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Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Amsterdam

On Sunday my specialisation class (Women, Gender, Development) went to Amsterdam, but we didn't get to see much of the town. The plan was to meet at 2, walk around Amsterdam and then have a potluck dinner at our classmate's apartment. Yes, she lives in Amsterdam and takes the train to The Hague everyday!

But by the time we reached Amsterdam it was 4pm so we decided to have dinner first. Bad move - we only started moving at 6, and with 1.5 hours of daylight left we only made it past her neighbourhood full of wolf-whistling young men and to the river. Amsterdam really is a much prettier city, but for now I still like the cosiness of The Hague. (:


What was fantastic though, was the immense gastronomic spread for dinner. We each planned to bring a small amount of something from our countries (I contributed fried rice), which added up to a lot! Also, when you get a bunch of feminists around, all talked about was how certain men from certain countries behave in ways that are a big culture shock to other women in ISS.

We watched this film for Global Politics today, 'We'. It takes a speech from Arundhati Roy (the sweetest-looking person with the most piercing message!) analysing US hegemony and mashes it up with videos taken from global news channels. The parts on Palestine occupation were terrible, but it was also maybe worse to see our fellow classmate from Palestine cry during the film.

2 comments:

adeline said...

ohmygosh i ♥ arundhati roy! did i send you that email where that day when i saw her at this speech convention thing, was when i had my first epiphany moment about india? i can tooooootally empathize, she's so eloquent and poetic isn't she, like she can turn politics poetic. haha.

sounds like fun, so what did she say about US hegemony?? she's criticised for raising issues but not giving solutions right, so i heard.. is it a totally 'blame US' thing, as usual? ha.

adeline said...

by the way i totally thought the grapes were you. haha. turns out you were fried rice. who'da thought :D