Teak Hoagie

in which Carolyn travels the world and elsewhere

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The Amsterdam office

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These ridiculous little cars were everywhere in Amsterdam Zuid. Seeing two people tooling down the street in one was hilarious, and I was filled with questions: how fast are they? Are they legal for highway driving? Why drive one of these instead of biking when the weather’s nice? (And I have nothing against ridiculous little cars. Big cars are another matter entirely.)

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Fun favorites old and new from the Rijksmuseum: an illustrated 18c condom made of sheep intestine, Willem Bartel van der Kooi’s “Piano Practice Interrupted,” and two incredibly intricate paper cut works.

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Since I’m trying to use Tumblr as my trip photo diary given the awfulness of other social media, I’m going to try to reconstruct my Netherlands trip in September here, two months later. I travelled to Amsterdam for work for 6 days. The hotel where my colleagues and I stayed is the one where John and Yoko had their bed-in, so there were Beatles-themed drinks at the bar. The first night, the weather was balmy and it was not raining!! So Makiko and I drank oude jenever and ate bitterballen at the outdoor bar. We also admired this screaming gull, which is a popular slack emoji for the office #yelling channel.

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The view from my room, September 7, 2025. Never been to Amsterdam Zuid before. Enjoying the quiet, marveling at the apparent prosperity

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If I had to spend most of my birthday at an airport and on a plane, I’m grateful at least that I had a two-seat row where the other seat was empty.

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What a surprise as I sat drinking my coffee in B and Erin’s lovely kitchen

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Last Saturday in Glasgow, a drizzly day. We headed to Pollok Country Park not far from our apartment to take in the Burrell Collection and were surprised also to see some highland cattle, who were not at all bothered by the rain. At the Burrell, a note on Chinese ceramics featuring male-then-female icon, Guanyin. I know it’s tiresome to keep calling attention to how different this is from what the current government of my country wants museums to do and say.

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Ghost and ghoulish stories on a tour that took in allegedly haunted buildings (the hospital across from the necropolis, the Cathedral Hotel) and an assortment of graveyards as we headed into our last weekend in Glasgow.

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Finally visited the interior of Glasgow’s cathedral, “by far” the oldest building in town (begun before 1200, finished about 250 years later). Beautiful wooden ceiling, vast interior. Loved the mural en route of St Mungo, Glasgow’s founder, as a modern-day homeless man talking to a robin.

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lol fuck yeah

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Huzzah, back in Glasgow on Thursday, August 28! There’s food that does not come with a side of chips here

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Last full day in Portpatrick, Wednesday, Aug 27. I walked up the steps to the big Portpatrick Hotel and snapped a couple of photos of the harbor. Mike wasn’t about to do more stair-climbing (or especially stair-descending) so I was on my own. Kind of over the seaside resort vibe and seaside resort food by that point. Anyway, this is officially part of the Southern Upland Way, which starts on the rock in the harbor and continues for another 200+ miles across what is supposed to be fairly unforgiving terrain. I think this was enough of it for me.

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Double rainbow in Portpatrick

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This toad was sitting in the middle of the street. I went up and nudged him with my foot but no response. He moved some to get out of my shadow, though, so I encouraged him over to the side where I hoped he would not be squished by a passing car. (Or she! No idea of the gender of the toad.)

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Another bright day in Portpatrick, so bright in fact that I got sunburned. We went to see the ruins of Dunskey Castle, which we reached via a walk through the nearby caravan park (what we would call a trailer park in the US, and we did in fact see a trailer-trash couple sound asleep in lawn chairs after what appeared to be a lunchtime drinks party). The path out to the castle was a little muddy and rocky, and Mike was feeling dizzy, as he frequently does. He slipped and fell once on the path to enter the castle (not, fortunately, over the cliff) and several more times as we navigated stairs without a railing along the Coastal Way down to the harbor on the return loop. The castle itself was intriguing but it was a rather harrowing day.

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Snapped a photo of the huge quantities of berries along the footpath to the Portpatrick harbor and consulted with the woman at the post office/general store about whether they were indeed blackberries. She called them brambles but confirmed they were not only edible but tasty. I picked a liter on an un-Scottishly sunny afternoon.