Just a few mills

This post is from yesterday night, but I was delayed in posting due to lack of Internet, and laziness :)


Just a few mills... and a few tourists.

So today was my first complete day in the Netherlands. It was pretty awesome, if you ask me. I spent the day with Andy (my second cousin) and his family, whom I am staying with for one more day, until Andy drives me to Venlo (and hour and a half away) tomorrow where I will be living for the next 3 months. I woke at around 8:45 this morning, just to promptly fall back asleep until about 11:20. Which I was supremely angry at myself for, suffice it to say that I have set myself 3 alarms for tomorrow. Anyways, today was also Aileen's birthday, she turned 15, and she got to spend the day with her fam jam and me, haha.  Once I woke up I had breakfast (yummy bread and Gouda cheese with butter) and then we went out for a drive. Andy and his family brought me to a couple of smaller villages around where we are. All the villages I have seen so far have been very cute, there isn't really a better word for them.

 The first one was Oudewater, we walked around the streets for a bit, and Andy told me that the tops of the buildings have different names, the step,  the baker, the clock, depending on how their facades look. We then went to a museum, it was a museum about witches. Back in the dark ages, people used to think that witches were as light and feathers, so that they could fly. In Oudewater, people could come to the weight house and be weighed to see if they were witches or not and receive a certificate stating that they weren't witches. There is a story as to why it was Oudewater that had the privilege to hand out certificates, but it is quite long, and according to the video, may not even be true. Anyways, I got myself weighted, and I am not a witch. It was pretty cool.

(Getting weighed to see if I am a witch, I will never go to Hogwarts *sad* )

We then continued to another village, I don't recall the name (but it started with an S) There we walked around, it seemed a bit bigger, and we had some apple pie and hot chocolate outside, which was during the only sunny period all day).

(different facades)

After that we saw some windmills, and we found some tourists. We went to a town called Kinderdijk, where there are a whole lot of windmills. It was pretty cool to see them, especially so many in one place. Of course nowadays, they don't need the windmills to pump water anymore, they have these giant screw things to do that instead. So it was buses and buses of tourists that were there to see the windmills, just like us. We also saw some funny tourists, that were probably almost as interesting as windmills.

Nadine, Andy's daughter painted my nails, blue, white, red and orange for Queensday. And then we ate dinner. It was also very yummy, vegetables and rice, and then we also had fallofel and this fried goat/sheep cheese pattie that was supremely good. For dessert we ate yogurt and blueberries, which was absolutely heavenly. One new thing I noticed was that the yogurt came in a carton (similar to milk) instead of the tubs that we have back at home. I then went for a walk with Selma and Aileen to walk their dog. It was super nice, because from the back of their property you can get right into the woods. Its a really nice forest with a pond(more like a lake) in it. It was a very nice walk.

(Forest behind their house)

We then drove into Utrecht for Queensnight. Which is the night before Queensday. People go out and there is music in the streets and people are selling tons of stuff, and you can buy beer everywhere and drink in the streets as well. On the way there we drove past Aileen's and Nadine's highschool, and then we parked at Andy's work. And I am currently in Selma's work right now (she works from home doing acupuncture, I am sleeping in her office haha) So I have seen everything :) . So Utrecht was very busy. There was one main street that was closed for cars and there were little booths all over the place. Aileen was able to meet up with her friends, they had decided to set up and paint peoples nails for 50 cents. They seemed pretty busy, but ended up making less then the cost of the train to get there. It seemed like they still had a pretty good time. We walked around the streets and stopped for a coca-cola. I think we all had fun people-watching, there were a lot of drunk people decked out in orange. Selma told me that it was a shame that I couldn't understand the funny conversations going on.

(Strange houses with floor to ceiling windows, it was like watching TV when they are eating dinner)

(Aileen's friends painting nails)

(Nadine, Selma, Andy, Aileen. Dressed in orange for Queensday)

I have arrived

It's just after 9pm, and I have never been more excited at the fact that I am starting to be tired, which means that maybe, just maybe, I will be able to sleep tonight, and not be ridiculously messed up by the 6 hour time difference I have just experienced.

I left Canada yesterday night at 7:20 EST and spent 6.5 hours on a flight to arrive at Schipol airport at about 7:50am, I got my bags and went through customs at about 8:40. I was pretty excited for the flight, If there is one thing to know about me is that I absolutely love airplanes. However, I was quite disappointed that the sun was shining directly in my eyes, so after about 30 minutes I needed to shut the window, so I couldn't look out at the clouds. then I stayed up pretty late and watched a dutch movie Suskind. It was a very good movie, and I was surprised that I watched the whole thing because I had already gotten bored and switched off two movies. Dinner was surprisingly good, some sort of curry dish and crackers.

