Mel's finished work!!

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... well, for this country anyhow. So I'm almost done with Amsterdam, we fly out to Helsinki at the crack of dawn tomorrow.

To backtrack a little, Simon arrived early on Tuesday, which was very exciting, and everything has been much more fun since. Still haven't really found any gluten free food, but I've heard it's quite good in Finland. The conference at the Vrije Universiteit was actually really interesting, great to see a public health focus on physical activity and a whole area I'm not really familiar with. It was also huge! This is a strange city for health promotion though. From afar we hold it up as an exemplar a bit because of all the cycling, but we conveniently forget all the smoking (even in restaurants!), not to mention the motorbike / scooter riders hooning down the bike paths without even helmets.

Touristy things we've done: canal cruise, van Gogh museum (me), windmill (simon), stroll around the redlight district (creepy and sad), heineken museum (closed). Oh, and we went to the conference dinner party to see some middle-aged academics dancing in a central Amsterdam club.

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