Oranje Boven!
I'm going to Stanford! :D It's kind of surreal to have actually settled on one option after eight months of nailbiting indecision, but it's also good to be going somewhere, and such a sweet school at that. I demand a reunion of California TASPers at some point this year - I count 5 of us now, not to mention the possibility Cornell/Stl/Texas TASPers matriculating in the Golden State.
Saturday was the Koninginnedag (Queen's Day) celebration in the Hague. Queen's Day, besides its traditional associations with the wearing of the color orange and the drinking of much beer (do they still have this in West Michigan, Emma?), is the only day of the year that garage sales are legal in Holland, and it was auspiciously timed to coincide with my family's big pre-moving drive. My mom asked me if we could sell my TASP textbooks - frankly, I have hardly opened them since TASP. but I couldn't bear to part with Musicking, the Woody Guthrie book, the Cook, or even Derek's book, and saved them all out from the for sale pile. The power of nostalgia. *sighs* Though I didn't mind parting with the DeNora (although I don't think anyone bought it).
In association with Queen's Day garage sales, kids with musical instruments will often set up along the street and play for money in traditional subway-performer style. My siblings and I, who play some old-time and bluegrass numbers together as a string quartet, took advantage of this tradition and made quite a haul. A kindly Dutch amateur photographer snapped some photos of us and posted them online with a bunch of other Queen's Day pictures at http://www.makeaphoto.com/fred2006.htm; just click on the orange hippo and go to page 4 to see them.
Groetjes,
Sam
P.S. Chris? Nestor? ???
posted by Sam at 5:30 AM
11 Comments:
Koninginnedag looks awesome, as does the string quartet you and your siblings have going there.
Woohoo for finally settling on a school!
Stanford is amazing but... why don't you want to be in the North-East?
:(
I haven't looked at the TASP books. Maybe when I have spare time in the summer, I'll read them.
Eh, who am I kidding? That's right: no one.
8:14 AM, May 02, 2006
I DO want to be in the Northeast in a lot of ways, and if Stanford weren't so good, I probably would be. Harvard was very tempting, and one of the main reasons the decision got delayed as it did was because we appealed my financial aid package at Harvard to see if they would match Stanford. They didn't, and in the end it was a difference of 25,000 dollars in debt between the two. Did I like Harvard better? Maybe a bit. Was that bit worth $25,000 I don't have? No.
I'm bummed to be missing out on the TASPer community back East, but at least I'll be a lot closer to everybody than I am now. :)
10:02 AM, May 02, 2006
By the way, you had English Paper 1 as well today, right? Do you do standard level or higher? Actually... are we even allowed to talk about it yet? Eh, I guess so.
I hear the standard paper had some poem about a rug. Sounds intriguing.
10:05 AM, May 02, 2006
We're not supposed to discuss the contents of the paper for 24 hours (although this rule gets flaunted flagrantly). I do Higher - thank goodness, I need two hours to write a decent essay. As it is, I didn't have time to slap on my concluding sentence, but the essay was pretty good, so I'm happy.
11:26 AM, May 02, 2006
The fish poem!?
1:02 PM, May 02, 2006
Awwww, you guys are so cute! Hmm, that's one tradition that didn't make it over the ocean. Seems unfortunate, though, that it didn't.
3:23 PM, May 02, 2006
dude, that's hot.
5:33 PM, May 02, 2006
Excellent choice, you're going to tear it up over there. (Besides, Harvard is old and cold, and Stanford is oh so cool.)
7:09 PM, May 02, 2006
OK, Jason, it's been about 24 hours and 25 minutes, so . . .
Yes! The fish poem! It was a good one, I thought. I claimed that there were no actual fish involved in the scene described (although others at my school interpreted it differently).
5:28 AM, May 03, 2006
If they weren't fish, then what were they? I mean, I said that the whole thing was a conceit linking men to fish, and objectifiying female beauty by comparing the woman in the tea garden to a pretty stone on the sea floor. So yeah, there were fish in my interpretation.
How was math paper 1? I thought it was mostly straightforward... but apparently it wreaked absolute HAVOC among my classmates. Seriously, you should have seen the trembling, cursing, crying, confused masses that raged out of the room after that exam. I'm not even exaggerating.
4:29 PM, May 03, 2006
Yeah, I said the same on the English essay. And Math P1 wasn't too hard either, although the permutations/combinations question (number 19)was sneaky. I generally have more problems finishing all the questions than getting them right, and I had barely finished when they called time. Although I forgot to add the +c at the end of the integration by parts . . . :P
10:15 AM, May 04, 2006
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