Day 3 in Netherlands

It was a beautiful day so far. The temperature was around 50'F and sunny during the whole daytime. Since the first meeting did not start until almost 11:00am, I got some free time to be the tourist to walk around the downtown shopping area. Most of the stores are open at 9am and closed around 5:30pm during the weekday so all I could see was the closed gates of all the stores at night time. I went to the bank to exchange some Euros with my US dollars. It turned out that they charged almost $6 transaction fee for that. So, my US $60 only got 33 Euro back! That was just terrible.

Anyway, I got to walk around blocks after blocks of the small shops and stores. I even managed to find where the mall (Heuvelgalerie shopping centre) was. It was just behind my hotel! Guess the main entrance was closed when I came back from work since I got to here. I was looking for some local souvenirs to buy but could not find any in my one and a half hour of the walking exploration.

On the way, I accidently found the biggest electronic store in the city,"Media Makt". It was like a 4-level super size Best Buy stores. It sold all kinds of appliances, computers, TV, DVD players, games, cables, camera, etc. At last, I was wandering close to the Eindhoven railway station and found that there was a small store selling some kind of souvenirs but it was not open. And I was quite far from the hotel and out of time so I could only walk back to hotel. And I am not sure if I will have time to buy anything since my first meeting tomorrow will be 8:00am.

After the work, my co-worker and I went to a Chinese dim-sum place and had quite a good meal. The food was very authentic and not cheap. I guess everything was expensive due to the weak US dollar, that is, bad converting rate for us. Well, I'd better go to bed since it will be an early start tomorrow.