Do something that scares you every day

It has been quiet for a while...but that is not because I have not been willing to blog, but because there was simply nothing relevant to blog about. Talking to some friends in the last couple of weeks they couldn't believe me: "You...doing nothing exciting? How can that be possible?" Well, it is the thesis looming. After I finished my internship in july, I have only been working on my thesis, working for borderconcepts a little and learning Arabic (well, that will be exciting one day but until now I can only write my name and read words I don't know the meaning of).

The whole thesis-writing thing turns out to be much more exhausting and slower than I anticipated. Even though I have always heard everybody say that, I thought that for some reason in my case it would all be different, I would work very hard on it, full-time every day. But, even though it took some time for me to realize: Writing your thesis takes time. I am not a fan at all, but I guess it is a necessary evil that every academic has to go through sooner or later. After reading useful articles the whole july and part of august and working quite hard, I entered a slow phase. There were weeks where I had to come up with special reasons to leave the house (apart from going to the gym and the supermarket). Well, it saved me a lot of laundry, I got a good work-out and am quite relaxed now. By now, I don't have these troubles anymore, since I am slowly starting to find a job (which is a whole different story) and have found a number of reasons to leave the house on a regular basis. I have even discovered the library for study purposes, which has highly improved my productivity. Today I moved my desk around in my room, hoping to improve productivity and motivation even further (I am trying to put myself under the Hawthorne-effect). Still, I haven't been on a plane since the end of july (which is a sad record in the past 3 years) and there are just no exciting things happening to me. Having dinner with my dear Coniurata last week, we discovered that we had much more going on at the age of 15 than we do now. How sad is that.

So in order to improve this situation, last week I decided that I need to do something that scares me every day. I enriched the meaning of "something that scares me" with "something that I normally wouldn't do" and "something that I feel slightly uncomfortable doing". So, these are the things I have done since then:

Friday, October 23rd: Call company x and ask about the status of my application
Saturday, October 24th: Wear HighHeels all night at a wedding without bringing backup-shoes
Sunday, October 25th: Go to the Münster fun fair and actually take rides
Monday, October 26th: Call company and ask about the status of my application, but nobody picked up the phone
Tuesday, October 27th: Selection Day at company z
Wednesday, October 28th: Get a call from company z (I didn't do it myself, but I also needed a day of rest since tuesday was double-scary)
Thursday, October 29th: Go to the Utrecht Career Event and talk to recruiters

Unfortunately, I haven't found anything scary to do today yet. It is already 4 pm, so I doubt I will find something. Maybe I can do a scary yoga pose at the gym. Or I could start SPSS-ing the results of my pretest. That is exciting, because without useful results, I am basically screwed. But I am still open to suggestions on what to do today. Even though nothing truly exciting has happened to me yet, I already feel much less bored. And I have a lot of fun things coming up: going to H&M at 7 am to fight for Jimmy Choo pieces on november 14th, going to the Amsterdam Wedding fair with my photographer friend Jenny to find her new customers, going to a job fair in Germany, Halloween, conducting research for my thesis and talk to random people and many more things. I will inform you if something really exciting happens :)

