a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
I’m at Schiphol airport, making my way back to the United States. We will fly all the way across the northern Atlantic and the continental United States, only to stop in Portland, Oregon ! Then on to Seattle. I couldn’t find a direct flight from Amsterdam to Seattle for this Friday.
My mission Thursday afternoon was to make it to the Rijksmuseum. To do that, I had to buy a tram ticket, and figure out the tram line to take.
I made it there with an hour and thirty minutes to spare before they closed. Now I wanted to find the room where Rembrandt’s famous Night Watch painting is. Luckily, the Rijks-museum is not the Louvre in terms of size : not even close. But the gardens and park around it has been renovated very nicely and it all makes for a great space right in the city to stroll around, and eat some frites or stroopwafels*.
*Belgian fries or syrup waffles.
I arrived in Amsterdam Thursday morning at around 11 am. I lucked out when I checked in : KLM offered business class seat upgrades at an 80% discount (which came to only a few hundred dollars).
So it was an easy decision for me to pay the money to sit up front in a big seat. I got a few hours of sleep in on the overnight flight, that way as well.
It’s Wednesday night and I am at Cape Town airport. My time is up, and I have to go back! I will travel back the same way I came, via Amsterdam, with a one-night stay-over. I’m leaving behind a wet and cold Cape Town area. It is still winter here after all, and spring and summer arrives late in this part of the country.
Tuesday was my birthday. I had a lot of stuff to take care of after my mom, my brother and I had gone for a quick birthday lunch. I tried to transfer the two registered cars from my dad’s name to my mom’s name with a pack of forms laboriously filled out by hand and others from the estate executor in hand, but came away unsuccessful. The motor vehicle department in Stellenbosch would not accept my US Passport as proof of identity! Has to be a South African ID document. Whoah, people. I don’t have one anymore. Be reasonable! I’m not stealing my mom’s car and shipping it to the USA.
All that remained at my mom’s house at the end of Monday were paintings on the walls, boxes with documents, and stuff in the back yard.
My brother and I stopped several times while we went through the stuff to check out documents. Some go back 30 years, and the set of Chambers’s Encyclopædia goes back – oh, about a hundred years!
I finally got a quote for shipping three pieces of artwork to Seattle : SAfr R 22,619 (which is US$ 2,310). What! Are they wrapping the items in gold foil? I said. Turned out that is for sending it by airplane, that’s why it’s so expensive.
So we had another appraiser come out and provide a quote based on volume. They fill up a shipping container with items that go to the same city, or at least to the same area, overseas. It will probably be a few hundred dollars for me.
The Company’s Garden (‘Kompanjiestuin’ in Dutch) at the top of Adderley Street in Cape Town, and adjacent to the South African Parliament, takes its name from the Dutch East India Company who first started the garden in 1652. Locals just refer to the area as ‘The Gardens’.
I have never really spent time there, and went there yesterday after dropping my friend Marlien at the airport. The Gardens area is abutted by numerous landmarks, including the lodge house for the slaves who built large parts of the historic city, the present day Houses of Parliament, the Iziko South African Museum and Planetarium, St George’s Cathedral (which is the seat of the Anglican church in South Africa), the National Library of South Africa, the South African National Gallery, the Great Synagogue and Holocaust Centre as well as Tuynhuys, which is used by the President for state events.
It was a gorgeous late winter day here in the Cape Town area today with blue skies and mild temperatures. We did make it out to Bloemendal wine estate for our lunch. The restaurant is not up high enough to provide the panoramic views shown on their home page, though. The chardonnay that I had with my lunch was quite nice. My friend Marlien is visiting as well, and we made it out to the V&A (named for Queen and her son Prince Alfred) Waterfront by late afternoon.
The family plans to have lunch at a wine estate here in the Durbanville area tomorrow. The estate is called Bloemendal, loosely translated to mean ‘valley with flowers’. The estate produces Malbec, Merlot, Pinotage, Shiraz, Sauvignon Blanc, and Shiraz Rose wines. The hills in the area offer beautiful vistas of the surrounding landscapes, and on a clear day Table Mountain and Lion’s Head are visible in the distance.
The Dutch are
not shy to voice their opinions, and certainly not about other countries, either. They were among South Africa’s harshest critics in the apartheid years, and while Nelson Mandela was still in prison. Here is a magazine I spotted in the stands (didn’t buy it, now think I will when I go through there on the way back home). It declares on the front page ‘America is a nasty bloody country* .. *for those who are not millionaires’. In the purple bubble, Mr Maarten opines : ‘Compared to the US, the Netherlands is a paradise’.
I suspect the death penalty in the USA informs this opinion, affordable healthcare that is still not available to all Americans, our expensive college education, the list goes on. I’m curious to see if the article acknowledges that the USA is a force for good in the world as well, though.
