An adventurous trip

Hey ho, here I am again! I bet you weren't expecting me to post something this soon, now were you?!?! Well, I just have to tell you about my trip to Holland - and more importantly about my adventures on the way back!

I had three days off after Easter and decided to spend them in Holland as it had been a long time since I was there last. So, I left on Easter Sunday and arrived around 2pm. I stepped out of the airplane onto the stairs, took a look around, tried to sniff up the cold Dutch winter air... and got hit by a snowflake. It was a single snowflake that must have wondered off somewhere because there weren't even any clouds in the sky. I was baffled. I had no idea where this snowflake had come from. Welcome to Holland...

I wanted to go to Utrecht to visit Wouter before going to Holland and so I went to Eindhoven train station. Imagine my surprise to see a random woman jumping up and down and flying at me like a frolicking pony while shouting something like 'whoawhooooooowhoaoaoaoaoa', when I was waiting for the train. This bouncy little thing turned out to be my friend Renee, soon followed by her boyfriend Ejal, who would grace me with their presence on the train as they were going to Utrecht as well. Obviously, there were no trains between Den Bosch and Utrecht (once again, 'welcome to Holland') thanks to the Dutch Railways so - even though I had won a lot of time I hadn't expected to have with Ejal and Renee - I unfortunately only had 30 minutes to spend with Wouter. Oh well, at least I got to see him. After this, I took another train to Nijmegen to join my mother's Easter dinner where my brothers, my sister-in-law, my mother's boyfriend and his children were as well. The food was good, although I had to get used to eating a meal consisting of so much meat again (as Olaf is a vegetarian we never eat meat at home). Later that evening, I went to visit Maartje and Edin to catch up, watch their wedding video and admire their wedding album. The pictures were all black and white and combined with their choice of outfits it made them look like a bride and groom from the fifties. I rounded up the night at Café Van Rijn, where Ward, my youngest brother was working (and so he should, I mean, Café Van Rijn just isn't Café Van Rijn without a Van Rijn behind the counter!) to get drunk and smoke to many cigarettes with my big brother, Hascar.

The next day, I could sleep late and had breakfast with my mother and her boyfriend. Afterwards, I went to see Maarten to have lunch and then to my father's for a late lunch. I enjoyed all this eating immensely but it did mean that I had already finished three big meals by 3 pm. As I usually just eat two meals a day, you can imagine how I must have been feeling. That night it was time for the Super-SteMaFeCo, a game night like there had never been a game night before, a game night with a continuing mission to go where no game night had gone before!!! Well, it just meant Stéphanie, Margo, Cobie and I got together to drink a lot of wine, catch up, smoke too much and play board games. Steef just beat me at Risk and Margo won at Koehandel, but I got my revenge in the end after winning two consequent rounds of Boonanza. By this time, Steef had gone home and we had been joined by Margo's girlfriend Marieke who had come home from work. As the girls all had to get up early the next morning, we didn't finish too late which made sure I didn't have a hangover on Tuesday. Oh and I almost forgot one of the most important things, we had loads of fat French fries and other types of Dutch junk food that I had been having a craving for for a long, long time...

Wednesday morning, I had breakfast with Renee and Eefje at uni and it felt great being back there again. It's funny how, even though I don't really miss Nijmegen or my old house that much, being at university made me nostalgic. Apparently, uni was much more my home than my old student room!!! Anyway, after that I had to go to the dentist, followed by lunch with Lisa who I hadn't spoken to for a long time. Later that afternoon, I went for a coffee with Femke and Sebastiaan and then managed to pry my mother away from a meeting for a glass of wine. That night, I had a quick look at Ward's new room and then rushed off to have dinner with Nina and Antonio, our Italian friends who have recently moved to Nijmegen. It was really good to hear how they are enjoying themselves here and have found jobs they like. We were especially worried about Antonio because he doesn't speak any Dutch but as it turned out he actually had a range of jobs to choose from. They like it so much there that they are thinking about buying a house. I ended the night with drinks with some of my study mates like Bert, Eefje, Marianne, Sebas, Erik and Suus. It was nothing the normal drunken debaucheries we usually engage in but we kept it relatively civil this time, but had fun and a lot of opportunities to have some good conversations - and talk humongous nonsense as well of course!!!

