My bike broke down last week (not surprisingly), the axle is actually broken, I didn't notice it before, but eventually it jammed the pedals. So since I have no tools and don't own a garage, I had to take it to the shop. They told me they had to order a new axle, it would take a few days. I come in this morning, the guy says he'll fix it by this afternoon. I come back at 5, it's still not done. Here's the interesting part, guess what he says? "I'm sorry, I forgot about it, it's my fault." Oh good god. Yes, it is your fault and thanks for apologizing, no hard feelings. I said I'd be back in the morning, he even offered me a replacement bike in the meantime. Now it's starting to feel like civilization again.

So I was walking the streets again today, was getting dark when I got home. Starting to know Utrecht better and better now, it's fun to walk some place I haven't seen 403 times already. The housing here is pretty unique, very condensed. In Norway, every house will have a flight of stairs leading up to the entrance, so in effect the ground floor is a meter above the sidewalk. That means you can't look into people's windows, unless you make a special effort to do so. But here there's no room for stairs, so the entrance to a house on the street will be right on the sidewalk, you take one step inside, you're already in the house. And so the ground floor is at the level of the sidewalk, you can look right into people's homes. It's a bit rude, but I'm a curious person, so I look in. I don't stop and stare, but I do look as I walk by. Most people don't want you to look, so they put up curtains and blinds, a lot of windows at street level have matte glass.

When I do look in and I see people in there, most of the time they're watching tv. It's usually their living room facing the street, so they're on the couch, remote in hand and tv set illuminating the room. For some reason, I feel sorry for people when I see them watch tv. I kinda think to myself "that's a shame". I guess that's because most of the time I'm watching tv, I wish I was doing something else. Sometimes I see them at the computer and that I like better. "Maybe he's learning something, maybe he's getting enlightened." Or maybe he's just gaming, but even that is much less passive than watching tv.

One thing that strikes me about these houses is that none of them have mailboxes. They all just have this slot for the mail in the front door. It seems so backward and 1st millennium, doesn't it? It's like in 976, before there was print, you would get messages on stone tablets, the mailman would deliver them through that slot (which seems to be dimensioned exactly for that purpose). Invariably, those mail slots have these special stickers on them. My Dutch is still crap, so I can't read the text, but I assume it's something along the lines of "No advertising without a recipient to this address".

Just as I was getting back, I was walking in the center and I see these three funny looking guys turn into my street and so I ended up walking 30m behind them for a couple of blocks. It was a curious sight cause in Utrecht you don't see a lot of skater/hip-hoper/gang-banger types, and so as a curious person I was watching them. Skater clothes, baseball caps, sagging pants (that's a given), very funny walk. It wasn't until a while later that I realized they were talking Polish to each other, one was saying something about how the other owed him five grand. As we pass this coffeeshop (ie. weed joint), the tall one gestures to some people inside, giving the impression that the proprietor is a buddy. Interestingly, there was a long line inside the coffeeshop a Friday night at 6.30pm. Just as I pass the coffeeshop, I see this girl standing outside the entrance, looking incredibly bored, then her wacky looking male companion steps out of the shop with a little bag and a goofy smile on his face and they walk off.

Choose the correct answer, you may select more than one:

• it is incredibly difficult to find work in Utrecht,
• very few people are employed permanently,
• it is very common to have more than one job,
• very few people live in Utrecht for a long time,
• people are incredibly anxious to work,
• available positions are never filled.

And here comes the answer in form of a question (just like on "Jeopardy").. how do you explain that there are so many job agencies in this town? In a five block radius, I've seen about 15 of them, on one street alone they are literally door-to-door, out of 10-12 stores 7 are job agencies. I've never seen that many places anywhere, all of Holland must be coming here for jobs. When I go past one of those, sometimes I get curious and start looking at the ads (because they always have them in the windows), trying to find jobs that I could do. It's much of the same everywhere; sales person (hell no), secretary, project manager (well if you count college projects :D), various HR-related jobs. I've seen a couple that are more rare; tech support (at the cost of losing my mind, I could do that), network engineer (finally one that's more me, I don't have the experience, but I could prolly pick it up quickly). Anyway, if you're looking for a job, I know where to start..

Ps. the answer to our implicit question, "where did you steal the title from this time?", is - the stationary store guy who ordered the Rollermack 1000 for Mr. Pitt.

• trying to lift off with the flaps on
• sprinting in knee deep water
• walking in quick sand
• drag racing with the hand brake on
• playing tennis at the beach

What else can you think of that approximates the sensation of biking in wind? The whole concept of a vehicle on wheels is that you apply energy to the system, whereby the mechanism propels that into kinetic energy, which yields momentum (the product of velocity and mass). Once momentum is obtained, friction permitting (air resistance included), it will allow the vehicle to travel at constant velocity indefinitely. In ideal conditions, friction is such that a bicycle will slowly decelerate, at a rate of [negative] acceleration a fraction that of the [positive] acceleration, which set it in motion in the first place. In English, that means you pedal hard for 10m and you roll for 60m or 100m. Now, in the case of wind, especially wind hitting you from the front (actually, speaking in terms of aerodynamics, it may be the case that diagonal wind [from the front] is trapped by a greater area of body, which imposes greater friction), the obtained momentum will decrease more rapidly. The result is that the energy applied yields much smaller gain in terms of motion. Now, in a psychological context, this breaks with the assumption that biking is an efficient process, thus causing trauma. See, the beauty of the wheel is that of playing on dynamic friction (which is much smaller than static friction). Ie. it takes more effort to set something in motion than it does to sustain that motion. When you're walking, taking one step will get you exactly one step forward. If you push a big rock forward, it will go forward exactly the distance you push it. But if you push a shopping cart in the supermarket, it will roll on wheels and travel much further than a rock to which you apply the same amount of energy (try this experiment next time you go shopping, it's very instructive!). Let's repeat: dynamic friction. But in conditions of strong wind, the magnitude of dynamic friction approaches the magnitude of static friction, rendering biking no more efficient than walking. Of course, it never actually happens that these two quantities take on the same magnitude, but consider that when walking the energy applied is proportional to your mass. But when biking, you are also moving the bike itself, so it actually takes more energy. When you then experience strong dynamic friction, the benefit of being on a bike falls away, rendering the whole experience very traumatic.

Goddamn flat land. Put up some mountains to trap the wind already!

As an exercise for next week, perhaps you could figure out why stopping at traffic lights at every intersection is greatly traumatic and impeding to the concept of biking?

Finally, if you think all of this theory sounds somewhat familiar, you may suggest the possibility that it is simply high school physics, in which case you would be absolutely correct. And that leads me to a big shout out to Nawaf, who is currently learning all this fascinating material by way of a nice booklet of physics formulae and a calculator to compute all these exciting quantities.

For a nation that prides itself in (I'm going to use this generalization a few more times so deal with it) openness and tolerance, the Dutch sure don't flaunt their life styles. For some reason (usually it's boredom) I've kept count of how many gay and lesbian couples I've seen since I arrived. Being the determined journalist that I'm not, I didn't actually stalk [or interview] anyone to find out whether they really are gay, but if hand holding in public is an acceptable approximation, may that be the qualifier this data is based on. The head count so far is 1 gay (male) couple, 6 lesbian (female) couples. I haven't kept track of how many straight couples I've seen, nevertheless the number of gay (unisex) couples appears to be quite low. So for anyone out there really nervous about coming to Holland because on every street people are "being gay" and doing drugs (I could do a similar work up on that issue), let me reassure you right now. Instead, what will get your blood boiling is putting up with all kinds of rules and regulations these friendly people impose on themselves (and on you).