Amsterdam diary

I've been preoccupied with improving the algorithm which calculates averages and standard deviations in the occupational psychologist's flagship program over the past few days. I didn't measure how long the calculation took before I started making improvements, but it was around 10 minutes per scale. After some improvements, I finally timed how long one scale took - about 4.5 minutes. After a few simple improvements (basically moving sql queries out of a loop), it now takes about 280 milliseconds for one scale - 1000 times faster! Isn't it good that I have a dog - I can think about algorithms whilst walking her.

Of course, one could argue that had I written the program correctly at the beginning, it would have taken 280 milliseconds then. Well, yes, that's true; I did try in the original version to have a certain amount of optimisation, but I failed, and so opted to write a simple, but slow, version that worked. I thought that the program would be a one-off and so didn't invest too much time in writing. As it happens, more and more scales have been added for which the calculation has been run, and so the two hours (or so) which I spent today were a good investment.

Now back to Amsterdam. For incidental reasons, we arrived in Amsterdam last week, on 30 April. As any Nederlander will know, this is "Queen's Day", an equivalent to Israel's Independence Day (60th celebrated today) - or so I thought. The city centre was closed to traffic so we had been advised to take a train to Amsterdam Sloterdijk station, and from there a taxi to our apartment. Once ensconsed, our daughter took us by tram to Vonder Park, and from there we wandered around by foot.

The park reminded me slightly of Cropredy: crowds of young people drinking, listening to music and wearing silly hats or costumes which they would never dream of wearing any other day of the week. Amsterdam has a curious tradition of public urinals in full view; these were either in constant use or else jammed by beer cans. Another curious tradition is that instead of putting beer cans and other rubbish into bags or bins, people were just dropping their litter onto the streets. I have never seen such filth before, and I hope never again. We walked from the park to the funfair in Dam Square, and the streets became more and more crowded.

At Dam Square, we bought provisions in a supermarket, walked back to the general area of Vonder Park, and caught a tram back to our flat.

The next day we went on the 'water land' tour of Volendam and Marken. We started off by buying tickets at Amsterdam Centraal station, only to discover that the bus drivers were striking: whilst they were driving their buses according to the timetable, they weren't charging people for the rides. In other words, we needn't have bought the tickets (not that they cost much). On the way to the station, we noticed how clean the streets were; the cleaners must have been working all night in order to dispose of the debris.

Volendam was pretty, but reminded me of an English seaside resort (albeit without the beach). Nice but not wonderful. Whilst there, we visited a "factory" which makes clogs and cheese; quite interesting. After having fun with the buses, we eventually arrived at Marken. At first it began to rain, so we took refuge in their folk-lore museum, which appeared just at the right time. From there we walked on to the harbour, where we managed to find a restaurant prepared to serve us (all the restaurants were full - at 4pm!). After lunch, the sun came out, and everything looked much better.

On our second day, we went to Keukenhof gardens. I'm not much of a flower person, but this place simply took my breath away. It's only open for a few months each year, and fortunately we were there during those months. Stupendous.

After coming back to Amsterdam, we strolled around the Red Light district, which was rather less titillating (optional pun) than I had been led to believe. We had hot chocolate with whipped cream (an Amsterdam favourite) sitting by a canal, when my son phoned to say that Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team had managed to win their semi-final game (see previous post).

On the way to Keukenhof, we had seen the crowds queuing to enter the Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam, and so decided not to spend our final day in the museums. We decided to spend the day in Delft, which turned out to be an inspired decision. My daughter had told us that she had never seen a ticket inspector on a Dutch train and that we needn't buy tickets, but such habits come hard. We hadn't been on the train more than five minutes before a ticket inspector did come round....

Touristy Delft is fairly small and can be covered fairly quickly. After a light Italian lunch, we set off for the Royal Delft factory, which is at the southern end of town. What we thought would be a swift walk turned into a long hike. The factory itself is interesting, but not overly so. I noticed that there was a Delft town tour train (?) which would call at the factory about an hour after our arrival, so we paced ourselves accordingly in order to avail ourselves of this service which would take us back into town.

Once there, I installed myself in a cafe in the lovely town square and ordered cold chocolate milk and applecake, whilst my wife went off to the market and my daughter to visit the churches. The service was abominable; it took maybe twenty minutes for my cake to arrive, ten minutes to eat, and maybe another twenty minutes for the bill to arrive. Just as it did, my wife turned up, and I ordered tea and cake for her. Eventually these arrived, and after she had finished, we began to wait for our waitress in order to pay the bill. We waited ... and waited ... and waited ... and no waitress. I think that she finished her shift at 6pm, and her replacement was unaware of us. At least we had refreshment; a couple at a nearby table arrived and waited (and waited, etc) for someone to come and take their order. My daughter said that we could get up and leave without paying (she obviously has taken to heart certain Dutch habits), but we went to the cash register and paid.

Four days in Amsterdam and its environs went quite quickly, and once we had got over the daily argument of what to do, we enjoyed ourselves very much.