Month: May 2005 Page 1 of 2

Well, I took Caroline and went to Amsterdam for the morning to get my passport renewed. She was so excited cuz we were “going on the train!!!” lol. She loved it. She was super good too. Just the perfect little angel and a pleasure to have around. Here we are-

On the train on the way to Amsterdam, she was being silly and she just loves having her picture taken! hehe

There’s the good old American Consulate

Museum Plein where we ate lunch. I have so many good memories there…*grin*

The pigeons there are so tame they eat right out of your hand!

Caroline wasn’t totally sure how she felt about them

Us on the train ride home. She was so sleepy 🙂

Have you ever tried to do something and it just didn’t click? No matter how hard you tried you just couldn’t get the hang of it? Well that’s how driving stick was for me. I had a couple people try to teach me and it kind of went like this…*vrrroommm jerk putter die*…Almost every time I tried to get out of first gear! The couple times I managed to get beyond first gear it went ok but those times were few and far between. It really frustrated me.

Anyway, there are certain circumstances coming up in my life that are most likely going to require me to drive stick so….off I went with Ineke to try once again. I admit I was actually dreading it. First of all, it’s been pretty much a year since I’ve been behind the wheel of ANY car so I’m a little rusty at driving period. Plus, I’m a perfectionist, the kind where if I think I may not do something perfect I just avoid doing it. Not good, I know. But this was inevitable so I just sucked it up and prepared to fail miserably once again…

Only, this time I didn’t! Somehow, I don’t know if it was how Ineke explained it or what, but for some reason this time it just clicked. I was able to start and get all the way up to 3rd gear without problems. I killed the engine probably three time the entire lesson (which is a huge improvement, honest, the last few times I could’ve said I DIDN’T kill the engine three times the whole lesson and been proud of that! lol) But yeah, I’m so excited! I really felt comfortable, I honestly think I have this whole manual transmission thing down. Yea!

Just thought I’d share with all of you *big smile*

I had a nice weekend. We had a couple days of hot weather, as in like 30 C, and it was soooo nice!!! Unfortunately it’s now back to being cold and rainy, blech 😛 Oh well, at least it was nice for a couple days right?
Friday, I got to meet up with a new girl, Denisa, from the Slovak Republic. She just moved to Rotterdam, about 10 mins from where I live, so I’m excited. She’s really nice. We hung out, did some shopping, had apple pie at Dudok and then saw House of Wax (horrible, horrible movie by the way, don’t waste your money. And had I known before hand that it had Paris Hilton in it I would NEVER have watched it…don’t even get me started on her, lol) Saturday, a group of us got together because Anna had a couple friends from the States visiting. We had a lot of fun just hanging out and dancing. Here’s the crew from the evening (I didn’t end up getting a decent picture of Julian sorry…):

Anna Maria, Caitlin and I

Carrie and Erik

Chris

and Jamie and her boyfriend Matt (he doesn’t like having his picture taken…)

So yeah, that was the group of us. Fun stuff 🙂

I was looking for a word today and stumbled upon a list of phobias. Here’s some of the ones I found most humorous (note: all real words according to “The Phobia List”)…

Arachibutyrophobia- Fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth.
(don’t ever give a dog peanut butter by the way, this happens to them and they freak out! *guilty look* what? I never did that…)

Eisoptrophobia- Fear of mirrors or of seeing oneself in a mirror.
(I’ve had some very frightening experiences looking into mirrors first thing in the morning…)

Dutchphobia- Fear of the Dutch.
(had to include it, although I can’t imagine why anyone would have this one, hehe)

Pantophobia- Fear of everything.
(who can tell me where that’s from? *wink*)

and my personal favorite…

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia- Fear of long words.
(now come on, that’s just cruel!)

It’s just amazing what frightens people…

2 Timothy 1:7 “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” (NKJV)

Strawberries and whipped cream…mmmmmm!

Sunday afternoon was just so nice. It was one of the most pleasant afternoons I’ve had in a long time. I met up with Anna, Caitlin, Bea and Camilla and we headed out to Wijk aan Zee, a cute little Dutch beach town, and saw Illicit (a hip hop band that Kathrin’s boyfriend plays in).

