Mitä aiot tehdä isona?

( Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina June 2009 )

Long story short: we had a great time. I love Croatia with all my heart, it's such a beautiful country and it was a great experience to drive down the entire coast. Dubrovnik was just as awesome as I had expected it to be and I still cannot believe how blue the Adriatic Sea is. I also really enjoyed exploring Bosnia and Herzegovina for a bit, even though we didn't get to see much of it. I'd definitely like to come back to Bosnia & Herzegovina some day to see some more of it!

The pictures shown here are just a selection, the full set can be found at Selmer's Flickr page.

Coming back from holidays is always so much work... Unpacking, sorting mail, trying to get a grip on an exploded inbox, uploading pictures, typing up my travel diary, etc. Not to mention the Mt Doom of laundry that is currently in our kitchen. Can I please go back to Croatia and sit in the sun reading a book and eating icecream instead?

Anyway. We had a great time, we basically drove along the entire coast of Croatia and then went up to Mostar & Sarajevo in Bosnia and Hercegovina. We had fantastic weather the first week and quite a bit of rain the second week, but it was great fun nevertheless. Pictures and full story will follow at some point!

So far my week has not been so great, mostly because of the news.

I can't stop thinking about that plane that disappeared. They have found some debris yesterday, so I suppose it hasn't technically vanished, but the idea of an airplane going down so quickly the pilots can't even send out an SOS is very unsettling. Especially if it has something to do with lighting and turbulence as they are currently assuming, according to the news. I'm not particularly afraid of flying, but I have never been completely relaxed on an airplane. Probably because I've watched too many of those air disaster documentaries on Discovery Channel... I know that air travel is safer than any other kind of travel, but a crash like this one really doesn't help with me feeling more comfortable on an airplane. I desperately want to know what happened, not just for my own feeling of safety, but also so I can finally put a stop to my mind coming up with all these horrid scenarios of what happened to the people on that flight.

And what makes matters worse is that a good friend of mine actually knew someone on that flight, which has brought it all even closer.

And then there's the court case. Last year a police officer was shot and died. The man who did this was sentenced this week and the case has been on the news all the time, as it's very uncommon for police officers to get shot here and the family of the officer was not happy with the verdict (they thought the prison sentence wasn't long enough). Anyway, the whole thing bothers me because I went to school with the officer in question. She was a classmate of mine in primary school. She wasn't a close friend of mine, and I haven't seen her since I left primary school, so it's at least 15 years since I last had anything to do with her. Or thought of her, in fact. When she was shot last year it was the first time she even crossed my mind in 15 years, and now her name & picture are all over the place again. I don't even know why it bothers me so much. Of course I'm horrified that something like this happens, but I'm not particularly sad about her. Which sounds horrible, but I mean, it's not like she was a part of my life or anything. My life doesn't change because she died because she never was part of my life, not even when we were in primary school. She was just a classmate and I probably never would've thought of her ever again if she hadn't been shot. Maybe it's guilt or something similar?

I don't know, I'm just babbling. Suffice it to say that I'm having a bad week. Maybe I should just stop watching the news.

Four more weeks until Selmer and I go on holidays! I've been counting days for a while now and am really looking forward to it. We're going to Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina.

As usual, I am on a holiday destination reading binge to get in the mood, but this time I am obviously reading the wrong books. I just finished Misha Glenny's "The Fall of Yugoslavia", and have also recently read Slavenka Drakulic's "How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed" and Dervla Murphy's "Through the Embers of Chaos". I still have a pile of equally depressing books laying around or about to be delivered, such as Robert Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts" and Slavenka Drakulic's "They Wouldn't Hurt a Fly".

Does anyone know any happy books about Croatia or Bosnia & Herzegovina?!

I must admit though, depressing reading as it may be, it is also fascinating. I was too young to pay much attention to the Balkan Wars when they started, and I always had just a bit of a vague idea of what happened. Right now I feel I am getting the hang of it, who did what to whom and when. But at the same time I am completely mystified by the why, and the more I read, the less I understand.

I am obviously a little behind with things, but I just realized that the girl who won the Dutch X-Factor two weeks ago did so with a cover of "Hallelujah". And it's dreadful! They completely screwed up one of the most beautiful songs on the planet!

I spent a substantial amount of time tonight listening to different covers of the same song and then realized that on the British X-factor a girl won with the same song (also a horrible version of it, might I add) last year. So not only is the Dutch X-factor sacrilegious, they are also shamelessly copying the UK. It's an utter disgrace, that's what it is.

