scenes. If you haven't caught onto what I'm talking about, it's The Transporter 2. The first Transporter movie had a great first 20 minutes, action packed driving, cool scenes. Then it completely faded. It wasn't good because it was trying to be good. The second installment from Luc Besson doesn't try so hard, it just knows what it's good at. First of all, what completely dominates and sells this movie is Jason Statham's character. This guy is so cool it makes me want to drive a car. I love the little details - the gloves, the super clean car, the suit, the haircut - it's all so well worked. What I mean about not trying too hard is that Besson is content with basing the whole story around Frank, because that's the only interesting concept of this story. There's plenty of funny physics, another thing I liked. You will see wild scenes of cars racing to an instant complete stop, impossible martial arts and so on. They don't even try making it look real, and why should they, it's much more entertaining this way. But to show you just how badly they fail when trying, the movie comes complete with an uber fake Italian bad guy. There isn't a thing about this guy that says Italian. His protege is a greatly annoying bimbo small arms expert, the only one besides Frank who has funny physics. This one parades around in her underwear shooting guns, but in bed with the big boss, though she's naked, she covers herself up. Roight. I used to think a good action movie needs a great bad guy, movies like 'Die Hard with a vengeance' have taught us that. But if you see this, all you expect to see is Frank and he's worth the hour and a half all on his own. From the cool black Audi to the supply of shirts and suits right in his trunk.

Oh that reminds me, the music is very cool at times, but it doesn't have the kind of long, powerful sequences like we'd like. Come to think of it, the plot is a bit like 'Man on fire', except it's not.

I didn't think I would say this, but 2 years on (sorry, 2 days on) I have to register my first grievance. I was hit by a bike today. I'm walking on the side walk, there's two guys walking in front of me. Now, I walk faster than most people do, so I have to overtake people all the time. The problem is (as we learnt 2 days ago) that the sidewalks are narrow here, because they decided to accomodate the bikers by giving them their own section of the sidewalk. So I step onto the bike-sidewalk and then I hear a bell from a grandma bike behind me. I step to the right, to let the bike pass me on the left, I can't literally get back on the sidewalk cause the two guys are in the way, so I just walked up on them and expected the grandma to ride along. Next thing I know my right sneaker is hit by a wheel. I feel the impact of a wheel on my new. clean pants. The word "Jesus" is heard behind me. What the hell, I just kept on walking. I turn around, yell "sorry". The lady, 25-30 years of age, is looking at me like I just slapped her. Ok, I admit I pulled that one out of thin air, I've never slapped anyone so I don't know how they react, but let's just say for the sake of argument that it's that look of disbelief actresses put on when they're slapped around in soap operas. I wasn't hurt, my sneaker suffered momentarily but the impact barely broke my gate.

Now let's analyze the situation for a minute. I'm walking on the bike-sidewalk because I'm trying to get past people on the sidewalk. Tell me how often it happens that people walk past other people on the sidewalk, pretty damn often, right? I wasn't trying to do something noone ever has before. I hear a bell behind, I go right, in the direction of the sidewalk, I do not step out into the road, there's traffic. I do not turn around because by the time I turn around, I will already have been hit, it's much quicker to just get out of the way. Now, set aside the logic of me moving right, in the direction of my real place in traffic, the sidewalk, there is another striking fact about this incident. You see, bicycles are not vehicles at the mercy of inertia, they do have steering. Some are even fitted with a mechanism perfectly appropriate for this situation, usually in the form of a lever of some kind, to the rest of us they're called brakes. So cry me a river, lady.

The thing is, if you drive a car and you hit a pedestrian, you're fucked, no matter where you're driving. If you're on the freeway, you can't possibly stop in time cause you're going too fast. But pedestrians never, ever, ever appear on freeways. So the point is moot. Now, in inner cities, with two sidewalks, one for pedestrians, one for bikes, you are forced to step into the bike zone ever so often, when crossing the street, getting around a pile of bikes on the sidewalk which block the way, other people on the sidewalk etc. So it's no great shock that pedestrians find themselves in that zone from time to time. In fact, in places that have no pedestrian sidewalk, that's the only place to walk. See, as a biker since the age of 6, and a fairly reckless one at that, I know that pedestrians deserve biker's attention because bikes go much faster (yes, even the grandma bikes go faster than pedestrians). The rule applies for every faster vehicle over a slower one, the faster has quicker steering, it's up to the faster vehicle to steer clear. And I respect that principle, I don't ram into people when I'm driving or biking or skiing. Sometimes the only way to avoid it is by engaging the brakes.

