Actually, there IS a city of Delft... A city of the Netherlands, located in the province of South Holland roughly between the cities of Den Haag and Rotterdam. However, the description mentioned above tends to be more apt. Since when you arrive to the center of Delft, you got the feeling as being in a fairy tale. You feel as getting centuries back somehow expecting Johannes Vermeer or Antoni van Leeuwenhoek coming out of the small houses any moment later.

Every year on 30th April, the whole Netherlands is plunged into a orange sea; it is a day of celebration of Queen's birthday (Koninginnedag). Well, Queen Beatrix was actually born on 31st of January, but the celebrations are rescheduled on purpose to increase the possibility of nice wheater. The last day of April is therefore a unique opportunity to have a proper fun in the streets for otherwise decent Dutch people.

That is a random selection of some of the words that exactly characterize my first spring in Asmterdam and at AMOLF. I spent two weeks in the Czech Republic earlier during April. I managed to visit the Faculty of Pharmacy in Hradec Kralove and to make all the arrangements necessary for the final moving to The Netherlands. I met also many of my friends, which was highly appreciated. Additionally I took part in a two-day course on MATLAB programming. Why? Let me explain in the following article.

What you can read about Keukenhof when you visit the official website is, that it is „the most beautiful open spring garden in the world.“ It is open through mid-March to mid-May. This year the timing of the blossoming is shifted due to an unusually long winter. We started to plan our visit to Keukenhof in the middle of March and by that time we had no idea then on 20th April the tulips will not be ready yet.

The movie Alois Nebel, based on the graphic novel by Jaroslav Rudiš and Jaromír 99, became the Winner of the Grand Prix HAFF feature films in 2012 on the Holland Animation Film Festival in Utrecht. A year later, the authors returned to the festival: Jaroslav Rudiš was about to read a short story about Alois Nebel and Jaromir 99 came with his band Priessnitz to perform a live concert show.

Alright, welcome at the second and simultaneously final part of the report on COST workshop, which took place in Vienna first week in February. I will save your time and simply skip any lengthy boring recapitulation by beginning where I stopped in the previous post. That is on Friday morning. (Jackson should get some inspiration here, as it is not polite to let the audience wait for the next part for a long time...)

I was back at AMOLF’s labs for only one full week after getting back from Switzerland when on Tuesday evening (5th Feb) I was packing my suitcase for yet another trip. I was invited to give a small talk on my STSM on a COST workshop, taking place at Technische Universität Wien in Vienna, Austria. 
 

If someone had told me couple of months ago that I would have been skiing with Dutch guys in Swiss alps, I would have seriously doubted it. Yet, it just happened! And as I find myself being back in Amsterdam, I can officially claim previous five days the best holidays I had in years and one of the best I have had ever … which actually makes it far the most genius business trip ever.

It's been a while since I got back from Novartis campus. In previous posts I was writing about the scientific mission, its purposes and its course. After this experience, I can compare Academia, research Institute and Pharmaceutical company approaches to the research and science. However, it has to be emphasized, that in the following article I am comparing the Czech Academia, Dutch Institute and Swiss company, as the national background has a huge impact on the final working feelings. So here we go: Charles University, AMOLF and Novartis.

So finally the tetracycline project can be claimed finished. The editorial board of Journal of Chromatography B has accepted our article! :-) The full name of the paper is "Fast and sensitive UHPLC methods with fluorescence and tandem mass spectrometry detection for the determination of tetracycline antibiotics in surface waters".