My iPhone and me: the happy-ending

Coming back to Europe, planning on staying here for a while and having my cell phone contract expiring, I needed a new phone. Asking around and being a little bit of a nerd, my choice was made quickly: I needed an iPhone. After all, I also have a Mac. I had to wait a while until my financial situation recovered, but then, on March 20, the time had come. Since T-Mobile has an iPhone monopoly in the Netherlands, I went to the T-Mobile store to get a new contract. Being greeted by the friendly host and hostess (why does a shop need a host and a hostess…how about employing more real shop assistants so customers get served faster???) I waited for a long time. Then one of the real shop assistants took care of me, gave me my phone, put all my data into the computer, but oh! I had a German IDcard. It is T-Mobile policy not to accept IDcards, only passports. Even though I told him my passport was in Germany and the German law does not even require people to have a passport, he could not transfer my old number to my new contract without my real german passport. Well, I got my precious phone, went home, connected it to my computer and it immediately worked. I was flabbergasted. So much fun stuff to do with a phone! The next day, I went back to the store with a copy of my real passport, my ID and my temporary other passport. All of a sudden the fact that I didn’t have my real passport with me was not an issue anymore. But oh well, I was happy. Until a few days later I all of a sudden was not able to call or send any text messages anymore. So I carried around my other phone of which the contract just expired on April 1 for calling and texting and my iPhone for all the fun iPhone stuff. I repeatedly called the T-Mobile helpdesk, explaining my problem over and over again. The first time, I had to give the person my name and phone number. She was going to take care of it. It didn’t work. A few days later, another person needed all my personal data, including passport number. Still no effect. When I called for the third time (or maybe it was even later and the people in the meantime just weren’t able to help me at all) I was told I would have to fax my contract. Otherwise they couldn’t activate my SIMcard. That was around Easter. My other contract had expired so the only phone I had was my german phone. Since I was travelling everywhere and nowhere around that time (I believe it was Easter) I did not have my contract on me. It was not possible to retrieve it internally in one way or the other. Makes me wonder what they actually do with the contract…A week later, I emailed and faxed my contract. Still, it didn’t reach the right person. I had already visited the Vodafone website and looked at different Blackberries, planning on returning my iPhone and getting one of those if things wouldn’t work asap. I also told that to one of the people I talked to at the helpdesk. As all the others…he said he was sorry but could not personally help me. Throughout all those weeks I yelled at them, I cried on the phone, I requested to see the supervisor: nothing happened. Then, when I had partly given up and gotten a Prepaid Simcard so I would be able to at least reach my friends and be called, the incredible happened: the day before Queensday (April 29), my iPhone finally started working again.

I was happy the moment, but quickly realized that my old number had not been transferred. Still, I was too tired of the whole thing to take care of that immediately. Then one day, around the end of May (I have stopped to track the dates) I decided it was time to ask what had happened to transferring my number. A very friendly person at the helpdesk (who of course could not help me) told me he would start an internal inquiry to find out what happened. I would be called within five working days with the result of that inquiry. I laughed at him. Maybe that delayed the whole thing. So when I called two weeks later, obviously the reason for my number not being transferred was still unknown. And a solution was nowhere to be seen. I think I tried to call once after that and then just let go.

So two weeks ago, on July 30, I receive a call. I am talking to somebody from T-Mobile who is excusing himself for all the inconveniences I have had, offers me a 20€ discount on my next bill and asks if I would still want my old number back. Of course I wanted that. He told me I would receive further notice about how that would exactly go and again offered his excuses. I told him something was severely wrong with his organization and communication structure.

The day before yesterday, when I called Nelleke she asked me: so what is wrong with my iPhone (she just got the new one). When you called, I saw a number, not your name. I was confused at first, but then quickly realized: T-Mobile secretly gave me my number back. Thanks for not telling me. I don’t think I missed anything important, but just in case. The good thing is, I do have my number back. The one I have always had for more than 3 years. Almost five months after I initially got my phone, everything is working the way it should.

There is another thing that I have always been worried about and that I just solved. I know other people have also been through this: when I just got my iPhone, I had several panic attacks a day about losing it somewhere. And nightmares about it getting destroyed somehow. So this week I finally got a princessy pink shell and a display protector for it. It is not really pretty, especially because without the shell it is, but at least it makes me sleep at night. Finally.

At Schiphol Airport

Here I am again, this time waiting for my flight to Copenhagen. Seems like this is one of the few places in the Netherlands I find the time and inspiration to blog. Fine with me, one more reason to come here regularly :D It is quite funny how happy this place makes me. Apparently classical conditioning works. I only associate positive things with this airport as a lot of my journeys have started here. And every time I come here I accumulate more positive experiences so it’s kind of a vicious circle. If I could live here, I would. It is perfectly connected to the rail and road network and offers all other commodities one can wish for. Even a Starbucks. No other place in the Netherlands has that. Since a lot of people live on boats, maybe I can live on a plane. A houseplane. That would be awesome.