The next day, I was due to fly back around 2pm and I obviously arrived at the airport in time. I had just had a relaxing lunch and was looking forward to reading for a couple of hours while waiting for and being on the airplane, when they suddenly announced that my flight was cancelled. Apparently, some farmer had driven a truck into an electricity pole whereby causing a total power failure, so my airplane couldn't land. This put me in a tight spot, because I had to get back to Milan that day in order to be able to teach at a big client Thursday morning. As my school was closed, it would have been very difficult to inform them that I wouldn't be there the next day. Anyway, everybody had to get in the same queue to find out what could be done, and obviously RyanAir could only employ four rather stupid women (who only had two computers to share among them, so there were always two of them helping just one customer) to help us figure out a solution.

Obviously, when it was my turn all RyanAir flights from nearby airports had been booked full for that day and all days up to Friday. The lady was very understanding of my situation and said she would do everything she could to help - except trying to find me another flight with another airline. After assuring me that she didn't work for RyanAir but for the airport and thus worked for all airlines that use Eindhoven Airport, she uttered a completely unintelligible reason why this was simply impossible. If I wanted a flight with another airline she could tell me exactly how expensive that would be (the cheapest one being 450 euros) but that was it. Communicating with Olaf, I finally booked the night train from Amsterdam to Milan but I obviously had to pay for that myself. Well, anyway, I decided not to worry about the money that much but just to enjoy the train ride and the time I now had to read my book. I'm re-reading Tanith Lee's 'The Blood of Roses', for the first time in the original language, and it is amazing...

The train ride, however, would not be as relaxing as I thought it would. I love travelling by train in general because of the comfort, the views and the time you get to read. I have travelled by sleeper trains before and have always been quite happy to. This time, however, it was different. I had to share a cabin with five other people, two Germans, who were quite ok and didn't get on until halfway through Germany, two Greeks, who I didn't see for most of the evening because they were spending their time in another cabin where their friends were, and a young black woman with a newborn baby. A newborn baby with 6 other people in a cabin of 2 square metres?!?!?! When she got on, I realised I wouldn't be sleeping much that night...

Looks deceive, however, and after some initial wails the child went to sleep and didn't disturb anyone for most of the night. The two Greeks however, who came back drunk and stoned from the party in the other cabin, were quite annoying when they went to bed at around 1 pm when everyone else was already sleeping. And as if this wasn't enough, it turned out they were smuggling drugs out of Holland and hadn't taken into account the fact that they would have to travel through Switzerland. So, at around 3 pm, we were violently roused from our beds by grumpy soldiers and barking dogs who wanted to go through the cabin. Their drugs were found, of course, and the customs guards wanted to take them off the train. The Greeks, however, stupid and stoned as they were, started trying to bribe their way out of it. Now, there are lot of countries in the world where this would have a significantly positive chance of success, but NOT IN SWITZERLAND!!

So, after a lot of angry shouting and an unnecessary but provoked violent removal of these dimwits, we could finally continue our journey. Olaf, sweet man as he is, had woken up very early to come to Centrale to bring me my books and my bicycle because I had to go on to work immediately. I just hope my students didn't mind my not having showered, my smelly clothes and my five-day beard. As Caroline (my boss) later said, 'when you travel through Europe by train, strange things always happen...'

I was a little bit tired on Thursday, but not bad enough to really affect my work and Friday was a normal day as well. That night, Bart arrived to pay us a visit, and on Saturday we were joined by his girlfriend Tineke who had been attending conference here (she's doing a PhD in urology). We spent a nice, relaxing and warm weekend with them, which was exactly what I needed. They have just left and I am really looking forward to spending an evening with Olaf on the couch watching a movie...

I hope you are all well and to those of you I met when I was in Holland, thank you for a lovely time!!!

XXX, Fe

Pictures from Porto!!!!

They're in reverse chronological order...
On a little wall in the gardens

Getting crazy

Marta and I felt like kids again... We hadn't had alcohol for at least 16 hours!!

Flower

So not posed...

Beautiful colours

Typical wall decorations made of hundreds of little tiles. It looks a bit like a wall made of 'Delfs Blauwe' dishes

How to build as many apartments as possible on a tiny little piece of ground

A church...

