Blogs from North Brabant, Netherlands, Europe - page 17

Masters of Hardcore has been labelled by some as the mainstream event of hardcore. To some, it's like Parklife to the electro scene, the Utopia to Australia's rave scene, Taste of Chaos to the emo scene...you get my drift :). It is the biggest event in the world that plays purely hardcore - selling 20,000 tickets each time so it's understandable people feel this way. Just like all big events, it's made a name for itself for a reason - Masters of Hardcore presents the worlds biggest hardcore artists (mostly Dutch & Italian) and spreads them out over 5 arenas, which all have a different theme, well thought out lighting production, incredible sound quality and stage set ups. The controversy with an event such as this is that people complain it's always the same each time ... read more

Eindhoven is called the "city of light" around here because the town is the birthplace of the company Philips Electronics, and in the old days most of the people that lived in the area where I live now where employees of the company, and thousands still are. To celebrate this fact, they have a festival here every year called the Glow festival in which they redo the lights all around town in creative, artistic ways. For example, they turned the street lamps in my street from normal yellow-ish orange to a deep blue color, giving a very cool feeling to the street. They changed the train station's lights completely, and projected images onto some of the bigger buildings. They also built 2 green light cubes that changed patterns in time with music. It was really cool ... read more

The other day it actually snowed here, which really reminded me of Colorado. I never thought I would see snow here, since usually it only rains! Needless to say, the snow didn't last for long, but I took a photo from my balcony of a really great situation... Here's the story: There is a bus stop across the road from my apartment balcony on the 5th floor. All day every day, people wait at the bench and busses come and pick them up. When it was snowing, there was a guy waiting for the bus, by himself. Getting bored, he started to make a snowman on the bench, with a big ball of snow as a base. Then he built a medium-sized ball and set in on top. It was starting to shape up, when he ... read more

I haven't blogged in a few days, and I SWEAR there's a reason! I don't want to bore you with all that mumbo jumbo about "how my classes are going." That being said, the amount of work that we get here is astonishing. Like, truly mind-boggling. I'm talking about reading 4 plays, crafting a presentation on the Greek Chorus, write a paper on the Palestrina Style (whaddya know, daddy-o?), and read 5 chapters of Politeia, of which we haven't seen yet: the teacher was supposed to email us the chapters, but they never arrived. Hmmmm... Kelsey and I did have quite the adventure yesterday, however. We had planned to go to book a train to Paris next week. It's not completely necessary, but it's a good security. Eindhoven is a rather large city in a province ... read more

It has been a true joy these last few days, seeing my friend Ross and his new place in Eindhoven. Ross and his girlfriend Maruja showed me the utmost hospitality and kindness in letting me stay with them for almost a week. I got to tag along as Ross met his parents (all of whom were in Holland the same time I was!) and showed everyone around Amsterdam for two days. I followed Anne and Eric (Ross's stepmom and dad) around as we walked a good chunk of the city, saw the red light district, and took a canal tour that was one of the highlights of the whole trip. It was a cool city but a bit too much for me, and I was relieved when we went to Eindhoven, and to a calmer atmosphere. ... read more