We have been up to so much exciting stuff we’ve forgotten to post to this blog, sorry, guys!

Here’s a quick summary of what we’ve done:

• Art and Cafes in Utrecht
• A trip to the beach
• A weeked in Brugge, Belgum
• More lounging, etc in Utrecht (you may think that’s a bad excuse for failing to post. no comment)
• Flu, vomiting, headaches, immobility
• Road trip to Berlin

And since we leave tomorrow, we’re not likely to do a ton more, but we intend to climb the Dom in Utrecht. Which, after uploading photos, I need to set out to go do. Hopefully we’ll get some more detailed stories up here. In the meantime, here’s a description of a special birthday treat I had:

Here’s a little story about a special birthday treat that happened. The day of my birthday was spent in large part driving on a road trip. I was just fine with that seeing as how the trip was to Berlin. Part of the way into Germany the driver got tired of driving and I offered to do some. I was excited to drive on the autobahn and didn’t know when I’d have another opportunity. It was going fine, and it was fun. The car wasn’t thrilled with the speed we were going, but plenty of cars were zipping past me.

I then, in a moment of cheeziness (which I felt allowed to have, as it was my birthday) I requested that my friend who was DJing put on Kraftwerk. Autobahn, naturally. For maybe a minute and a half I was basking in the perfectness of careening along the listing to a song I love driving on its namesake. It was about that long before we hit traffic and came to a dead stop. For the next two hours we were in painfully slow stop and go traffic, utterly obligerating my romantic ideals of the autobahn, to an ironic soundtrack.

The experience, however, was a very good one. When we first hit the traffic I popped the door open and touched the famed highway with my hand. The irony of the situation was glorious, and I completely appreciated it. It was an excellent birthday treat.

**I wrote this post about Robodock and failed to post it here, so this is from 10/5/2006. Sorry about that!**
We had a great time. GREAT! Lots of hard work + lots of goofing off = a tired and content Keely.

I find it hard to fully describe the event. For those of you who’ve been to Burning Man, take that but remove the heat and dust, cut the population to under a thousand artists (and then maybe up to 7000 viewers during the event), add in more technology and a higher amazing art to WTF ratio and remove all people who think that putting on a crazy costume cobbled together at goodwill, downing lots of hallucinogens and having public sex is creative participation and you may have a sense of it. Oh, and take into consideration that if you are an invited artist (or artistic crew) you get in free, and are provided with camping, showers, toilets, food and beverages the whole time you are there. And internet access. And you don’t have to haul your garbage out.

Downsides to the week: garbage everywhere. TONS of waste (disposable cups, plates, etc. Our crew seemed to be among the only people who thought to bring their own coffee mugs along.) A rampant theft problem. SO MUCH RAIN (though, rain on concrete and grass is fine compared to rain on the playa, so we weren’t complaining too much).

There were some incredible art pieces that I saw there, and I didn’t see nearly all of it. Some of my favorites were:

This Robot Drummer

Serpent Mother (by the Flaming Lotus Girls. They have brought Serpent Mother to Burning Man in the past)

The Large Hot Pipe Organ

The Robot Band

These Human Powered Amusement Rides

And, of course, The Powertool Races. Here’s a photo of a tool about to jump through the flaming hoop:

On top of Robodock, I managed to steal a few hours by myself in Amsterdam. I didn’t do anything special, just wandered around aimlessly, stopped for food and yummy beer in a tiny Belgian pub, wandered through the Red Light District, and went back. It was lovely to get away from the crew for a moment (we were almost all sleeping in a yurt together, which was both fun and overwhelming at times), and the loudness the work going on in the warehouses at Robodock.

Also, my last night at Robodock, we wandered over to the Stubnitz. The Stubnitz is a former “freeze and transport” vessel from a fishing fleet. It has been converted into a traveling music and performance venue/bar. It was in port at NDSM-Werf (Robodock’s location) while we were there. It was wild, we wandered down on Thursday night after the festival was over. From our camping area it was difficult to get to because so much of the space between us was fenced off for the festival. We had to shimmy around the edges of fences, walk along the sea-wall, slip between more fences, and generally weave ourselves along the festival area until we could reach the ship.

The Stubnitz is huge:

And the inside is a trip. As one would imagine it has a very old, industrial feel. The best description I’ve heard so far is from one of my companions that night: “this is like something from a William Gibson novel.”

It’s dark, with deep colored lights (blues, purples, reds), with strange welded art pieces and benches for tables that are simple large pipes with a little padding wrapped around them. There’s an opening in the center that looks down into the hull, where there is seating and a stage.

There’s a photoset of our trip over on flickr.

Mike and I have now been in Amsterdam for Robodock for three days. Getting here was an adventure in itself. The thing with going to an arts festival as an artist is that you need to haul all sorts of stuff there with you. We set off for the airport with our rolly-carry-ons each, plus our “personal item,” i.e. shoulder bags with computers and everything else possible stuffed in them. In addition we had four items of checked luggage weighing, in ascending order, 40 lbs, 50 lbs, 52 lbs (which the check-in lady fortunately didn’t notice, the limit being 50), ad 65 lbs. Yeah, not including our four carry-ons, we were traveling with 207 lbs of luggage.

We somehow failed to think about the 1 hour check-in requirement for international flights, probably because we were supposed to fly to San Francisco for a connecting flight and because our flight left at 8:30am. We missed check-in by minutes, and had to spend quite a while trying to finagle another flight. Finally they managed to book us on a direct flight from Seattle, and didn’t charge us for it!

We arrived in Amsterdam shortly before 8am. As I went to go get a SIM card for the phone, the Lone Conspirator went to meet some friends who were arriving at 8:20. Trying to do the SIM card was a disaster, which I won’t go into other than that it ended in both of my credit cards being locked because why on earth would I be in Amsterdam?

Everyone else was hauling lots of heavy luggage too, but we managed to land a large van cab rather than the original plan to take the train to the ferry to Robodock.

We arrived at Robodock, which is at NDSM, an artists squat in an industrial area in the northern part of Amsterdam, hauled the luggage to the camp and then pretty much got to work.

We worked all day, and then got beers and went to bed around 11. I’m not sure how long I was awake, but after 4 hours of sleep before going to the airport, it was very tiring.

And that’s basically what we’ve been doing every day: working. Building tracks for the power tool races, building racers, running around Amsterdam scouting for supplies. I am sore from carrying heavy stuff, and tired as hell, but I’m having a great time. This place is insane, and I will write about that more later, as well as the festival itself once it starts tomorrow evening.