I was only able to sleep about an hour and half the entire flight. Which was dissapointing. I listened to music for a while, it was dark, so it would of been difficult to get my ipod from under the seat, so I instead, listened to the music provided through the in-flight entertainment. After about a half hour of a random jazz station, I took a look and was throughly impressed with the cd music selection. They had a lot of cds and I was able to create a playlist including Gotye, Lana Del Rey and Rhianna :). It was super foggy when we landed, I didn't see the ground until I was on it. That was pretty disappointing, because the view of the farms and canals when you come into Schipol is super duper nice.

Once I arrived I was picked up by my second cousin, Cosmo, who lives in a town called Weesp. We drove to Weesp to pick up his mother and then headed to his brother, Andy's house. I am staying at Andy's house for the next two nights before I go to Venlo on Queensday. I stayed up until around noon while they visited with Andy's family. It is his daughter's Aileens birthday on Sunday. We had cake, it was very yummy. I napped until dinner time. When I woke up and showered, I had forgotten that outside of Canada, everything is just a bit different, smells a bit different, feels a bit different.

I think the strangest thing for me right now is that inside the house you can keep your shoes on, or wear slippers. It felt completely strange not to take my shoes off at the door. So I think that one of my first purchases will be a pair of slippers, so that I won't feel strange in other people's houses (or my own).

We had delicious pancakes for dinner, you couldn't have picked a better meal for me if you tried to. It was amazing, I ate them with apples, and cheese and syrup, or apples en kaas en stroop. Tomorrow I think we are going to visit some of the smaller towns around here, then to Utrecht for Queensnight. I am hearing a lot of hype about Queensday; they only asked me three questions coming into the airport, where are you going? when are you leaving? Do you have any orange clothes?

Packing and Miscellaneous Loose Ends

So, today I moved out of my house. I packed the last of everything up, left my key on the shoe rack and drove away from my house for what is probably the last time EVER. Well if that doesn't give me watery eyes, I am not sure what would. 

Today is a small entry about a rather dry subject. You never realize how many little loose ends there are to finish up when you are moving or getting ready for a trip, or in my case, both. This morning I had planned to leave my house early this morning, getting to my parent's house around noon. However, I had forgotten to factor in that the deadline for every little errand I had procrastinated doing was today. After finishing my dishes (and packing them), making some returns to loblaws and staples and getting myself an ISIC card, it was already 12, and the hope of a relaxing afternoon of unpacking and packing in my childhood bedroom was long gone.
Thank goodness for my great friend and housemate who is moving out later in the week. He agreed to make the trip to value village to get rid of our unwanted stuff, return our bottles and do a couple of other ottawa-centric tasks. If not for him I probably wouldn't of made it to my rents until supper.

I am now a little less then 24 hrs until I am at the Airport, still a multitude of little things to get done, and my entire life to pack up. Should be interesting, lets hope I can do it.

Moving

..urgh.

If I have any advice to give anyone, you should either live out of a backpack, own nothing, and move around often; or, find a place you like, settle down, and don't give it up until you die, maybe even let your kids inherit it so they don't need to move your stuff after you're gone.

Now that I no longer have a bed, I guess I have "moved" out. I am sleeping on a futon in my (soon-to-be) ex-living room. So, I figure that I am allowed to start writing about my summer. The past couple weeks have been highly annoying and plagued with headaches from getting ready to move out, and ironing out technicalities with allowing me to actually move to Europe. It has been one of the most stressful and undesirable experiences of my life. I have lived in my current dwelling for a little more then a year and a half, and apparently have accumulated a lot of stuff, not only furniture, but clothing, paper, school projects, and power tools.

Since I am going to Europe this summer, and I am trying to fit my entire life into this:

I got to move all my extra stuff back to my parent's house. They were really enthusiastic about getting a bed, futon, and table (along with a lot of boxes) as new tenants.  To my father's surprise we were able to fit everything into our trailer, so they only needed to come to Ottawa once :) Less pleasing was the miserable weather, but, hey, that's just what moving is, right? miserable.

(BBQ (with propane tank), Futon, Single Bed, Dining Table, Dresser, Bonus: 2 Wine Boxes of stuff)