Wednesday Walk: Utrecht Science Park

Inspired by @tattoodjay's Wednesday Walk challenge, I went on a 4km walk in a busy area today, so I could take plenty of pictures - even pictures of people. It did work out that way, and it was relaxing too, despite the busy traffic. I've been working during the weekend, so I took a day off in the middle of the week.

I walked to Utrecht Science Park, better known to locals as De Uithof, along the Weg tot de Wetenschap, which means Road to Science. Yeah, that's an unusual name in Dutch too.

This road runs along the Kromme Rijn, the old course of the Rhine. I wrote about the new course before. The name means Crooked Rhine - but it's been straightened in order to drain water faster. It was actually flowing at a decent pace today. We've had no lack of rain this month.

I don't know why there's a football field for kids here. The ground is bumpy and no one lives on this side of the road. FC Utrecht's stadium and training fields are nearby (behind me when taking this shot). I may have seen some players jogging, but I wouldn't recognize them.

Backing up a bit: while cycling on the way to my walking route, I saw this burned out scooter. Apparently it started burning on the bike path and was abandoned in the grass.

Its name was D85 1GD.

Bicycles are the most popular form of traffic here. It was at the end of the afternoon, and students were returning home from campus. A few hundred live there, but that's not really a thing we're used to in the Netherlands.

A new office tower is being built at the entrance of the Science Park, for our equivalent of the FDA, with the catchy name College ter Beoordeling van Geneesmiddelen.

There's a curly thing across the road.

A closer view of the new office tower.

There were mushrooms, but I wasn't hungry.

Hey, here's that Monero sticker again. Some vandals have been promoting their drug dealer coins to innocent students and scientists, even distracting pedestrians from traffic.

The Minnaert building in the university's science cluster. As if they told the architect: "We don't care if you're a furry, as long as it's rectangular box."

There's a brand new tram line from the central train station to the campus, but it has been running without passengers since early 2018 - holding up three full buses here. Testing might be finished in December or earlier, but the start of the tram line has been postponed more often than Brexit. The warning bell stopped ringing when the tram stopped here, which is not supposed to happen if you ask me. The driver looked extremely bored and didn't make eye contact.

Wow, there's even a Monero sticker in front of the college library, where it will be seen by economics students.

Here I turned back in disgust. We've only seen a small part of the science park. There's also a social science building, a botanic garden, a pharmaceutical company and a number of hospitals for human beings, animals, children and soldiers.

And another one. Why isn't the police stopping this?

It's nice to have trams run on a grass lawn, but I almost wandered onto the tracks. Another thing to take into account as part of the test stage.

Oh, come on! There are limits, you shameless anarchists!

On my way back, the curly thing from the other side.

A desire path to a residential area is growing here. More anarchy!

These mushrooms are rotting. Someone should throw them in the trash.

More mushrooms. I could have walked through a park, if I wanted to look at boring trees.

More boring trees, and an artificial island on the left.

These joggers looked suspiciously organized, which made me think they might be professional football players. FC Utrecht's latest game was a 3-0 win against PSV.

So there was a lot to see during this walk. Yet I didn't reach 5000 steps according to @actifit. I have less than 12 minutes left in the day to reach that score, so I'm going to jump around frantically now.

All photos by myself, using a Samsung Galaxy S7. Some of them cropped, but not edited otherwise.