Holland in spring, it is beautiful. After a lot of traveling by train this week, I can easily say that - I did about 700 km. My personal favorite is the countryside of Twente which is all green. Of course, there may be some bias in that opinion. I really enjoyed being here this week, with the beautiful weather and seeing many friends and family. A huge coincidence was to see my good friend Remco, who works in Papua but happened to be in the Netherlands for a conference.

I was planning to leave the country on Monday morning and to fly to Valencia but karma decided otherwise. My US visa needed to be extended and for this, I went back and forth frmo Boekelo to Amsterdam on Monday. The Consulate kept my passport as part of their standard procedure and promised to send it back within three days. It is Saturday now and I do not have a passport, meaning I cannot meet this person in Valencia who I was supposed to meet!
It also means some extra time in the Netherlands and I will probably go to see my family for some extra days. I look forward to fly back to Boston on Wednesday, especially because it seems my boxes will finally arrive this week. No more sleeping on aerobeds! No news from my interview with the Dutch Cancer Funds yet, but I will post the result here when I get it.

I will fly to Amsterdam in only a few hours, o goody! Looking forward to it; seeing my little nephew and niece, other family, be at my brothers birthday and see friends. O, and there is that interview next week to Last week has been a bit crazy, it seems the first research project I have started working on is turning out quite positive. (For the interested: I am analyzing expression profiles of lung adenocarcinoma samples). The analysis of the same dataset was performed simultaneously on five research groups and as it happens, our analysis outperforms all the others. I would not mind at all do continue that analysis but unfortunately I have to fly to the Netherlands for a week! More positive things are going on but I will save that for future blogs. Take care!

YES! First time climbing outside in Massachusetts! On Saturday, Chris (a guy from Enschede I met at the climbing wall) and Martin (a Czech guy from BIDMC) went to a climbing area called the Quincy Quarries.

We left at ten in the morning and have been climbing more or less all day. We concluded that the area has probably been created by mining activities,which makes most of the walls straight or with a slight positive overhang (which are relatively easy to climb). It was not very busy, the weather was very nice and sunny and we got there by public transport. What more can you ask for? In the evening, I went to a party and I spent Sunday to do some shopping and some work. I needed to buy new jeans - when I just arrived and did some washing, I made to mistake to use bleach as detergent and ruined a whole bunch of clothes :(. At work, things have taken off and I am seriously involved in two projects, one project is waiting and I still have not decided what my main focus over here will be. On the party Saturday night I met several friends from last year and a few of them are finishing their postdocs and have started applying for tenure positions - assistant professorships and so on. Good to know there is life after postdoc! On Friday I fly back to the Netherlands and I really look forward to it!

A new light in my life: I bought a Sony PSP. As with my iPod, I find it hard to believe that I have lived so many years without one. With the PSP, I can finally access internet at home again, it plays music, movies and of course, you can play games on it.

So far I only played Fifa 2007, which is a soccer game.Sports are actually a big part of life here. Boston is the home town to one of the nations best baseball teams (the Red Sox). It seems the local soccer team is doing quite well (New England Patriots) and the basket ball team (Boston Celtics) is one of the worst in the States. My guess is that the Red Sox can be compared to Feyenoord. Their traditional arch enemies are the New York Yankees, which then would be Ajax. In analogy with Feyenoord and Ajax, the Yankees frequently win the league while Boston went completely nuts when the Red Sox won in 2003. Baseball is played almost every night so the Sox and the Yankees meet regularly. Interestingly the Yankees presented a new player this week, 44 year old Roger Clemens. Baseball is hardly a sport, really. The guy earns an annual salary of $28.000.000, by the way. Not bad for “hardly a sport”!

It is Saturday and I am at the Broad doing some work. For people in science (read: non-faculty members/professors) it is fairly common to be at work in the weekends, although less common for people in computer science (like me). But I have little other things to do and it is a good idea to try to get a head start over here. I did have other plans today; like trying to buy new lenses somewhere. In America however, everything goes strictly by the rules. One of the rules is, no doctor prescription, no new lenses. OK, fair enough. Yesterday I ran into an example which shows that Americans have a hard time thinking for themselves; we had plans to go bowling somewhere, and the bowling alley turned out to be a place where you can also go out. This means that you have to be able to present some means that you are over 21, otherwise you cannot drink alcohol. I forgot to bring my passport, so I presented my drivers license. I sometimes hope that I look very young, however I do not flatter myself by thinking I look younger than 21. Still, the gorilla at the entrance would not let me. No passport, no entrance. Come on! Think, you fool! We did not go bowling.

So, here I am at the Broad. But then again, blogging is a nice way of procrastinating. The Broad building is very new and everything looks very nice. The workplaces are very small, though, and I read somewhere

that there is already 900 people working here. This is some photos of my desk, and we work with four people in this little cubicle. Newcomers do not get priority (of course) to bigger desks, but our lab manager has told me that she would try to get me a bigger spot.

It is not so bad however, I love sitting next to the huge windows and seeing a lot of sunlight. At the submarine building of the Erasmus, you hardly see any during the day - I really prefer this. My place is the one next to the window, on the left side.