amsterdam

today was conference day 2. the talks were a lot more interesting and we did a tutorial on limit cycles which was pretty cool. in the afternoon they took us to amsterdam and we got a tour of the gait lab facilities at vu and the hospital. the lab at vu actually had a really wide treadmill that you could skate on with rollerblades. they also had a leg prosthesis for someone who didn't have an amputation. i'll post pictures later though as its getting kind of late here now and i have to be up early for more conference fun.

after the gait lab tours, they took us to dinner at hole in the wall irish pub. they fit all 100 of us in hole in the wall, which was pretty cool. after dinner a bunch of us walked around the city for awhile. as one of the grad students from delft was our guide, i got to see non-touristy parts of the city which was cool. i like amsterdam. aside from the ridiculous amounts of rain and overcast skies, i would live here. i saw lots of canals and a beautiful garden in the middle of one of the buildings. i saw lots of old churches and buildings that were leaning in odd directions as their foundations rotted, causing them to sink. then our guide brought us to the touristy part of the city. you could smell the weed immediately. i'm rather naive about things like this, but i didn't know it was possible to make a whole section of a city smell like that. well, its possible. we didn't walk through the redlight district, but i don't feel like i'm missing something by not doing so. finally, i learned that the city name (amsterdam) is because of the dam built on the amstel river (which is now at the city center). likewise, rotterdam is named because of a dam built on the rotter river. until tomorrow!