two days as a tourist (part 1)

But first, finally some confirmation. A few weeks ago I saw swimming along a canal a new type of bird. It was the size of a look, with the head/neck of a heron, and it kept diving and remaining under the water for so long that it was hard to get a good look at it. Provisional research through Wikipedia led me, via the process of elimination, to the tentative conclusion that it was a cormorant. I wasn't happy with the conclusion, because all the pictures I could find on the web didn't have similar body colors/markings (the bird I saw looking black/iridescent blue, with no lighter patches.) Over the last few weeks, I've seen it around various places - both in the canal out front of our place, and in the canal on the way to the office. At one a week and a half ago, we saw it standing out on one of the boats, with its wings splayed, and it stood like that for quite some time, which allowed me to get a picture. Still, I wasn't sure. Then today, it was sitting on one of the boat docks right in front of our porch. I got quite a few pictures, came back in, googled again for "cormorant pictures", and pretty much the first hit was nearly identical to one of the shots I'd just taken. So! New bird for me. Pretty exciting.

Yesterday and Tuesday Jyoti was here again, on her way back to the States from Berlin. She'd mentioned when she was here earlier an interest in seeing Spinoza's house. ( Read more... )

I've always been a big fan of a) finding/seeing ephemera related to people I have some contact with (though I'll admit my contact with Spinoza's work consists in a small portion of my History of Modern Philosophy class as an undergrad of which I remember remarkably little (it was the only philosophy class I took that I didn't like.)) and b) going to places that other people don't go to. (More on that in the next post.) When Joel and I go back to Rijnsburg so that he can see the house, we'll also go to den Haag and see his house where he lived there. I figure we'll make a Spinoza Day out of it.