well, crazy july is behind us, all the pinkness of building a website for young teenage girls fading with it. i css’d while listening to hannah montana, the jonas brothers and taylor swift, corrupting whatever poor sense of musical taste i had before (and dragging down those around me too!). i saw twilight, and then read (practically devoured) the 4 books and a half that stephenie meyer wrote on the series – all in the same week. i’m up to speed on all the cute idols for <16, their schedules and mischiefs. for a whole month, i was a giddy teenager all over again, but i actually had a lot of fun doing the site, and the last 2 weeks were pretty intense. i wish i could slip into this sort of focused working mode more often.

the website is a sort of portal, so it required a big infrastructure: drupal was our “community plumbing” system of choice. drupal can be quite messy and scary, with its panoply of modules, options and versions and it took me some time (months, actually) to get used to it, to motivate myself to learn it. right now, i can say i got over most of my grudges with it… and i even like it, a little. that stuff might not be straightforward, but sure as hell is powerful and i will probably use it again someday, if another big project comes along. for the small stuff, wordpress has my undying loyalty.

on other news, our dealer found us a nice focus station wagon that we’ll officially purchase soon, as soon as we figure out insurances and other details. it’s pretty, and i’m already used to it since my family currently owns 2 of these. we weren’t pushing for a third one, but i think i’m secretly happy it turned out that way :)

it’s a nice car and though it is a little big for us, the size of the trunk comforts me, and i find myself making mental lists of the things we’ll be able to fit there. things like foldable bikes to use in the cities we’ll see, and ski/snowboard equipment. i’ve tried snowboarding once before, in a indoors place in shanghai and loved the feeling of it, so i’m looking forward for new tries (and falls). i think we’ll pick a nice country for that. :)

i take all the pictures of food in the blog on the restaurants we go to for dinner, so today i thought i’d show something different: a typical lunch in the company. here it is:


it’s basically a set of random chinese dishes with meat, fish, vegetables, tofu, etc that everybody shares. the ayi orders it from a small restaurant, and an hour later, the delivery boy brings it around and she screams “chi fan le!” :)

sometimes the dishes are good, sometimes they’re not, but since there’s some variety you can always choose the ones you like best. stuff in heavy sauce doesn’t make it to my dish, but in contrast, the beef strips and the curry chicken are a favorite.

we’re usually 8 people eating, and the bill is a grand total of 80rmb, or 10rmb per person (8 euros total, 1 euro/person). amazing, hein?

at the place where i work, there’s a bunker, inside of which lays the facility that controls the gas in the whole netherlands. live. all of it. i mean, it’s possible to close all the gas entries in all the cities and knock down the country with a few clicks and dos-like commands. and still have an impact on neighbouring countries, since holland has a huge reserve of natural gas and is considered the energy roundabout of europe. as in a science fiction movie.

anyway, the bunker is an autonomous underground control room, built separately from the rest of the building, with very limited access and iris scan entrance. the people working there have received training up to 5 years and know they are being watched by the national secret services.

the air seemed to be reaching it through a dozen of anti-everything filters, it felt clean and fresh, slightly artificial, in a private hospital kind of way, but without the smell. the walls had pictures of 20 years ago, when the team still worked on another location or pictures of the process of building the bunker (and let me assure you, buildings construction in a country below sea level isn’t easy – but that’s material for a whole new entry )

beyond the computers, the network maps in the walls and the darts target, the focused look of some people and all the support facilities around the room, there were a couple of things that made me smile.
first, an aquarium someone brought from a mixing station somewhere, when they didn’t know what to do with it there. it was big, colorful and occupied the center of the control room.
then, on one of the walls, there was a real-time video stream from the garden outside. no sound, just image. people chatting, biking, unaware they were being watched. it gave the workers down there a meter, a view of the weather and the light outside. i found the idea so humane, so nice.

as opposed to the offices upstairs, the aura there was calm, focused. i mean, people smiled at me, the stranger being guided through them as they silently watched the screens, made calls and someone delivered some fresh made coffee.

and at that point, i understood i’ll never be one of them. can you imagine the look on her majesty’s face when someone told her the reason why the netherlands was without gas… was because a dispatcher spilled a cup of coffee on a computer? :|

featuring ana and her workplace, from the bevrijdingsdag (liberation day) festival, in the city park. warm days, blue skies, green grass and music in the air… feels like summer :D

* today i got to work under a snowstorm that lasted for 15 minutes. snow in april? yes, i wouldnt believe it as well but it was true. i hadn’t put my rain trousers on, so i got all soaked. at least i brought capuccino and brazilian music today.
if i can’t have the trousers dry, at least the heart is warm ( of course now there’s hardly a cloud on the sky. )

* in the office, there’s a map on the wall that i’m facing, when i’m at my computer. it shows the netherland’s national and regional gas grid, with its pipeling accross the country, transfer stations and other bits and bytes. it also shows what is called the Groningen gas veld – the biggest gas field in the netherlands- which, you might have guessed, is sitting somewhere under my butt, miles deep down in the ground. scary? well, no. by a lucky quirk of fate, this natural underground storage has enough gas in it to keep the netherlands working (and i mean factories, homes and exports) for at least another 20 years – and that’s a lot, specially if you think it has been being explored since the 70’s.

