My fears were very well realized last night when my train from Arnhem to Duisburg reached the destination late and the connecting train has already left. However the possbile connection problems had been already announced on the train itself and some hidden voice from train speakers had advised to contact the Information desk at Duisburg in case of any problems. It turns out that the advice given was excellent.  I was very readily given a room to stay in a nearby hotel and a ticket for the morning. It turns out my connecting train was the last one out of the station.

I really did not have to spend a very cold night on the station bench after well. I got my first taste of the 'well-organized' method of the Germans. Even though it was a train station hotel, the room was pretty good and there was a PC at the reception with free Internet which I used eagerly to update my facebok status. My train for Bremen was to leave at 7:47. The breakfast was supposed to start at 6:30 well in time for me to have a warm hearty meal before I caught my train. The reason I used supposition in the last sentence is that I woke up at 7:30 and had to miss my breakfast but thankfully not my train. I could not really blame myself for sleeping longer in that warm bed as the wind blew outside and it snowed all night. But my stomach is not at all happy about the eventuality of having to eat dry buscuits that I had brought and drink cold water from a PET bottle.

The train is now well on it's way to Bremen. I can see steeple roofed church towers and the sloped roofs of houses grouped around the church, all covered in snow. The train tracks and the trains which seem to have stayed overnight at the stations we are passing are all layered in white. The snow is not that thick but the scenery moving outside the large windows of this DuetchBahn ICE train could just as well be from any Christmas Card. If there was sled running alongside the train being pulled by Reindeers with a laughing Santa holding the reins, the setting would be perfect for Christmas in November.

The Dutch and the German people I have talked to say that snow at this time of the year is very unusual. In fact it had not been snowing at all for the past 3 or 4 years at this latitude. As I exeprience this unusual weather-pattern in Europe first-hand, I can't help but reflect on the title of the Workshop that I came to attend, 'Sensing a Changing World'. Is it Global Warming that is changing our world or is it something else? Is our world heading towards a dark future of doom and gloom? Is there something I can do about it? I don't know the answers to these questions exaclty and I don't know what the future holds, but I really wanna see and appreciate as much as possible of this world that I live in. 

Today was the last day of the workshop titled 'Sensing a Changing World' which I came to attend at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The Workshop had started on 19th Nov and my presentation was on the first day itself. I was presenting on Fieldservers and I hope I have generated some interest on these devices in this part of the world. There was a technical excursion today to Northern Netherlands where the Dutch are deploying a large scale and unique antenna array called LOFAR for radio astronomy. Their idea is to make it low-cost and easily deployable using small sized phased array antennas instead of the tradional large parabolic ones which were the norm. With the end of the workshop, I have left behind at Wageningen a small beautiful city with cobble-stoned streets and small brick houses with sloped tiled roofs. They remind of the small alleys in Bhaktapur and Patan back home. If there was a large temple at the town center instead of the church with a bell-tower, Wageningen would quite be similar to an old town in Kathmandu Valley.

I am now leaving the Netherlands behind on a train to Duisburg in Germany. The train has run 40 minutes late due to the bad weather and unexpected snow today. I hope I do not miss the connecting train. My tickets are for the last trains out of that city and I don't quite relish the prospect of having to spend a cold night in the train station.

I intend to see some cities in Germany before I move into Brugge in Belgium. I have to be back in the Netherlands on or before 29th Nov, when I have my return flight back. I have not seen Amsterdam yet, so I might as well come back to the Netherlands a day earlier and enjoy the (in)famous sights and sounds of the Dutch capital.