Topic: Travelling

Actually, there IS the 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.

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.

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.

19th International Mass Spectrometry Conference was about to be started on Sunday 16th September. The opening ceremony was scheduled for half pas three in the afternoon. We decided to take the advantage of morning time to see another nice place in Kyoto.

The journey to Japan took us basically one whole day. We set off from Ruzyně airport in Prague at 9 a.m. (Thursday 13th Sep), at Amsterdam-Schiphol we changed for a boeing to Ósaka and lend there at 9 a.m. again (Friday 14th Sep). However, we added seven hours on our watches, so the travelling itself took 16 hours. From Ósaka we moved on to Kyóto by train.