261: Public Transit is the pinnacle of human achievement.
That might seem a little extreme, and it is a little bit of a silly position, if you had me seriously declare a single thing the most impressive or incredible human achievement it's definitely either space-faring or advanced medicine, BUT I think there's an argument to be made that Public Transit belongs in that camp, and I would be happy to champion it.
Anyone who's talked to me about just about anything for just about any amount of time knows how much I love public transit, especially train systems. Well, if that conversation has gone on with that topic for any further amount of time, I will have mentioned Amsterdam and The Netherlands as one of my very favorite places, because of those things.
Well, I've now spent a day and some in that very place, and I love it here.
Today was a grand adventure, but really only a couple destinations. We started in the Van Gogh museum, because my mom and I both love art museums, and I've already spent a few day's worth in the Rijksmuseum, so we wanted to go somewhere new. The Van Gogh museum was really cool, and we were able to see the entire thing in a few hours, which worked great. I'm never very good at talking about art, I certainly can't put into words how and why I like the art that I do, I just like it. Van Gogh's works are among those I quite like, and the museum also had some of his contemporaries I also love (Mondrian, Monet), it was really neat.
The other adventure today was to TU Delft (that's Technical University), which is a school ~an hour's train ride from Amsterdam, and one that I had been seriously considering for grad school. I haven't put a ton of thought or work into that decision (later me's problem), but TU Delft is definitely up there in the possibilities ranking. It was such a cool place, and I loved walking around it. It wasn't huge, as it is just an engineering school, but even just wandering around, it seemed like somewhere I could easily spend a ton of time (the library was awesome), and their electrical masters focuses heavily on renewable energy, which is exactly what I want to do.
We got everywhere today with just public transit, and it was beautiful. Amsterdam Centraal is a short walk from the hotel (10-15 minutes), and then we got on the train there, took it to Delft, took a bus from the station to the University itself, walked around, took the bus back to the same station, and then took the train back to Amsterdam, and we weren't waiting longer than 15 minutes at any of those points for the relevant transit to arrive and take us away. It was incredibly well-polished, the tickets were easy, the navigation was a little difficult because much of it was in Dutch, but it was doable, and the trains and busses were clean and smooth.
I can't wait to take the longer train tomorrow (to Stuttgart), I love just watching the world roll past out the window, and trains are arguably the best way to do that.
That train is at 8 AM tomorrow though, so I'm going to schedule this one (it's only like 3PM Pacific as I write this) and then I'm going to get some sleep! I'm super tired again, still recovering from jet lag, and we did a lot of walkin and movin today, so I'm beat.