Greenhouses and Country Lanes

Today marks the 2 week mark of when we left the U.S. It seems crazy that it's already been 2 weeks. Where has the time gone?! This week was the second full week of classes. The week was marked by mostly cloudy and rainy weather. Thursday was the first sunny day all week. It was odd waking up to the sun when it had been four straight days of clouds and rain.

This week we started our first project. We had to take what we've learned so far in The Netherlands and apply that to a street redesign in Boston. Our group was tasked to create a bike boulevard in Dorchester that places the bikes at a higher priority over the cars. It's interesting to see how different the Dutch design standards are to what we have in America.

We also had two field trips this week! Tuesday we took a bike ride to the countryside east of Delft. We toured a greenhouse, had raw herring for lunch, and went to the beach in the afternoon. Overall it was a pretty great day! And despite the menacing clouds in the photos the rain did hold off all day.

The countryside east of Delft. Canals and farmland.

Canals in the country. We are standing in top of a levee, and behind us is another canal but at a higher elevation. There's a dam between the two bodies of water. We learned that when there is very heavy rain, the government opens this dam here and consciously floods the land. I found that pretty interesting that the farmer must just deal and manage with is the periodic flooding on his land.

Panorama of canal area

I didn't realize they had a lot of greenhouses in The Netherlands, but if you look on the google maps satellite view of the area southwest of The Hague and Delft, all you will see will be the roofs of the greenhouses. The greenhouse we toured was super interesting. The greenhouse is owned by an old man nearing retirement age who was pretty chatty. The field trip was super awesome, as I had never seen the inside of an industrial greenhouse before.

The greenhouse was super neat, we got to see how automated everything is and how many plants they can hold at once.

Video of the plants in motion

Outside of the greenhouse

More greenhouse. Look at that conveyor belt system

So many plants!!

Me Annie and Christine living it up at the greenhouse.

My first attempt at raw herring!

It wasn't that bad. It tastes like the fish inside of sushi.

Beautiful beach near Monster. This beach is much more quiet and undeveloped compared to the beach we were at last week.

Best bike path in the word? I would say so. This bike path just follows the sand dunes for several kilometers. It was one of the most peaceful bike rides I have ever taken. It was so nice just biking along and seeing the ocean on one side and sand dunes on the other.

More Beach! I'm surprised by how nice the beach looks.

And more bike path and sand dunes.

After the field trip we had dinner at a professor's house. We split up into three groups and three different professors all prepared a dinner. I ended up at Jeff's house, where we had fish curry for dinner. It was really good, and it was super nice of Jeff and his family to open their house to all of us. 

Hagelslag, aka chocolate sprinkles on bread for dessert. Not bad!

The view from the rooftop deck of Jeff's apartment. Pretty nice!

One final thing to note. I'm still having trouble finding a place to buy coffee in the morning. Tuesday I spent about 10 minutes looking for a cafe at 8:30 am but a lot of them didn't open until 9:30 or 10. I can't imagine a coffee shop not opening until 10 am in the U.S. Anyways, here has been my solution to this problem. I stocked up on 95 cent cans of iced coffee from the Jumbo (the local grocery store) across the street. I have to get my coffee fix somehow!