The surroundings are very green and there are some nice hiking trails. There are no street lights around the house, so, during the night it is very dark.

This is the living room (those loudspeakers are good):

This is the kitchen:

Just after arrival in Vancouver, I talked with a hotel employee. He worked for quite some time in Londen and he went to Amsterdam all the time. Shortly after that, I came across the Vancouver Art Museum. Currently, they present an exposition with paintings from the Rijksmuseum. Everywhere (also in Victoria) you can find bill boards with Rembrandt and Vermeer on it.

On my first day in Victoria, I phoned to the lab and I heard ‘goeie morgen’. It appeared that S., a master student who often is in the lab, worked in Leiden for two years. He treated us mentos.

Some days later, someone entered the room and started speaking Dutch with me. One of the professors is dutch.

In the center of Victoria, one can find a carillon that is a gift from the Dutch community in British Columbia. A few blocks further there is a Duch backery.

Yesterday I entered a beer store. The first thing I saw was Heineken.

And ten minutes ago I saw an ING commercial on a Philips television.

That is one month Canada…

It is a quite ‘lonely mountain’. I did not find my way to the top yet. I can imagine one would have a nice view from there. So, that is for the next ride.

When I got off my bike for a minute, this fellow was staring at me:

Saturday I went downtown to buy a clip to protect my trousers from the chain of the bike. The chain is not inside a case. This is the main shopping street of Victoria:

Half of the shops in this street are souvenir shops. Not very exiting.

If you turn around at the same spot the photo above was taken, you see this:

This is the harbour of Victoria. The big building at the left is the Empress Hotel. I was there back in 2006, when the 7th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval was organized there. It is a quite luxurious hotel.

The weather was marvelous. There were some really impressive cirrus clouds. This one in particular:

These clouds are very heigh (c. 10 km) and they consist of ice. This one must have been hundreds of meters long. It shifted across the sky very slowly. After three hours it reached the horizon.

On the beach I read Safranski’s book and this:

I found this magazine in a bookstore. It is a popularized overview of current knowledge of the brain. It covers an interesting range of topics (learning, consciousness, memory, …). It is a bit too positivistic for me, but nevertheless quite interesting.

I am now officially a guest student at Victoria University. That means that I will get a student id card, which gives me some privileges, such as access to sport facilities and a library card at reduced costs. We had to go through some bureaucracy to get this; I had to send a letter with four autographs: supervisor in Victoria, supervisor in the Netherlands, the Department chair, and me. The reply on my application was send to my home address in Vlaardingen, but luckily there was someone there to check my mail.

The other hurray is that I found an organ to play on. This morning I went to the sunday morning service in the nearby Anglican church. It is a nice church – the exterior as well as the interior – with friendly people, and a musical rector. The sound of the organ has a warm and friendly quality. I am currently studying Bach’s canzona. The manual parts I can prepare on the piano in the lab I work in, but to study the pedal part, I really need an organ. So, I am happy to have found one.

Apart from the organ, I also enjoyed the service. The Anglican liturgy is firmly rooted in the tradition of the Western church. I have a preference for traditional liturgy because of the objectivity. Adhering to an age-old tradition frees a church community (and worship leaders) from inventing all kinds of wheels. These liturgical forms have been polished and purified by time.

This is truly awesome. Each dot is a galaxy consisting of billions of stars. This is so immensely huge that it makes the mind stop thinking.

The first hurray is because I have a bike. Last week I applied for a bike in the Spokes bike bursary program and today I received an email that I will get one. The idea is that you get a bike, you put some time and money in maintenance, and afterwards you give it back to Spokes in better condition than you got it, so that they can give it to someone else. The program is entirely run by volunteers. They get old, unwanted, bikes, refurbish them, and provide them to students and staff of the University of Victoria. Thus a bike can have many lives.

I’m really happy with this, because I feel a little ‘trapped’ on the campus, right now. Of course, I can take the bus to Victoria downtown and walk around there, but the bus is a very inflexible way of transportation. A bike is much more flexible. This will enlarge my ‘radius of action’ considerably.

The second hurray is because we have new washing machines. When I first checked the machines, shortly after my arival, I was a bit worried. The machines were quite old and I was not really confident to put my ‘delicate clothes’ in it. But then a note appeared on the door of the laundry room, announcing that the machines would be replaced by new ones. So, I waited for that. Now, they are there. The new machines really are a big improvement.

Vancouver skyline. I took this picture when I was in Vancouver shortly after my arrival in Canada.

In this building, I have my bedroom.

This is my desk at the University

And this is the other side of the room. Some interesting audio equipment Isn’t that nice?

There is a Dutch carillon in Victoria. It was a gift from British Columbia’s Dutch community to honour Canada’s 100th birthday in 1967. Queen Juliana unveiled the cornerstone of the tower.

This is the tower the carillon is in. I did not hear it playing, yet.