As usual, I have been quite busy J I finished my stupid internship report and finally got my bachelor degree. That was about time. And I am also done all my exams for my master so the only thing that keeps me from graduating is my master’s thesis. Which I am very busy working on. It will be in Consumer Psychology researching product packcagings and since I might use some of you as guinea pigs in my research that is as much as I will tell for now. I am really excited about it and working on it and seeing it advance makes me happy. My internship is almost done, I have four more days at Henkel and then I can put all my energy into it. Even though I’ll probably also get another job so I can continue to buy all the nice things I like and come back to Schiphol once in a while.

Two weeks ago I went to AIESEC International’s Transition Party in Rotterdam. It was really nice because I met Emily and Marc again and it made me remember fun Canadian times. It is only now that I can really look back on my time in Canada and reflect. It took me a long time to let go. Like my whole AIESEC experience. Even though I visited a conference on H4TF, I just can’t get myself to push that button on myaiesec.net and go to H4TF. I keep telling myself that I might still go on Exchange and therefore should keep it like this. And I’m also never in the mood to fill in the surveys... After spending a weekend like the AI Transition weekend I start doubting whether I should really get a job and start the grown-up part of my life. On the one hand I don’t feel ready for it there’s still so much more to do and I am kind of jealous of all the people I met, just starting their AI and MC terms. On the other hand I know that there is so much out there waiting for me as well...I just hope things fall into place somehow. Until then, I’ll keep worrying about the future and working on my thesis. And dreaming of my houseplane.

Am Samstag kommt das Sams…

Again, I let a lot of time pass before I shared my nonsense, wisdom and my exciting life with you on my blog. It’s not that there’s nothing to talk about, au contraire, I am just very busy, being all over the place and by the time I found the time to write about something I had in my head for a while, something new is in my head but not ready enough to write about. This will hopefully change in the near future, since I am writing my last two exams in the coming two weeks, I am almost done with my internship report (which puts me months ahead of a lot of other TCWstudents) and I am kind of cutting back on travelling…but for today there is something I am very excited about:

Those of you who grew up in Germany have probably heard of the Sams. Those who didn’t, check out the picture. It is a figure from a German children’s tale. There are some special prerequisites that have to be fulfilled in order for the Sams to come:

• The sun has to shine on Sunday
  
• On Monday Mr Mon has to come (since I live in the Netherlands it is also sufficient if the moon shines à Maandag)
•  On Tuesday I have to go to work ( à Dienstag)
•  On Wednesday it has to be the middle of the week (à Mittwoch, easy one)
• On Thursday there has to be thunder (àDonnerstag)
• On Friday I have to have the day off (àFreitag)

I was thinking about this today and I realized that all the conditions are fulfilled!!! So maybe the Sams will finally come to me (à Samstag). I would be very excited for the Sams to come, because even though it has a huge appetite and almost nothing is safe from him except rubber (I can deal with that somehow) having the Sams around brings some great advantages: it is incredibly fun and even more important, it has blue wish points on its face. And I could use those wish points. Nelleke (who lives in my house now, by the way) and I have just brainstormed what we could use them for:

•  finish my internship report (even though I am almost done, but the finishing touches would be nice
• make me pass my last two exams
• clean up my room (it always gets messy and dirty just by itself)       
• an OV-trainticket that is valid both during the week and in the weekends (so Nelleke and I can travel back and forth whenever we want and aren’t trapped in places during the weekend, maybe we could even make it a 1^st-class ticket)
• cure my cystitis (which is almost gone, but completely gone would be better)

I have also some more complex wishes, but wishing for the Sams to complete my master’s thesis or make me skinny might be a bit presumptuous and will probably overburden the Sams and make it ill…and we don’t want that.