I hate television.



The good thing though is that I found a whole collection of fantastic renditions of "Hallelujah" that I had never heard before. My all time favourite version is still the one done by Rufus Wainwright, but I was also very impressed with kd lang and Allison Crowe - I obviously prefer Canadians when it comes to this song. :D

What's your favourite rendition of "Hallelujah"?

So, Seoul!

I didn't have time to elaborate this afternoon as I was at work, but I was too excited not to say anything. :D

I was planning a trip to California in October with a friend of mine, but for several reasons the trip is not going to happen this year (it will next year though, it's just a postponement!). So basically I found myself with three weeks off in October, quite a bit of savings in the bank and nowhere to go. So I started thinking about places to go that wouldn't cost too much (still have to have some money for going to California next year :D) but that were as far away as possible. Just to see how much it would cost I checked out flights to Seoul and I found a 500 euro ticket. Believe me, that is dirt cheap for a flight to Seoul! So I booked it. Just like that. And now I'm going to Seoul the first two weeks of October. How insane is that? I've been fascinated by Korea for years and never thought I'd go there anytime soon, but I guess I am! OMG!

Added bonus: I have a 11 hour layover in Istanbul, plenty of time to explore another place I've been wanting to go to for ages. :D

I still can't believe it. I'm going to Korea! Woot! This is turning into an amazing travel year, I'm going to all these places I've been wanting to go to and never thought I would within the next ten years. I am such a lucky bastard! :D

OMG, I can't believe I just booked a ticket to Seoul!

( Iceland April 2009 )

So, all in all, Iceland was fantastic, amazing & fascinating and I fell completely in love with the country. I am totally going back there within the next couple of years. Preferably to stay longer and see more of the country at a more leisurely pace. :D

The pictures above are just a selection, by the way, if you want to see all the pictures we took, have a look at Selmer's Flickr page here.

Today I went on another food finding mission. I like to try new recipes and I'm mostly attracted to "exotic" stuff, so very often I find myself roaming the many Asian, Turkish, Surinamese, etc. supermarkets trying to find some infamous ingredient for yet another cooking experiment. I love these food finding missions, it is so much fun to browse these stores and look at ingredients I have never heard of and have no idea how to cook! I love how you can buy pretty much everything in Rotterdam, it's one of the best things about this city.

Anyway, so today I was on a mission to find Ras al-Hanout and vine leaves and I found myself at Ali Baba (i.e. the local Turkish/Moroccan supermarket). And lo and behold, what do I see on the spices & herbs shelf? BAKING SODA. I was so excited I almost squealed and did a happy dance. I have been looking for baking soda everywhere, and the Ali Baba was pretty much the last place I had expected to find it, but they have it! And I wasn't even specifically looking for it today! Just goes to show that you will always find things when you are actually looking for something else...

Now all you Americans might think, baking soda? What's so special about baking soda? Well, it basically doesn't exist in the Netherlands. I'm not sure if it's just an American thing or more widespread, but either way, in this country, we don't use baking soda and it's pretty much impossible to find. Whereas in a lot of recipes for baking I find online (I mostly look at American sites as they are far more extensive than Dutch recipe sites, and by far I mean the from here to Sydney type of far), baking soda is an essential ingredient. It's very frustrating. So when I very unexpectedly found baking soda at the supermarket, it was the highlight of my day. I wonder what it says about my life that I get excited about baking soda... :D

By the way, in the Netherlands an Asian or Surinamese store is called a toko, which apparently is the Malaysian/Indonesian word for "store" and is obviously a remnant of colonial times. I wonder how long it will take before we start calling the Polish stores sklep?

Incidentally, sklep is also the only word I know in Polish and I am really pleased I can finally use it in conversation. :D

Just another lazy Sunday... I went to a housewarming party last night and it wasn't a really spectacularly wild party or anything, but I didn't get home until 2.30 am, so I'm still feeling a little out of it. I think it's also because I might be getting sick. I was really close to getting sick last weekend, but as I was in London I wasn't going to let that happen so I just took a whole bunch of Lemsip and pretended nothing was wrong. It worked quite well, actually, but a flu never really goes away, does it? It'll probably be back with a vengeance sometime soon. :D

Anyway. So I haven't done anything yet today, apart from nearly finishing the book I'm currently reading, "Under a Blood Red Sky", by Kate Furnivall. I am enjoying it so much that I am a bit hesitant on getting back into it, as I only have about 30 pages to go until the end, and I don't want it to end! It's interesting really, as this book has so many things I usually hate, like a plot that's going all over the place with no time for character development, the use of magic as a plot device in a historic novel, cardboard characters with cliché opinions & emotions, the incessant use of "instinctively", etc... But I just can't help but love this book! I had the same with another book I read by this author, "The Russian Concubine", in which the descriptions of so called Chinese and Russian culture drove me nuts, but at the same time I just couldn't put the book down and I loved it to bits. Funny how that works!

