I am traveling to collaborate with colleagues in Amsterdam and Dublin. The funding comes from the National Science Foundation. To a program designed to encourage collaboration between European Research Council and the National Science Foundation, I applied for a supplement to an NSF grant. The original grant was on using the Experience Sampling Method to understand the experiences of students in undergraduate computer science and life science classes; the supplement turns the table by introducing the data analytic technique - Bayesian methods - to learners as a tool for them to understand scientific data. The title of the supplement tells some the story of what the focus of the work is: Not only for scientists and engineers: Advancing Bayesian methods for pre-collegiate learners. My department also offered some travel support, for which I am grateful.
One of my favorite parts of my job is having friends and collaborators around the United States and the world. This trip was made special by visits to two friends, one I’ve known for a long time - Leigh Wolf, at University College Dublin, to whom I owe a lot in my professional career, especially my commitment to working in the open, but also how I think about teaching online. I’ve worked with the other friend for nearly a half of a decade to develop the {tidyLPA} R package, Caspar van Lissa, at Utrecht University. I am also meeting a newer colleague, E.J. Wagenmakers, at the University of Amsterdam. So far, I’ve spent some time in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Dublin, Republic of Ireland. It has been a great trip, though I miss my wife and son abundantly and wish they were here (and, I am thankful for my family spending some time with them and for Katie and Jonah spending time with them while I am here).
I am sharing a few first thoughts and reflections on the two cities. This will, in somewhat typical format here on my blog, a loose list of things.
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
- Bikes! So many bikes, ridden by people of all ages
- The canals give the city its character; it truthfully seems like boats are parked like – actually, to a greater extent than! – cars. Bikes and boats, maybe, are my first images of Amsterdam.
- It was crowded; maybe due to the summer
- Riding a bike through parks was fun, through the city was harder than I thought due to not knowing the unwritten rules (I now know cars yield to bikers and walkers, but this confused me initially; bikers also get very close to you without hitting you — closer than I am used to at home)
- It was almost offensive how easy it was to ride the train and bus (“Do I need to buy my bus ticket in advance?” “No, you can just use Apple Pay.”; “I see the train leaves in two minutes; can I make it up to the platform to make this train?” “No, it will leave precisely at 18 minutes after and it will take you about two minutes to walk there; the next one comes in four minutes”)
- I had a lovely dinner at Caspar’s house; this is the best part of traveling, getting to talk about your country and theirs, the minute differences in how things operate; to have someone explain a place from the view of an insider, and, as someone somewhere for the first time, to relax
- The Dutch like to be on time and they like reservations, but they are also laid back and talkative, even chatty like Americans who are traveling can be; t-shirts are common even in professional settings; I was a bit surprised by this after having traveled to Germany last year (Germany was more comprehensively formal, reserved, even hierarchical, though I still loved it and the people I spent time with there)
- Dutch breads aren’t as good as German breads, I think
- Surprisingly, bikes seem to be stolen often
- There are many recent immigrants; the Dutch pride themselves on being deeply tolerant and progressive, and while I sensed an overall extremely high quality of life, I also sensed a subtle set of tiers to society, with recent immigrants having less clout (and financial resources) than those who are not; I found myself sincerely surprised to learn that the Netherlands has had a right-wing led government for more than a decade, and that their social safety net has been somewhat eroded over that time
- It was, overall and so far, a beautiful, open, eye-opening place for me to visit; I will next try to explore outside of Amsterdam on bike
Dublin, the Republic of Ireland
Music! Music comes to mind first, whereas bikes came to mind first for Amsterdam; an experience I will not forget is listening to traditional (“trad”) Irish music in a pub in Ireland: it was so good it almost made me cry. Leigh recorded a video I uploaded here. I got to pat a musician on the back and tell him cheers; it was better than I expected
With Leigh, I went to a concert of the Mary Walloppers; it was, in a word, electric, also traditional and intensive, almost musically violent, and especially seemingly so in the “rough” part of town; another memory I won’t forget
Guinness - it’s good! I had two and I’d have more if they tasted this way in the states; I’ll give it another try when back
Irish people are funny, sharp, and talkative; several times I couldn’t tell if someone was poking fun of me, being friendly, or something else! “Where are you from?” “The U.S.” “Oh, that’s okay, that’s not the worst … actually, yeah, it is.” I heard Irish folks make fun of each other in similarly; I guess it’s called the craik (pronounced “crack”); making fun of friends. I liked it. It was as joking and informal as Germany strict and formal — much more informal than the Netherlands.
The hiking was amazing; along the sea (ocean); waves, seals, cliffs, flowers, castles, rolling mountains that looked a bit like home, beaches
Ireland has a strong contemporary literary culture; literature, poems, non-fiction, too
Great food! Better from a small sample than the Netherlands; lots of great seafood; everything was fresh
Hard to capture; in some ways, far more like the U.S. than the Netherlands and Germany — English is the default, which is not the case in Germany and only the case in some places and contexts in the Netherlands; not so in Ireland, where it seems like the base case is that English will be used; culturally, it feels more American, but also more ineffable; or maybe the U.S. feel more Irish than the U.S. feels Dutch or German?
I noticed several books I picked up and skimmed shared the theme of finding it hard to describe Ireland; why? I don’t know yet, but this reminded me of where I live, where the southern Appalachian mountains are hard to describe, subtler than other places, but rich and complex, and hard to describe in a single and straightforward way
Being with a friend made this so much better - thank you, Leigh; I look forward to returning again with my family!
Maybe more reflections will follow, maybe not.