PSV Eindhoven vs Roda JCOn Saturday, 4 February, I watched a live football game : PSV Eindhoven vs. Roda JC. It was an amazing experience to be at the Philips stadium, and the match was absolutely awesome.
Inside the Philips Stadium. PSV player Beasley is being stretchered off the pitch with an "injury". Unfortunately this time it was for real. Usually football players can double up as Oscar winning actors.
I managed to get tickets for the game thanks to a guy I found through the website
www.meetin.org. There was a group of 14 people coming in from Amsterdam for the game, and the organizer, Arie, is an ardent PSV fan. He organized everything superbly, from tickets, to printouts of the team roster (with details of the individual players), to the histories of the clubs and also the rules of football for those who didn't know! He also taught us classic PSV fan chants and also how to count down to zero in Dutch. He is a really loud guy, and while walking to the stadium, he would often break into a PSV fan chant. Initially I was a bit apprehensive --you don't do such things in the Netherlands!-- but eventually I got around and joined in. It was great fun to sing loudly in the streets, and I did not even have a drop of alcohol in me!!
The PSV stadium is lovely. I loved its looks from the outside, and I liked it even better from the inside. It is so organized, and 32,000 people can get inside and to their seats less than 30 minutes, without any pushing or shoving. It took us 10 minutes from the time we made it to the gate to the time we were on our seats! That is Dutch efficiency for you! Also, even though we had the cheapest tickets, we got an awesome view of the pitch and I could make out the individual players. During the warm up, there was nice music filling the stadium. edit: It was "Love Generation" by Bob Sinclair and "The Final Countdown" by Police.
The match itself was outstanding. Roda JC scored 2 goals in the first 5 minutes and the stadium was pin drop silent. Then 7 minutes into the game, PSV scored from a penalty. The scorer was Jan van Venegoor of Hesselink. Yes that is his full name! And they say Indian names are strange! Check the scorecard after 8 minutes :
All the makings of a classic!
The rest of the game saw PSV launch a spirited fight back. Roda defended well, but PSV were just too good, and with each attack they got even closer. It was wonderful to watch such fast paced, accurate football. They made it look so easy. PSV finally got their goals in the second half and the match finished a tight 3-2 to PSV. The stadium went absolutely crazy when the third PSV goal went in. I have never seen such animation and noise since I have been the Netherlands.
All in all it was a great experience. I was in the company of some very nice and friendly people. Curiously a around half of the company were from the US. Who said the Americans don't like 'soccer' ?
A Delicious Brunch
On Sunday, 5 February, Wim Feijen hosted a get together of the ETAC members, past and present. It was quite a large event, hosted at the "Golden Tulip Hotel" in a neighboring town of Geldrop. There were 26 attendees, including Jeremy and me. I was looking forward to it because I would get to meet many people whose work I greatly admire.
The plan was for Mrs. Dijkstra to pick Jeremy and me up at my spacebox and drive us to Wim's house where we would have coffee and cookies. Jeremy was scheduled to perform Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata for the chello and piano alongwith Maarten Boasson, who is a chello player and an ex-ETACer. So meeting them earlier at Wim's house would give them an opportunity for last minute practice. After spending time at Wim's house, we would all make for the Hotel together.
I had some delicious cookies and truffles at Wim's house, and, while Jeremy and Martin was practicing, I had a nice chat with Mrs. Dijkstra about her forthcoming visit to Mumbai and also about her experiences during World War II. The stories were quite shocking and at the end I was not surprised to learn that she still preferred not to speak German. It was quite scary time and it is fascinating to see how the Netherlands has managed to rebuild itself over the last fifty years. Here is a candid picture of us talking, picture courtesy Wim Feijen :
Mrs. Dijkstra and me. Look at those delicious cookies in the foreground! :-)
Once at the hotel, I noticed that, in the corner of the reception room, there was a table on which there were a couple of photo albums containing photos from the ETAC sessions of the past. There was also a collage of pictures of the ETAC through the years. A picture of Jeremy and me was also part of the collage! That drove the message home that we were part of a unique tradition, and I felt nice about it.
I met Rutger Dijkstra once more and we spoke briefly about his current work. I really enjoyed the food. It was a sumptuous spread. Check out the starters :
Yummy!
When it was time for lunch, I sat at a particularly special table. Here is a picture of it :
My lunch table : The empty seat at the front is mine. On the left, from front to back: Anne Kaldewaij, Ineke van Steenwijk, Lex Bijlsma. Opposite head : Jaap van der Woude. On the right, from back to front : Henny van de Woude, Rutger Dijkstra, Wim Feijen. (Wim joined us for the desserts, his seat was previously occupied by Erna Kaldewaij).
I had an amazing conversation with Anne Kaldewaij throughout the lunch. He is the author of "Programming: The Derivation of Algorithms", which is a book I am studying and which I find to be amongst the best texts on program derivation. He shared anecdotes about the ETAC and EWD with me. He told me about some of his other un-published work which may be of interest to me, particularly the calculational design of data structures, which is a very important part of programming. His experiences with teaching our style of programming and about why it has not caught on bore out Jeremy and my ideas on the issue.
Anne promised to send me his other work by snail mail, and sure enough, on Tuesday, I got a package with several papers and programming exercises with solutions. He said more would follow soon! The people here are so nice and helpful!
I also asked Rutger about life in Groningen, where he lives. He shared a funny joke about the Dutch people in the area. Here is the joke: "A farmer in Groningen hired a helping hand for the farm. Every day the helping hand would come at the prescribed time, do the work and leave. This happened for several months until one day the helping hand came to work on a motorbike instead of on foot. They set to work as normal, and at the end of the day the farmer said to the helping hand: 'Nice Bike', upon which the helping hand retorted 'I quit'. The puzzled farmer asked why he would do this, upon which the helping hand said 'I do not come here to talk about bikes all day' . " . They are people of very few words. I found the episode quite funny!
Wim also gave away some ETAC memorabilia to the more regular members. These included the ETAC coffee pot which has been going strong for 31 years of the ETAC's existence. Also the coffee measuring cup was given away along with small mementos. A few people spoke about the ETAC, but it was in Dutch so I did not understand it. Mrs. Dijkstra spoke in English (just for Jeremy and me!) and spoke very nicely too. I have a copy of her speech.
All in all it was a memorable day and certainly very profitable in terms of my education -- thanks to Anne, I now have so many problems to solve that I don't think I will fall short for a couple of years! Thanks once again to Wim and Rina Feijen for hosting us.
Odds and Ends
I also managed to get myself a guitar this week. I borrowed it Jeremy's friend Igor Segers. The two of them play piano duets at the music school and I sat in on one of their practice sessions the week before last. During the course of our conversation Igor learned that I was interested in learning the guitar, and boom! he said he could spare his! It is amazing how things work out. Here is a picture of the instrument :
I finally got myself a bike, so now I can travel around Dutch style. It sure is very convenient around here, with all the specially marked bike paths etc.
that's all for this week. It has been one of the more eventful ones to date, and I still haven't recounted all the stories. Amongst the things I have not described are my trip to Amsterdam to participate in the couchsurfing meeting, my first experience with couchsurfing, nor the details of my plans to participate in the Cologne carnival from Feb 22 to Feb 26. Well, I do like writing, but I cannot write so much at a stretch!
Enjoy!
Read the rest..