The gardens, which are a miniature copy of the gardens of Versailles

Me!!!

A facade

View from the cathedral which is set on Porto's highest hill

Idem

Idem

See how nice the weather was?!

On top of hill, very tired after a long climb - and perhaps the port tasting had something to do with that too...

Tasting port

Another church

Roarrrrr!!!

Square on the river with typical houses

Square on the river with a typical tourist and guides trying to remain incognito

Porto is known as 'The City of Bridges'

The old town behind boats traditionally used to ship the grapes from the inland valleys to Porto to produce port wine

The old city

The Atlantic Ocean, it had been a long time since I saw it last

Me and Marta

A gigantic park in the middle of the city

Some famous port producers

Random building on top of a hill

Hope you enjoyed the pictures. I certainly enjoyed the trip!!!

Eccomi qua!

Ciao tutti,

Eccomi qua, my computer has been repaired thanks to the amazing efforts of Jorryt and Lars so my life finally has meaning again. This happened a couple of weeks ago but I haven't found the time to write an update until now. Where to start...

Well, our trips to Verona and Porto were very nice. Verona is a lovely city and though it wasn't that warm we spent a lot of time outside walking through the city admiring it. I'm sure there are loads of things to do inside as well but Verona mainly struck me as a city that needs to be experienced outside. It's all about the streets, the architecture, the city walls and the wonderful blend of Roman, medieval, classicist and modern buildings. It had been a long time since I set foot in a Roman structure so the visit to the Roman amphitheatre made me very happy.

It was too bad we didn't get to see an opera though. Ah well, that's a good reason to go back. Here are some more pictures.











The weekend after that we visited Marta in Porto. I was quite excited about this as it was my first trip to Portugal and didn't even mind getting up at 3.30am that much. It really f*cked up our bodies though because by the time we arrived in Portugal we had already been awake for 6 hours and it was only 8 am!!! Anyway, we were resolved not to let this stand in the way of a great holiday and tried to find against our fatigue by eating lots and lots. This helped to a certain extent and we were able to spend a lovely day with Marta and her boyfriend Nuno. Porto is lovely and Olaf took loads of pictures, some of which I will put online as a next post immediately after I finish this one - I'm not very good with computers, whenever I add pictures to a post it messes everything up...

That was February. Going away for weekends is very nice but unfortunately also takes up a lot of time, energy and, most importantly, money. And now that spring has more or less started there are a lot of people who want to come for weekend visits, so hotel OlafFedor has been opened for business again. This month we successively had Lars and Niels (Olaf's brothers), Joost and Kim (friends from The Hague) and my father and his girlfriend visiting. I was a little bit nervous because of my dad's visit, because I had only met his new girlfriend once before for about an hour. Fortunately, she turned out to be lovely and I think she is a good match for my father.

Reading back what I have just written I am amazed that we have managed to do so many fun things the last two months, because it feels like all I have been doing lately is working. Since January my schedule has been filled completely and I have even got more work than I care for. This means I work long days, teach lots of lessons and am struggling to find the time for my office work. One of the reasons for this is that several of my colleagues left virtually at the same time and we didn't have enough substitute teachers to cover all their lessons. We have also been experiencing some problems with our database and email system which means everything is more difficult and takes more time to do. All this has been has been causing me a lot of stress and frustration and I think I am a little overworked. This has made me really grumpy and unfocused, which I hate. That's why I am really in need of the five-day Easter holiday that started yesterday at 5 pm.

Fortunately, the email situation should be resolved by the time my school opens again and my workload should decrease in about three to four weeks when some of my courses will end. But this is something I don't want to think about, because I am on holiday!!!! It is a holiday that I am not really going to use to relax but to meet up with old friends and people I haven't seen for a long time. Yesterday, we spent the evening with Belinda and Enrico who are in town for Easter and Jorge and Diana are coming over for Olaf's homemade sushi tonight which should be a lot of fun. And tomorrow, I'm flying to Holland by myself for a 4-day visit to Nijmegen and I'm going to have so much fun...

XXX, Fe

PS Stay tuned for the pics from Porto