So I guess I’ll have to work on these things myself. I’ll keep you posted.

Working Life

The fun times have to be over at some time and as I told you in my last post the time has come for me. Every day I get up between 7 and 7.30 (more 7.30 :P) and go to work for eight or nine hours. When I have lecture days I get up at the same time to go to Enschede. Look at some nerds and meet study friends, which is always great fun. After two months I can make my first conclusion: I really like it. That probably means that I have chosen the right internship. Until now I never thought in the morning „OMG I have to go work again and I don’t want to“. Of course I look forward to weekends, but that is most of all because then I finally have time for myself and do some fun things. Unfortunately I spend most of the evenings during the week studying at home, so weekends are precious fun time. I am looking forward to being truly grown up: having the evenings during the week free as well and, even more important make more than 2,60 € an hour. The fact that I get free laundry detergents and cosmetic products does not really make up for that. But I learn a lot, get to write my thesis and it is only for 6 months, so it’s okay for now. I am looking forward to work for real.

Right now I am enjoying another aspect that comes with working life. Since free time is scarce, travelling is getting much more scarce than I am used to (which is obviously not the good part), but the scarcity of free time gives me the perfect excuse to travel in my favourite way: by plane. I am on my way to Berlin right now and since cheap train tickets were already sold out and going by bus is just NOT an option, I am hanging out at Schiphol right now, drinking White Chocolate Mocca and waiting to board my plane. Getting here was a bit of a hassle, because the Dutch Railways are showing their sweetest side this week (again). On Monday some wagons of a train got out of the rails between Utrecht and Rotterdam/The Hague. It continued riding for like 5 km and destroyed the rails and the platform of the station it passed. So no trains riding there. People going from Utrecht to Rotterdam have to travel via Schiphol (check the map, it’s kind of ridiculous). Fortunately I wasn’t affected by that, but the train I was taking to Schiphol got cancelled and I just had 10 mins to drop off my luggage when I got here. Luckily I checked in online yesterday night, because real check-in was already closed. So unfortunately I didn’t have a lot of time to hang out. Which is sad, because Schiphol is my happy place. I just love being here. And I haven’t been in over a year.

In a few minutes I am going to fly to Frankfurt, where I have just been twice, travelling to Argentina and coming back. But I think I will like it almost as much as I like Schiphol. Maybe flying to Berlin via Frankfurt is not very „acting sustainably“, but I think AIESEC makes an exception on this value when it comes to travelling. My Mum also criticised the means of travelling and the itinerary, BUT it was cheapest (well except for the bus) and best fitted my schedule. And it is not my fault that Berlin is economically irrelevant and therefore does not have too many direct flights to and from other European capitals. On top of that: I use public transport every day and bike the rest of the time. So I can fly as much as I want to.

GET A LIFE!!!!!!

As much fun as all the Twilight-reading, travelling to Russia and hanging out in Münster around christmas was, it could not last forever. I had no idea what to do next, no financial resources and still no computer. So it was time to start fixing all that.

While being in Canada I had already decided that I would probably not just keep AIESECing, but first finish my studies. So when I applied to some internships while I was still in Canada and also sent two more applications during the holidays. But nobody was working during christmas and New Year`s, so I didn`t get any answers until after I was back from Russia. I returned the sunday after New Year`s and on monday my dad and I went to Saturn to buy me a shiny MacBook. I know this is spoilt and materialistic, but I was soooooo happy and relieved. I had my life back. I had a place to store all my data, a computer that was truly mine that I could take anywhere and on top of all that, it was a Mac. No more firewalls, antivirus programs and fatal system errors!!! Why are people using Microsoft? 

