The day began extremely early. We all met in the courtyard at 8:40am. I think this might have been the earliest we have had to meet so far. Once everyone got down there, we all walked to the bus stop to take the bus to the science park. As we stood waiting for the bus, I think I heard someone say that it was 'painfully too early'. With Clifford as our leader, we transferred buses and then finally arrived at the Science Park which houses Sara.
Sara is the home to Amsterdam's super computers and other data storage for both academics and commerical businesses. We were led to a conference room. Shortly after entering the room, he brought to our attention that there was coffee available. So all at once, the group swarmed the coffee in desperation for caffeine. During this time, I watched Jack pour some tea into his coffee and then put some much sugar in it that it didn't matter anymore.
The presentation was umm...interesting...but we all listened to it anxiously awaiting the opportunity to enter the Virtual Reality Cave. The group was split up into two. I was part of the first group. We went into the cave first. We were each presented with a pair of googles in order to get our brains to make sense of what we were seeing. When looking into the googles, each of the eyes saw a slightly different image allowing the brain to percieve depth. Sara's virtual reality studio uses tracking technology to detect the user's movements. While the 'user' wore the glasses, the rest of the group looked at the scene through that person's eyes.
After the cave, we took a tour around the databases. We were taken around and were shown what the internet looks like. The 'tour guide' explained to us the sheer sophitication of their super computers and the amount of data that can be stored at Sara. He also explained to us the super computer. From this, I learned that somewhere in New York, a connection failed limiting our access to the UW network.
After the groups reunited, we were presented with lunch. We were served an option of sandwiches with fruit, and milk or orange juice. I thought lunch was good.
After lunch, we headed back to ISHSS for the prostitution part of the day. In room D, Petra Timmermans was waiting for us. Her lecture was very interesting and informative. This might have been one of my favorite lectures so far because I felt that she wasn't talking at us but interacting with us. After the lecture, we headed over to PIC to get a tour of the Red Light District. Again, we broke up into two groups. We saw Belle. Our tour guide explained to us that often sex workers in the Red Light District work in the same area as others of the same ethnicity because of supply and demand, but in recent years such division is not as clear anymore. Unfortuneately, I wasn't able to take a lot of pictures while I was there, so I hope everything remembers what that part of the day was like. After the tour, we went into a sex worker's rental space. The apartment that we visited was currently unliscensed and not operating. So we looked around and heard about what's it like to rent one of those places. It seemed to me that sex workers in general are like a big family, making sure to care of each other while on the job.
After all of this, we joined back together did a quick group review and headed back to the dorms. A big portion of our group had a BBQ in the courtyard and I joined Shirley, Mirjam and May-Brit for a slightly complicated dinner.
Overall, it was an 'interesting' day!
1 comment:
Yay for Red Hot Chili Peppers...I think my favorite part was Mark trying to ride the bike with his head. I didn't realize you got footage of that!!!! Awesome!
Post a Comment