// review this later
§ 34-A/7. No comfort station in the Kingdom may have hot water available.

What you see is a verbatim extract from the Constitution of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. And this is a very instructive example of what happens when code goes unmaintained. Someone wrote this in a draft, meant to change it later, forgot, and it was left as is.

The result is that there is absolutely no hot water in any restroom anywhere. You spent 15 minutes on your bike in the wind and want to defrost your hands? Tough luck. You had a little bike emergency and had to get your hands dirty? Good luck washing off the gunk with cold water.

No matter where you are, no matter what time of year it is, if you want hot water you have to bring it yourself.

The first lectures of the day start at 9am, a difficult hour for all of us. As one of my teachers said "what a time to start". And even if you bike to school and get some of that fresh morning wind air to wake you up, by 9:20 everyone is fighting sleep.

Once the lecture ends, those conquered by fatigue just let gravity work, cross their arms on the desk and let their head find support in the horizontal. The rest, sober enough to get to their feet, stroll out of the room and head for the lounge area.

Quickly two lines form in front of the twin coffee machines. Fortunately, these are very reliable, so people get their fix, but as the Dutch would have it, the cups are really small, so by the time you're halfway through, you're thinking about getting more.

The soda and candy machines see no business at this hour - it's too early for soda and candy. Instead, those not lined up for coffee just linger around the two tables and stakeout the scene, waiting for the worst crowds to clear. Around 9:55 everyone (including the teacher) grabs their drink and heads back into class, where every room is marked with a sign "no eat or drink".

Note: I actually wanted to make the drawing look more like it was drawn by hand, but there are two problems:

• I can't draw.
• I don't have a tablet.

Drawing with the mouse is just awful, so instead I sketched out a pretty lame illustration in inkscape, which is wondeful, but unfortunately I don't know how to use it properly (but even if I did, I have no artistic ability).

No, this isn't the set up to a joke. I'm serious. In Norway, when you go out of town, _any_ town, there's a forest. There's forest everywhere, there's so much forest that Norway is a major exporter of paper goods and wood (yes, you read it correctly, wood).

But here, it's just grasslands and farmland. There's no forests. When Christmas comes knocking, there must be a magnificent shortage of Christmas trees, no?

I take paracetamol about once a month, maybe less often, for headaches. I get headaches more often than that, but I try to do without drugs, cause I'm afraid of depending on them.

A few weeks ago my supply ran out, so I was in Kruidvat for some other goods and I thought I would restock. To my surprise, they have a whole shelf just for paracetamol. They have them in different mixtures (low concentration for kids etc) and quantities. I finally found "the regular one" and I noticed it was a pack of a hundred. Yes, ONE-HUNDRED. Who needs this much paracetamol? It would last me a lifetime. Or if I do take one per month, over 8 years. I'm not sure you're supposed to store drugs for that long.

When I listen to Dutch radio, I realize my instinctive comprehension has come some way since March. There are now quite a few words I associate reasonably well to Norwegian words, without having to check. Even the weird ge- prefix is starting to feel somewhat understandable. "heb gevonden" - "har funnet", yeah I can follow that. But there is still one major problem, the rhrhrhrh throaty 'h' the Dutch love so. It's like a scrambler. When I hear it in a sentence, in a word I don't recognize, it momentarily cuts my concentration, so for the next 200 ms after that, I miss whatever comes. Worse still, when it comes multiple times in quick succession, it might as well be klingon, I completely lose track.

What happens is that when listening in on a foreign language, I'm seeing the letters and words as they are spoken. Not visually, but my mind takes them one by one and puts them together. I can visualize the word and see the letters if I want to, but by default it's enough to just hear it and the mind will figure it out. The first step is to figure out where words end. Then it is visualizing the words and looking them up against all known words (in languages familiar). But when that rhrhrhrh sound comes into a sentence, it's like a system crash, all information is lost and for a while until the system comes back up, I'm unable to collect any data at all.

Those devious Dutch.