I'm so happy it's the weekend! I'm really tired and I'm just going to take it easy this weekend. I have a housewarming party to go to tomorrow night, and then probably watching a couple of "Beverly Hills 90210" episodes with friends on Monday. A friend of mine got the dvd box a while ago and it'll be interesting to see that show again! It's been what, fifteen years since I last watched BH90210?!

Anyway. So I've been busy, as usual. I went to London last weekend, which was awesome. I went on my own 'cause I needed some me-time and I basically just wandered around the city drinking Starbucks coffee (I know, evil corporation, but we don't have them in the Netherlands* so it's exotic and cool to me), went to the Tower of London and the British Museum and saw three musicals. And had Sunday Roast with a friend of mine (same friend as BH90210 dvd's) and her friends, who happened to be in London for the same weekend. Good times! I saw "Mamma Mia!", "Hairspray" and "Wicked", and especially those last two were brilliant. I had great seats and I wasn't even paying through the nose as much as usual, as the pound is really low these days. Yay crisis!





* Well, there are a grand total of two Starbuckses in the Netherlands, actually. Both at the airport: one before and one after customs.

I started reading a new book today and within the first couple of pages the word "instinctively" appeared. And that's the third time in a row that this happened with a book I'm reading! ARGH. The use of the word "instinctively" is without a doubt my most hated literary shortcut and it drives me batshit. If you ask me, that's just a writer being lazy. Usually it'll go like this "She instinctively felt she could trust him", which basically means the author can't be arsed to set up the male character properly so it becomes clear he's trustworthy. Or it goes like "She instinctively knew how to operate the machine", which means the author can't be arsed to devote a paragraph earlier on the main character learning how to operate machinery, so she can use the knowledge later. And if the author does it right, it won't be a dead giveaway for the machine using event later on. Hell, they could even just say "the machine looked like a machine she had before, so she figured out how it worked really quickly". Nobody "instinctively" knows how things work! Nobody "instinctively" knows some people can or cannot be trusted! That's just giving away the plot. Obviously the person who "instinctively" couldn't be trusted turns out to be the murderer later on. You might as well say "Character X is the murderer" on page one. SHEESH. As far as I'm concerned, the word "instinctively" should be banned from literature. I'm quite tolerant of bad writing in general, but the use of "instinctively" makes me want to tear the book up, set it on fire and throw it off the balcony. AARGH.

OK. Rant over.

So what are your literary pet peeves?

Things that make me happy on Saturday February 14th, 2009

- It's Saturday, which means I have three days off in front of me and not much planned, so I can do whatever I want. :D
- Yesterday I had my farewell lunch for the International Office (i.e. my previous job) and my boss got me a Haruki Murakami book, which my colleagues had all written a message in. I felt very appreciated, and that's a nice feeling!
- I finished my first round of selecting exchange candidates yesterday, and sent an e-mail to everyone who applied about their status, making a lot of students very happy.

This whole selection thing has been quite fun, actually. I love reading the motivation letters (some are unintentionally completely hilarious). I had 46 applications for an exchange, of which I accepted about 15 directly based on their application, 6 were rejected and the rest has interviews in the upcoming two weeks. I love doing interviews, it's fun to talk to the students and hear about their ideas of going on exchange. Some of them are really nervous, which is cute. :D The only thing that really sucks is that you have to reject some people. We have some minimum requirements (grade & language requirements), but even if someone's grade is obviously way too low, which makes it fairly easy to reject someone as you have a good reason, it's still really difficult, especially if they have a very good and enthusiastic motivation letter. Thankfully most people get accepted without too much trouble, and it's nice to be able to tell them that. Especially as I know my decision to send them on exchange will give them an experience they will always remember as the best 5 months of their life, and which will probably change them forever. :D

Eep, I still need to do two of these!