Since my mom’s house was sold a few weeks ago, we need to clear everything out of it before the end of the month. There are loose household items and decorations still remaining as well – the most important (read : sentimental) of which are my mom’s paintings on the walls. Some of the artwork date back to when my mom was in art school fifty years ago. So we just feel we have to keep as many of them as we can, in the family. (My mom’s new apartment home can only accommodate a few paintings).
I am going to an international mover tomorrow to have a few paintings shipped to Seattle in the States. They have to be packed carefully, and before shipping, the wood frames and canvases have to be inspected for beetles and insects as well, I’m told. Yikes, I had never thought of that !
(Apologies! This post is late! It was a challenge for me to find an internet connection after my arrival into Cape Town). I just wanted to report that I arrived safely into Cape Town on Monday night. The pictures are from Monday morning at Schiphol airport.
So here I am in Amsterdam : I made it in to the Central railway station at around 3 pm from Schiphol airport for my one night stay in the city. It was cloudy and rainy all afternoon, but for the most part not so rainy that one could not walk around. From what I saw, I believe Amsterdam still easily carries the title of the world’s most liberal city. There are pot shops (marijuana shops) everywhere, and one smells it while walking the streets. People smoke it in restaurants. And even in broad daylight, there were madams advertising themselves in shop front windows (Oh! Am I in the red light district? I guess I am, I thought. No ma’am, thank you ma’am). The city is dirty! It’s actually noted in the newspaper as well. The writer says maybe now that the Rijksmuseum has been renovated and reopened, it can motivate city officials to do a better job of sweeping the streets. (Unfortunately I did not have enough time to make it to the museum).
My bags are packed, almost. I’m leaving for Amsterdam in the late afternoon, to get me to Cape Town, South Africa. It’s winter down there, of course – with the climate somewhat similar to here in Seattle in winter time. (Think cool weather, clouds and drizzly rain). I think Cape Town does have more sunny days than Seattle even in winter, so I do expect to see some sunny weather.
My door bell button was on the fritz after doing duty for some ten years. So : time for a new one.
The choices at the home depot store were somewhat limited, but I settled for the one shown in the picture. ‘A little frilly and fussy on the sides of the little metal plate, not?’ I thought today while I took the picture. But on second thought I think it goes with my old house nice enough !
I am getting an impromptu refresher/ education of the bridges around San Francisco Bay, because I have to. There is the 
famous Golden Gate bridge, of course, and the Bay Bridge – but until now I have not really paid attention to the other bridges that cross San Francisco Bay. I had to drive back our shared rental car to the airport. Those in the know recommended I take the San Mateo bridge route, and that’s what I did. Even though it’s a little farther, there would be less traffic to deal with.
The original bridge, known as the San Francisco Bay Toll-Bridge, opened in 1929 and was then the longest bridge in the world. It reopened in 1967 with a modernized span. So with Google Maps’s voice over directions I used many highways and byways and made it to the airport in good time. But after I had gone through the security check point, I discovered that I left my jacket in the rest room outside the secure area. So off I went, and I did find it – and again through the whole security rigmarole. Oy vey.
I checked in with the field crew again this morning for 3 hrs or so, and around lunch time started to drive back to Walnut Creek. (Walnut Creek is the name of the municipality on the east side of the Bay where our hotel and project office is).
It was a long drive up! .. partly because I couldn’t resist making a brief detour to Monterey, which made me run into rush hour traffic in the San Jose area. Man! California has a lot of traffic, I thought. (Of course, California is not alone in this in the world).
I spent the day out in the field at a natural gas pressure metering and regulating station. These metering stations are placed periodically along natural gas transmission pipelines. The stations allow gas utility companies to monitor, manage, and account for the gas in the pipes as it is transmitted over long distances. Compared to a gas compressor station (with big noisy gas turbines for pressuring the natural gas for transmission), the types equipment found at a metering station are simple and not too complicated.
Natural gas transmission and distribution pipelines are made of steel in diameters of 6 inches to up to 48 inches. Across the United States, there are more than 210 gas pipeline systems that total more than 305,000 miles of interstate and intrastate pipelines.
It turned out to be quite a day of travel for me. After arriving at San Francisco airport, my colleague and I rented a car and drove out to Walnut Creek – on the east side of the Bay. So that allowed me to check in and meet the project’s team members. HOWEVER, there are annual maintenance activities scheduled for a facility in the Paso Robles area, and moi is going to represent the team there tomorrow to observe the work methods and gather information for suggestions as to which improvements could be made to the systems that support the scheduling and execution of the work. So we figured I’d better hit the road sooner rather than later to escape the traffic around San Francisco, and off I went around 2.30 pm. The drive went well, and I pulled into Paso Robles off of US-101 right at about 6.00 pm tonight.
Here I go .. I’m off early in the morning to San Francisco to my new project at the gas utility company. I don’t know what the work place will look like; I have only worked with one of my firm’s team members before, and with none of our client team. So : brave new world for me.