That monday I packed up my Mac and went to Enschede to meet with my OC. Of course I couldn`t just let AIESEC be AIESEC. It`s AIESEC Twente`s 20th anniversary this year and since my dear friend Wiebke is OCP of the Committee that is organizing a gala for that I just had to join as well. So, for a change, I am Organizing Committee Vice President Communications for our Alumni Event at the moment. Life is just nicer if you have an AIESEC title. Well, I met my OC that night, went to AIESEC Alumni drinks (which was much less spectacular than I had expected for some reason) and the next morning I paid a visit to my former workplace, borderconcepts in Gronau. Since I did not have a source of income that seemed a wise idea and Michael, my boss, loved it too. He immediately put me into an office and gave me a huge bunch of work. A week later he also gave me a dutch contract so I could apply for Studiefinancering. That solved my financial paradox and also gave me an occupation. There was so much work to do that I could go to Gronau anytime I want. Less hanging out at home. Positive. And more good things happened. 

Somewhere in that week I received an e-mail from Henkel. I had applied for a marketing internship there from March on. They asked me if I was interested in an internship in another department that would start in February. So a week later I had an interview for an internship in the Brand Management of Schwarzkopf Henkel Hairstyling in Nieuwegein, close to Utrecht. The interview went okay, but I wasn`t too confident. I had to wait three dreadful days for an answer and was already making a lot of Plan Bs (since I had just discovered I was also missing two more Master`s courses), when on the Friday they called me and told me they wanted me to come and work for them. OMG I was soooooo happy. Internship at a multinational company in Fast Moving Consumer Goods. Exactly what my plan was. I think at that point people around me started to get scared...I wasn`t even back for a month but I had things arranged quite well. But another issue arose: I was starting my internship over two weeks...in Utrecht. Which is not on commuting-distance to Münster. So I needed a room. And of course it had to be big, quite central and in a nice house. I searched really intensively and after visiting Utrecht another time and looking at some places I had also accomplished that. 17 m2, just outside the city center, next to a park, a supermarket and a bus stop. 475 euros...which people who don`t live either in the west of the Netherlands or other European capitals don`t really understand, but that`s the way it is. I took me a time to get used to the thought that my intern salary doesn`t pay my rent. But I had to live in a nice place. Having lived here for 1,5 months I am happy and regretless. 

I moved to Utrecht on February 2nd with the help of my dear family and the dearest Coniurata. Of course, as usual, I was tempted to kill my family during the moving, but I kept myself in, knowing they would leave soon. And they did. I unpacked and arranged and the next day my Utrecht life started. I get up every morning between 7 and 7.30 (haha those good Canadian times when I just slept as much as I want), then take the bus and the tram to work, work from 8.45 to 17.30 and then take the tram and the bus back home. In the first two months of my internship (which are almost over) I have one day in the week off to go to Enschede and visit lectures and study. That is kind of nice because it splits the work week. I like my internship a lot: it is diverse work, a lot of numbers and analyses, which I have never really dealt with before. So I already learned soooooo many things about that side of marketing. Which is, especially in FMCG, way more important than creative advertising-design. I also got a pretty good impression of how a global company works and I really like that and there are also a lot of cool things to do: writing texts for product introductions, coming up with concepts for advertisements and websites and organizing things internally. It`s fun, my colleagues are nice and I have a lot of fellow interns in other departments so we can share our experiences and hang out sometimes. 

Work is also exhausting. On friday nights, I am worthless. A tired something. It is pretty hard at the moment, because I am also taking two courses this block and they both include an exam and papers so I spend my days working and my nights and weekends studying for the greatest part. Not too much fun! But it will be over in a month and I just wouldn`t have been a happy person living at my parent`s and just taking courses. 

Utrecht is a great place to live. Beautiful, not as freaky as Amsterdam, not as metropolitan (in a bad way) as Rotterdam and central, so I can go anywhere if I want freaky or metropolitan for a day or a night. I also very much like that I didn`t have to make friends here, because they were already there and they keep coming. Jenny lives 25 minutes by train away, Niels lives in walking distance again and Annika is doing an internship in Rotterdam. And in May Nelleke will move into my house. And live next door to me. She visited yesterday and my roommate is leaving, so we are both very very excited. We`ll be roommates finally!!! After all our great plans have failed in Enschede. More and more people who are graduating come here from Enschede, so I won`t be alone and bored. 