Here’s the whole band

Pieter during his solo

They were good actually, I had a really fun time watching them play. So yeah, it was just a good day. Nothing too terribly exciting about it, we just chilled and I got to hang out with my friends and be silly and smile and laugh a lot. We also took some really nice pictures of us girls on the beach but unfortunately they’re on Caitlin’s camera so I can’t post them right now. Caitlin, you gotta send me those! *wink*

Or at least according to “anonymous commenter” on this post… I’ve never been called a liar in my life (well, since I was a kid anyways. I can remember my sisters chanting “liar, liar, pants on fire” a time or two but that’s a whole different story, hehe). It surprised me and actually made me a little mad (which you will probably be able to tell if you read my response to the comment) but in the grand scheme of things it really doesn’t matter and actually it’s kind of amusing when you think about it. So yeah, I’m going to chose to laugh this one off and actually I had a really great day aside from that. I’ll post about it more tomorrow since I have some fun pictures (which I actually took) from the show (that I actually went to) that I’d like to post along with it. But for now I need to catch up on my sleep so, g’night everyone! *smile*

Boy, I hate traveling at night here. Not because I feel like it’s dangerous or anything (although I definitely would not advise spending any more time than necessary at Centraal Station) most of the time I get home with no problems at all. The reason I hate it so much is because it takes soooo looooong to get everywhere. Normally it takes me about fourty-five minutes to an hour to get from my house to Anna’s house in Scheveningen. Tonight however, because of having to wait for and take two night busses and a night train, it took me almost two and a half hours to get home. blech!

We had a good time going out and stuff though. We played a card game and just hung out at Anna’s house for a few hours and then went out and ended up at a little Australian bar called Kangaroos. We had fun and laughed a lot. I’m so grateful that I have such a fun group of friends now. There was a period of a couple months when I first got here that I had no one at all to hang out with, that sucked! But now it’s all good. My friends are great and I’m so glad most of them are sticking around for awhile. Except Anna who’s moving to Spain in July 🙁 Well I’m happy for her but it sure is going to be a bummer not having her around any more. *sigh* Such is life I guess…

So yeah, my evening was great, I just need to make sure I leave earlier next time or spend the night!

I just want to say that I watched Bambi today and cried like a small child when the mother died…again. I have seen that movie 87 thousand times (and that’s probably not too big of an exaggeration) and it still gets to me. Caroline was very concerned and was like “it’s ok, look the daddy deer is there”, hehe. She’s such a sweetheart. But yeah, I just love classic Disney *smile*

This past weekend I went to Pinkpop, a music festival in Limburg, and had an absolute blast! I’ll let the pictures tell the story 🙂

Saturday 14 May-

We got up at 5am and had three hours of trains and busses (well, four hours really since we missed one of our trains and had to wait an hour)

When we finally arrived we set up our tent (in the rain) and explored things a little bit

Heineken, the official sponsor of, oh, just about every major event in the Netherlands, lol

The first night the best act definitely was The Chemical Brothers, they did euro dance mix stuff, it was great

and for good reason, I watched a girl almost break her neck crowd surfing during the Chemical Brothers :S

Sunday 15 May-

It rained until almost 3pm…so the ground was pretty wet and muddy, not to mention covered in trash 😛

Beef, it’s not just what’s for dinner *wink* it’s also a really fun Dutch band

The Prodigy put on a really great show

getting close to the fans

I enjoyed them a lot! It was great, we were right on the bar and I have the bruise across my ribs to prove it, hehe

After that show we called it a night and went to bed, notice I didn’t say went to sleep. It was freezing cold (honest, I was wearing four shirts and three pairs of socks!) and every time we’d fall asleep we were awakened by some drunk tripping over our tent, *sigh* Oh well..

Monday 16 May-

The weather finally improved, no more rain, yea!

Everyone was enjoying the nice weather and just acting crazy

Wir sind Helden, a band from Germany and probably my favorite band from the festival. They were really good!

Bloc Party, another good band this time from the UK. We watched the show and then got their autographs afterwards, fun fun

Faithless, the last band of the festival

After them we headed home, we both couldn’t stand the thought of another cold night in the tent, hehe

Notice all the confused looks and pink hats? Nobody really knew what was going on as far as the extra trains went. It worked out though and we made it home by about 2am Tuesday morning.

It was such a great weekend. Going into it I was unsure about how it would go simply because I only knew one band that was playing but now I’m so glad that I went. I heard so much great music and had a really, really fun time *smile*