First days in Utrecht
After spending 3 days in Amsterdam, I checked out at the hostel, took tram #5 to Amsterdam Central Station, and from there the train of the “Nederlandse Spoorwegen” to Utrecht Centraal, a nice 25min ride. We got off the train inside of “Hoog Catharijne”, the largest shopping mall of the Netherlands. Then, after some 10min of walking, we reached the key pickup office of the Utrecht Summer School. Here’s the picture capturing this moment of extreme happiness :)
EDIT (2014-04-29): Now, after walking countless times by that little church in the picture, I still can’t forget how awesome it felt to be in this city for the 1st time.
Then we found out we were lodged in “Cambridgelaan”, inside the University campus. More specifically, “Studentencomplex Cambridgelaan - De Uithof”. This was EXACTLY the place where I dreamed to be accomodated. It’s big, in a perfect location, roomy, and full of nice people. Besides, take a look at the building’s architecture:
I live in a flat with 3 other colleagues from my course - a greek, a german and a venezuelan \o/. We have 4 individual rooms, with wash basins in each room, and we share the kitchen and the bathroom. My room is big, literally two steps away from the kitchen and has direct access to the street! Take a look:
And here is our kitchen, also very well furnished, with a wide Plasma TV with HDMI and VGA inputs, confortable couch, microwave oven, etc.
After unpacking, organizing our stuff and “recognizing” the flat, we went to the supermarket, some 50 steps far from our building :) There we bought our food, but also discovered that 5L of Heineken cost 10 euros… what a dream!
Sunday night we went for a walk around Utrecht’s old city centre. This city is incredibly, hugely BEAUTIFUL. For now you’ll have to believe, for I couldn’t yet take pictures to prove this claim…
Today, finally, the time has come. We started to play with Haskell! First, we were received by Mrs. Geraldine Leebeek, secretary of the Computer Science Department, and by Prof. Dr. Doaitse Swierstra, general manager of the CS Summer School. We had some coffee and later on the first lecture of the course. At 12 o’clock we had our FREE welcome lunch, with all 30 students from around the world. This is our “official” coffee room, where we’ll discuss Haskell in each of the three daily coffee-breaks :)
At 6:00pm, as our first day of lectures was over, the sun started to shine strongly over the Netherlands, and then we had the perfect weather for some pictures, trying to show the beauty of the campus… There it goes, the University Library, the central administration building and the “Basket” bar. Notice the cycle path…
Besides all the modern architecture, the campus surroundings are also pretty amazing. We have several farms and forests around us, several cows, sheep and rabbits :)
So that’s all for now, folks! Tomorrow we’ll have one more day, full of lambda calculus, monads, static typing, type inference, parallel programming and all these cool stuff… Also, we’re having pancakes at sunset in a typical dutch tee house. I hope then to have a lot more of cool pictures to upload for you guys!