Everything just turned out really well. Which makes me think...even though I hurt myself a lot by tripping or walking into things, being me is still quite good!

Vampire Princess in Russia

After I was back it took me some time to get over the jetlag and the fact that it was Christmas vacation, everybody was in town and there was something going on every night also didn't exactly help...but the good thing is: I had a pleasant occupation while I was lying awake every night.

I already mentioned how on the night before my birthday I went to see the Twilight movie. All my friends had exams to study for, so I went by myself. Which felt weird, because everybody had somebody else there and they were all looking at me wondering why I was alone, but whatever. I remembered a conversation I had years ago with my mum and my aunt about going to the movies alone...only grown-up, independent people do that. So there I was, on the night before my 24th birthday, being all grown-up and independent. Watching a Vampire-Teenager-Movie. And it was great. I am happy I didn't read the book before I went, because then I wouldn't be able to appreciate the movie as much as I did. As soon as I left the movie theatre I decided: I want a vampire for myself. Immaculate beauty, immortality and unlimited financial resources: that's what I've been looking for all the time. And if I could convince him to make me a vampire too, even better: immaculate beauty, immortality, unlimited financial resources and no need to sleep. It sounds just too perfect to me. But oh well, my birthday passed, no vampire came. Other interesting things happened on my birthday: I had to show my ID at the LCBO and I had a nice potluck at my place and played Werewolves with my friends. I wanted to buy the Twilight books but looking at everything I had already bought and trying to pack everything I realized it wasn't a good idea. So on the day of my departure, when my huge suitcases were checked in, I bought the first book at the airport. When I couldn't sleep in the plane, I read it. And I kept reading...because I couldn't sleep for a while. On Friday, I was done with the first book (I had bought it wednesday night), so I bought the next one. My brother gave me the third for Christmas and I bought the fourth right after the holidays, because I had finished the third already. I have always been a fast reader, but I also liked the story very much, I had plenty of time because I couldn't sleep at Central European Time and I didn't really have anything else to worry about. Of course, I had to find something to do and reorganize my life etc...but that doesn't really work when the rest of the world is on vacation so I kept my mind busy obsessing about vampires. I was very well aware that that was a bit stupid maybe, but well...it kept me busy for a while. And even though the books are an easy read, I have read much more stupid and trivial things in my life. Every book from the Twilight series borrowed the theme from a classic, the first one is based on Pride and Prejudice, the second on Romeo and Juliet and the third on Wuthering Heights. I don't know about the fourth, but I will figure it out at some point.

Things got less intense when the holidays were over and it was time for me to embark on my next adventure: we had planned it for a long time, I managed to get a visa even against all odds, so on December 30th Niels and I went to St. Petersburg to visit our dear friend Mariya. I hadn't seen Mariya since she visited me in Copenhagen in the summer and I hadn't seen Niels since the end of June when I was last in Utrecht, so those were very pleasant reunions. We had a lot of fun in St. Petersburg, because Mariya had her hilarious friend Oksana with her boyfriend visiting as well. On the 31st of December we went to explore town with Oksana and her boyfriend. Unfortunately we were not very well prepared, we didn't have a map or a guidebook and our Russian friends were neither, even though they pretended to be. So we walked around a bit and ended up going to the Hermitage, which is the Russian version of the Louvre, basically. It is really impressive. We just spent an hour there, because it was about to close and for some reason we didn't go there earlier, but I was very impressed and decided to go again. It would also be a great place to have a party. Mariya had chosen a different place to celebrate the New Year, a very stylish club in downtown St. Petersburg. For the impressive fee of 90 Euros we could drink as much as we want and there were free cigarettes and free fruit (this becomes important at a later point of the visit). It was a great party and we had a lot of fun. I wanted to be a vampire in the end of the night. Check facebook for pictures.