One disturbing fact: motorized scooters also ride on the bike-sidewalk, those things are capable of doing much more damage considering their weight and velocity. :lazy:

I moved into this student building on Monday. I share the house with 4 other people, all of them international students. It's a big house, all the bedrooms are big, kitchen is huge, but the whole place is very run down, it's actually classified as a monument. Yeah, go figure.

Well anyway, I don't have a lot of experience living outside my family house, I basically lived there for 24 years with one exception of 4 months. When I moved in here, I was a little uneasy about how well I would get along with the others and thinking maybe I would feel awkward and uncomfortable. Well, I haven't really had that. But there are times when I am alone for a long time, like half a day. I may be out shopping or walking around, it doesn't matter, the point is I'm not talking to anyone. In moments like that, I feel a bit bored and locked in in my room. I find that I don't know what I really would like to do in times like that, but it's certainly not whatever I'm currently doing it, I need some change of perspective.

What I realized today is that for moments like that, talking to people is wonderful therapy. It's not because something or other is being discussed, it doesn't matter what the conversation is about, so long as it keeps you engaged and you don't tune out to study the curtains because it's so boring. (Obviously, at this point it requires you to participate actively enough so that the conversation doesn't derail in such a way.) Then, after I chat for a while, half an hour, an hour, the longer the better in fact, and the more people involved the better also, I go back to my room and I feel better suddenly. Like I got what I needed somehow, even though I never knew what that was. I used to have this living at home as well from time to time, but back home you know the people so well that they become a bit neutral in how they affect you, you simply know them inside out. If you move in with people you don't know, it's a lot more dynamic.

Oh I hear you saying it "it took you 4 days to comment on the language?". Good things come to those who wait (or do they, that's a really abitrary expression, it makes no sense). Anywho, time to dive in.

Dutch is like an abused form of Danish. Especially so in speech, but I've noticed that if I can make out a sentence, imagine what it sounds like in speech, then it sounds a little Danish. So to Norwegian it relates as a friend of a friend. In fact, in as much as I can make it out, it makes me want to fix the spelling. One thing that is a serious violation [of what? common sense, clearly] is forgetting to use the verb in a sentence and remembering your mistake right at the end. So some sentences end up like this looking. Ridiculous, isn't it.

One thing that can be amusing is street names and city names. When you hear them spoken, they actually sound kinda cool, like 'Duivendrecht'. But it does make you wonder if they were conceived under the influence of something or other, or if the founders were just very creative.

The phonetics are funny. If you wanna pick up a pack of "Rema boller", they call that 'bol' (I don't even know if that's singular or plural). Only, it's pronounced 'bolh', almost as if you were gagging at the final letter. In fact, while the the words are not terribly different conceptually, they are incredibly obfuscated. 'utydelig' ['unclear'] becomes 'onduidelijk'. It's like they made a point of adding more letters [French, anyone?] and changing the ending. Lingual camouflage?

Get uit.

Today is Day 3 of my time in Utrecht and it hasn't taken quite that long to notice some oddities and recognize certain patterns in how people here ride their bikes. Everyone says there are probably as many bikes as there are people in this country and in Utrecht that seems to be true indeed. The first rule of biking is: everyone shall have the same bike. For whatever reason,there just is no variety, the same exact kind of bike is sold in every store and every bike on the street is one of those. Ok, I have seen the odd mountain bike in a store, but none of those are on the streets anyway. The second rule of biking is that everyone rides a black grandma bike. If your grandma (or any other grandma) rides a bike, what kind of bike do you think it is? Have you seen grandmas on bikes, what kind of bikes were they? The World War 2 models, right? So we agree. Sometimes people paint their bike, but that's rare. What never changes is the class of bike, it's always the slow moving grandma bike. Which brings me to rule three: we all ride at the same pace. It's no wonder really, it would be really inconvenient to do anything else on those bikes, they have no gears, they're heavy, they're old, they're barely fit to roll. And accordingly, everyone rides at the same speed, you will see people speeding occasionally (which is nothing like actually going fast), but a lot of the time people bike in line (because there are lots of bikes here). So whether you're a grandma or Jaap Stam, no cutsies. The advantage is that you will probably never be hit by a bike cause you can see it coming half a mile ahead. Rule four is one I couldn't have known about: bikers own their own lanes in traffic, and they act like they own them. See if you own something and you don't know about it, people will gladly use it knowing you own it and you won't mind either cause you don't know. Over here bikers have their own lanes in between the sidewalk and the road. This effectively reduces pedestrians to 3rd category citizens. Some places have lanes for traffic and for bikes, no sidewalk. Of course the bike lanes look like a normal sidewalk, people walk there but bikers will ring their grandma bells at you for that. Right, why don't pedestrians move to the road instead. While there are more points to discuss and explain about biking in Utrecht, you've heard enough for a day, so let this sink in for now. Here ends our lesson.