Things that made me happy on February 4th, 2009:
- The application deadline for outgoing students was at the beginning of this week, and quite a few applications for my region have come in, especially for Finland and Sweden. It's really fun to read all the motivation letters! It's great that for some places more people have applied than we have places for, so I will have to do interviews with the students to determine who would be the best candidate. I love interviews!
- It's been snowing.
- I have no social events planned until Saturday evening, which is very nice and quiet after the complete craziness of the Filmfestival.


So yeah, the Filmfestival is over now. I ended up watching 7 movies and they were all pretty good, actually! I've been very lucky this year. Usually there's always one or two movies that are completely dreadful, but I really enjoyed all of the movies I saw this year. On Saturday I went to the closing party with a couple of friends, which was completely awesome. They had this ska-ish band playing and lots of artsy fartsy people getting very drunk. I even spotted some of the directors of movies I had seen during the festival. Then later on they played a lot of classic dancefloor tunes and I drank too many martini & ginger ale cocktails. It was a really great party, I'm so going again next year!

Monday I went to donate blood, but apparently my body was not in a giving mood as the vein they stuck the needle in didn't really do anything. They moved the (BIG ASS) needle around a bit, but it was hopeless. So in the end I only ended up giving like 10 ml of blood. They told me it was just bad luck and they will send me another invite soon, but I was still a little disappointed. And now I have this really huge bruise on my arm from where they were messing around with the needle!

Ack, what happened? I seriously did not have a single minute to sit down and write an entry for the past five days. Inbetween watching movies, drinking cocktails, working, visiting schools in Germany, shopping and celebrating birthdays, I just couldn't find time to update. So I'm just going to pretend nothing happened and continue with what made me happy today. :D

Things that made me happy on Tuesday January 27th, 2009
- Driving back from a schoolvisit in Germany, going 140 km/h and overtaking some big ass expensive BMW's in my dorky little rental Renault, playing The Rasmus really loud and singing along at the top of my voice. I just love driving in Germany. :D
- I had to do a presentation at a German school today, in German, and I'm SO HAPPY it's over. I was dreading it for weeks. Presentations for high school students give me the heebie jeebies in general, but having to do it in German just made my nervousness go up to a whole new level. It went quite well, actually, but I'm very glad it's over!
- I spent a lot of time today looking forward to upcoming trips, which never fails to make me happy. :D

Things that made me happy on Wednesday January 21st, 2009:
- I got a notice from the bookshop I can pick up a book about learning the Hindi script that I ordered a while ago
- I got an invite to come donate blood at the bloodbank, which means they didn't find any scary diseases in my blood after the health check

Things that made me happy on January 20th, 2009:

- Obama is president!
- I ran a workshop for the new exchange students this morning and even though it was the first time I ran this workshop it went really well and it was lots of fun!
- I got a couple of new books in the mail

Things that made me happy on Monday January 19th, 2009:
- Amazon.co.uk has great customer service. I ordered ER season 13 in October and only just found out the last disc doesn't work properly ('cause it takes a while to get through all the episodes!), so I'm well beyond the 30 day return limit. But when I explained the situation they told me to return the DVDs anyway and they'll send me new ones. I love it when customer service actually provides service to customers!
- I started reading a new book, "An Utterly Impartial History of Britain (Or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge)" (John O'Farrell), which is really rather funny so far.
- It's Monday, so I have my day off and Selmer had to go to work at 7 am this morning. I know it's rather mean, but I really, really enjoy being able to stay in bed when he has to get up and go to work. :D

a. comment on this post and I will choose seven interests from your profile.
b. you will then explain what they mean and why you are interested in them.
c. post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.


book232 chose seven interests for me to explain ages ago, my apologies for being an unbelievable slacker in answering...

( Here are the interests she chose for me )

Things that made me happy on January 18th, 2009:

- Last night Selmer and I went to the theatre to see Wim Helsen, a Belgian stand up comedian. Selmer's sister had gotten us the tickets for Christmas and I'd never heard of the guy before, but it was really quite amusing. I especially enjoyed listening to his Flemish accent and vocabulary. :D
- Selmer brought me a couple of travelguides for Iceland from the library, so I've been enjoying myself browsing through those! Did you know there are only 288,000 people in Iceland? I knew there weren't too many, but not even 300,000! That's crazy! There are almost twice as many people in Rotterdam alone!