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Published: January 5th 2006
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Airport
Waiting to fly out of Vancouver Spreekt er heir iemand Engels? (does anyone here speak English??)
No I'm not in Sittard right now, but my train DID go through there, and I wasn't sleeping, so it's still correct.
I still haven't really slept, napped for 2 hours but then there was dinner and I didn't want to miss that. I got Joel's address, left the library, and then absolutely failed to find his house. The problem was that the map was really not that great for the area of town I had to navigate (sure sure, she blames the map), and there were streets on my map without names, and Joels street was actually not on my map but off an edge of it, however I thought I had a general idea where it was when I left the library. There were way more streets than on my map, so that threw me off, and there were parts of the street I couldn't cross, like where the road went down under the train tracks, and so I had to go around. That would leave me in a different place than I thought, then something else would make me have to adjust my planned
Vancouver
Leaving vancouver early early early in the morning path and eventually I just asked for directions. Got directions from 3 different people, they all spoke English and seemed happy enough to help, however I'd go where the first one said and not find it, then ask the second, still not find it, then finally from the 3rd I made it.
So I'm getting pretty tired from my little hike around the neighborhood on top of everything else, and I finally find the door, 152A, and knock... and no one answers. Use the buzzer... no answer. I try not to worry, walk up and down the street, browse the windows of all the shops (lots of shops around here, will take pictures tomorrow) and wander back up to the apartment. Hit buzzer... no one there. I'm not in the mood to walk around, so I sit down, finish off the rest of my trail mix, just starting to wonder if I should go back to the library for a while when I notice 3 people walking up the street, and holding some stuff. It clicks when one of them blows into a conch shell, one starts drumming on a drum, and the other holds up a chalkboard
Islands
Some islands en route to Seattle with "BEV" written in big letters on it. YAYYYY people for me! Hugs all around, breif chatting, and then I nearly sprinted for the shower. I don't know if I've ever felt so good after a shower... I was pretty grimy after too many hours in airports and in the same clothes, uck. Nice shower here though, I must say I quite like it.
So then I got to meet everyone; Marit had the drum, Jesse was wielding the conch shell and Tobas was in charge of the sign. Jesse and Tobas (or Tobi (sp? not sure, thats pronunciation though)) live here, Marit is Tobas' girlfriend. After the shower I went upstairs to Joel's room, where I'm staying til he gets here, and is also conveniently the computer room. Marit took off, had to study for a test, and the guys were on the computer. Oh someone else was here, I can't remember his name right now. They were on the computers for a bit, I read and eventually fell asleep, but I decided to get up when they said dinner was on. I could have slept, but I was pretty hungry and figured I should get some
Clouds
Leaving Seattle, heading for Amsterdam food in me, I hadn't really eaten since the plane. That was around 6ish, we had pasta and some tomato and veggie sauce stuff, was yummy. I met Mariska, who was over, she spends a lot of time around here too, she lives just down the street. She cooked the pasta sauce, was soo good. We ate, had yummy jasmine tea (they drink lots of tea here, yay) talked for a bit and watched Minority Report. Chatted some more, then cleaned the kitchen, washed dishes and had cake. Tobi and Marit came downstairs for the cake and icecream, oooo yummy cake. Things are fairly communal around here, like everyone takes responsibility for cleaning up stuff, not just their own, and it works pretty well. I think I'll like it a lot here, everyone's really fun and easygoing and nice. Jesse had a headache/hangover all day but even he was cheerful and stuff.
I realised when I was on the train that s'Hertogenbosch, or Den-Bosch as they call it, is where the painter Heironymous Bosch lived. I learned about him in school, did a big report on him and his paintings, and he's really interesting, so I decided that
Amsterdam
First view of Amsterdam, just before dawn that's one of the places I want to visit. There's a museum there that has some of his works, and I'd love to check it out. It's fairly close too, in the same part of Holland too. The province Maastricht is in is called Limburg, it's the farthest south, and Den-Bosch is in the closest province to it, called Noord Brabant. I've decided I'd like to go either to Hamburg or Munich, I have (sort of) family in Hamburg, but Munich sounds really great too. Alex speaks very highly of it and it has rather piqued my curiosity. They're both about the same distance, so I'm going to look at ticket prices and stuff like that, and decide later. Tomorrow we're actually having breakfast all together, everyone makes pancakes and fruit salad and whatever we come up with. It's just more elaborate than regular mornings and everyone sits down together for it. I said right away that I'd make pancakes, and everyone seems quite excited about my enthusiasm for making breakfast. I told them I hoped it would make up for my lack of skill with the other meals, they said they're all good at making dinners so its just
Amsterdam
First light as well. They'll probably end up teaching me how to cook stuff and I will probably volunteer to cook stuff for breakfast fairly often, seeing how I enjoy cooking breakfast anyways.
I'm going to take pictures of the people and the house tomorrow, and the city. Tomorrow will probably be a wandering-around day, figure out how to get to the station and the library from here. Grocery store is apparently very close, and theres a Turkish shop that sells vegetables just down the street. I could probably just go on and on, about the trying-to-kill-yourself stairs in the house, the city, other stuff from my trip over, but I really think I ought to sleep. the count is now 55 hours, 6 of which I've spent sleeping. It's 2 am here, breakfast is at 10 so I really should try to sleep. It's just hard when you're so tired, you don't feel tired anymore. I really only meant to add some pictures, not talk about so much stuff, but oh well. More tomorrow.
failing to fall asleep, somehow,
~Bev
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Kim (cousin)
non-member comment
yehaww you made it!!
Hey kid...well you have fun there, im gonna live vicariuosly through you on this trip..so you better not stop emailing the info..the rate im going I'll never get out of this hole! Have Fun Bev!!!!