* i secretely hope they’ll take me to the control room, deep underground, one of these days. or (even more daring) to one of their drilling platforms in the northern sea. that ought to be fun (though not very likely).
meanwhile, i was invited to the company’s birthday party, more than 2 months away. (the dutch plan with their lunch with months of advance. everything must work perfectly)
no one knows where it will be, or what will be done. a well kept secret, with the promise of dinner and party afterwards. looking forward, though slightly scared.

* i read somewhere on the wikipedia quotes that “dutch is not a language, it’s a throat disease”.
i apologise to my dutch friends, but i couldn’t agree more. it hurts to speak (amazing, i can actually say a couple of things by now!) and to hear. making out a few words per phrase is a hard exercise of concentration. today they put a poster on the wall by the koffieautomat, something about a workshop by the ict department. due to the high concentration of technical words (which for me are much easier that the others), i could actually make out what it was about. another victory against the forces of evil!

* it’s been a month i’m working here now. yay to me. i survived the indifference, the unberable language wall, the age gap. i also survived the amount of new information and methods, vb code produced by a non-programmer and windows.
you gotta have a sense of humour, i’ve learned, and you definitely have to have the nerve to make a lot of questions and fuel as many conversations as you can. it doesn’t matter that everybody speaks english – most of the time it’s just too troublesome for them to bother. i can tell they have never been in my shoes.

* last sunday there was an openday in the company, and we were encouraged to bring friends and family to see a photoexhibition they have on the ground floor. it was rather nice. first of all, because i got to show part of my workplace (and i’ve always liked to peek at people’s work place) to my friends, and they got an oportunity to enter the building without having to show their id or other burocracy.
and then, by the exhibition itself. it’s about “golden oldies”, and the beauty in the 3rd age. a lot of wrinkled closeups and old madonna’s statues mixed with funny one person sequences (from waking up to ready-to-go). some rather unexpected works involving not-so-dressed grannies. :| that must have been fun to shoot.

hello.
first of all, thanks for the support, after the previous entry. the first week has passed, despite all my internal whinning and, as usual, after a while, the changes grown on us and one learns how to deal with them. isn’t it? and besides, not all is bad.

for a bit of culture, about the physical place i work on:

The headquarters of G. in Groningen has been designed with “organic” architecture in mind. Alberts & Van Huut created a building, which they see as a “third skin”; their philosophy being that in addition to skin and clothing, buildings provide man with a further layer of protection against the elements from outside.

There are the high-rise office wings with their short hallways leading off the elevator shafts and stairs and the low-rise structures containing the required meeting places and all central services. The central foyer with its lofty, glazed stairwell gives the building the desired focal point.

(from here, and you can check this forum thread for more pictures, or ibn battuta’s (one of rug’s student groups) pictures from an excursion there.)

i have to be honest, i don’t like it all that much from the outside. it stands out of the normal dutch neighbourhoods too much – it’s too high, to different.

but one has to give it some credit – it is amazing.
above all, there’s a certain coherence in it. every item has at least 5 edges on it, from the outside walls to the gardens, the mirrors, the desks, the doorways, the little pole with the elevator buttons, the stairs, the cupboards doors, even the control room deep in the basement has a strange spaceship-shape… and that stairwell is quite something. it ligthens up the whole building, with it’s color blue-green color gradient.

also, because the company can afford it, all the 17 floors are filled with sculptures, paintings and other art installations (one i particularly like, has the structure of a bed and lots of broken eggshells around it).
it’s like working inside a museum, in a way. :D

ps – from my desk, on a 7th floor office, there’s an amazing view over stadspark, with all the snow of the last week :P

ps2 – about the organic architecture style, from the wikipedia:

Theorist David Pearson proposed a list of rules towards the design of an organic architecture. It is known as the Gaia Charter for organic architecture and design. It reads:
“Let the design:
- be inspired by nature and be sustainable, healthy, conserving, and diverse.
- unfold, like an organism, from the seed within.
- exist in the “continuous present” and “begin again and again”.
- follow the flows and be flexible and adaptable.
- satisfy social, physical, and spiritual needs.
- “grow out of the site” and be unique.
- celebrate the spirit of youth, play and surprise.
- express the rhythm of music and the power of dance.”

hello.
after 4 interviews, all more or less positive, i can finally say i have made a decision and i took one of the jobs.
the company is mind-blowing big (the kind of place that comes in postcards, as a city landmark – and i’m not joking!).
i’m scared, i have butterflies in the stomach and i’m happy and excited. all at once.

the “family” here is pretty happy and proud and we celebrated with alheiras and batatas a murro (typically portuguese food) and fried bananas (thai style).

i even got a present! a couple of tiny little fish… so cute! we named them after a not-so-nice italian expression, and then we got our turkish oceanographic biologist in the field to check out wether we can expect babies anytime soon…
“well, it’s complicated to tell”, she explained… and then she stopped and said “hum, wait… one red and one yellow?! that’s galatasaray‘s colors! you have to separate them!” :)