Lovely Leiden

This is a small post about a small village called Leiden. I happen to have friends there, so off I went.

Charming

This place is almost too delightful, like a rainbow coloured unicorn made out of candy floss. Canals lined with willow trees, windmills lazily rotating in the distance and young beautiful people gracefully riding their bikes complete with baskets and flowers. Something must be up…

Robots

…What’s up is, everyone is a robot. I have rarely encountered a set of people with a less honed set of social skills (other than the entire nation of Sweden). They have a set of very rigid social interaction rules that have to be abided by, they eat dinner at 6pm and they get excited by jacket potatoes.

ESA

The European Space Agency has its control and technology centre right by here, so off I went for a little tour with my friend who works there. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any spaceships although I’m sure I saw their secret alien testing lab through a window. Most notable however was lunch at the canteen, where I was privy to the employees of such an organisation. Now, most of the top nerds at school in the 90’s and 00’s became dot com millionaire hipsters with polo shirts and microphones and the joke is on me, but there are a few who simply missed the last train to hipsterville and had to stay in geek city forever. These are the ESA employees, and it was like being inside an episode of the Big Bang Theory.

Once I was convinced they were hiding UFOs, I departed to Rotterdam, which is basically the exact opposite of Leiden in every way. The Dutch are known for their variety, right?