Birds and (non)Eclipses

Yeaaaaaah.... it's officially the "chronically tardy blog update" part of the quarter.

That's right, it's exams time again!

I am sooooooo not ready for this.

Again.

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Lessons of the Netherlands #13:
Don't come here if you're freaked out by Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Or watch it here. Or have ornithophobia.

Seriously.

There are regularly massive swarms of birds that literally darken the sky. And that's just outside our apartment window. I've been trying to document this insanity for a couple days but never manage to be home during daylight hours. Sorry about that. I finally managed to get a picture of this (only in Den Haag, for some reason).

Hitchcock's version

Netherlands version (newly uploaded!)

To make it up to you, allow me to introduce you to some of the ridiculously urbanized birds in the Netherlands. Seriously, they do not give a crap about people. At all.

This heron was standing in line for a stroopwaffle with 15 people. No craps were given by the bird. The tourists (you can recognize the tourists. They get excited about the birds), however, were pretty psyched.

The row of sleeping geese ('wild'). 100ft from Den Haag Centraal Station.

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Lesson of the Netherlands #14:

You know how sometimes you go to your car and someone stuck fliers on the windshield? Kind of annoying, mildly inconvenient. That's not a thing in the Netherlands. Instead, people will go to the bike racks (and believe me, there are a lot of bike racks. And they're always full) and staple fliers around the handlebars. Or, if you're Google Glass, put seat covers on every bike on campus.

Every. Bike.

Google (probably) paid someone to walk around TU Delft with an insane amount of bike seat covers and put them on thousands of bikes. Thousands. And that's a conservative estimate.

This was taken around 6:30pm, so the racks were pretty empty. 

I don't even know, man. This is something that would only happen in the Netherlands.

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There was a big solar eclipse on Friday (20 March) and Ev and I were pretty excited to see it. Unfortunately, the weather refused to cooperate and instead we were fogged in with heavy cloud cover all morning during the eclipse. That afternoon, the skies cleared for the first time all week and we had a beautiful sunset.

Not an eclipse, but pretty nonetheless. 

Anyways, I'm just going to go ahead and predict that the updates for the next couple weeks will be chronically tardy (and possibly skipped), since Jesse-kins comes in tomorrow morning and I have exams. Again. Seriously, the quarter system is evil.