The next morning, after I recovered from a slight headache, I was wondering why everything I had in my handback was sticky and covered in weird dirt. My party companions couldn't help solve that mystery so it stayed a mystery...until the next day. When we were on the subway - OMG the St. Petersburg subway is the most beautiful subway I've ever seen (well aware that most of them are ugly but whatever, it is REALLY nice). The stops are all decorated, some with statues, some with mosaics, other with art-decoish elements...really cool. And very very very deep. So much for the subway. Unfortunately it is forbidden to take pictures in there. - but we were sitting in the subway and somehow Dimmo, our Russian friend got into a discussion/fight with a smelly drunk homeless woman who then pretended to call the police. The way she did that was hilarious: she searched for her cell phone (deepest subway in Europe + cellphone = not working), finally found it, held it upside down to her face and immediately started talking. She could have grabbed anything and would have used it as a phone, I imagined her taking a remote control out of her bag, or a banana. When I thought of the banana, I had to laugh like a crazy person for a while. In that moment I had solved the mystery: out of all the free fruit at the party I had grabbed a banana and put it into my purse. I don't remember what I was thinking...but that explained the little mess I found the next morning. We were not able to recall what happened to the banana itself. The rest of the time in St. Petersburg we spent walking around in the cold, freezing and visiting sights. It is a truly beautiful city. The only reservations I have are about its cuisine (which we didn't really try but the things we heard and saw were sufficient) and the absent friendliness and english language skills of its inhabitants. I would like to go again in summer, when it is less cold.

It's been a while...

It indeed has been a while since I last updated my blog. And, I wouldn't be me if there weren't a million things happening in the meantime. As always, I will start at the beginning by telling you the primary reason for not writing anything while I was still in Canada, although the majority of my friends already know because of my moaning: My computer died!!!

I spent the whole first weekend of december in Toronto, hanging out with the MC and having a great time and when I came back on monday morning, I switched it on and BANG: screen went black and after consulting the helpdesk at the university and a nice gentleman at the store I knew: this was it. I had anticipated something like this would happen at some point, but I was totally not ready for it. I spent two days being miserable and crying, but then I continued working on other people's computers, the university, etc. Anyways, my life kind of turned into "a shallow hole" like Danny called it, since I was in Guelph, everybody was having exams, it was freezing cold outside and I had to save the money I planned spending on trips to buy a new computer at some point. I was longing to go back to Germany, where there were my parents' laptops waiting for me and eventually they were going to buy me a new one...

But I still had some time left in Canada, I had my birthday, I saw Twilight for the first time (I will dedicate another blog entry to this at some point), packed up all my stuff, and spent the last days with the dear friends I had made there. Then the day of my return had come, with my suitcases packed, each weighing exactly 50 pounds, I went to Pearson Airport which was a mess so short before the holidays. Everything went smoothly, I had the Twilight book to help me through the night because unfortunately I wasn't really able to sleep. I had a stopover in Zurich, which was quite funny. I was dressed the way Northamericans dress when they travel, because it is most comfy: trackpants, sweater, scarf and had two huge heavy pieces of hand luggage. There was I, sitting between all the bankers and businesspeople on the Lufthansa morning flight to Dusseldorf. But oh well...it was worth it. I guess that also scared the customs people off to search my luggage for goods I should be declaring. Honestly, I don't think I had anything I should have declared, so I looked rather innocent.

And on the other side of the door my dear family was awaiting me!!! That was soooo nice!!! Of course instead of driving straight home we took a detour of the Ruhrgebiet because my Dad had things to do there and we had to drop off Andreas at his place in Dortmund. So when I was home I was exhausted and had only two hours to rest, because Wiebke and Wouter came at night. We went to the Christmas market, chatted and eventually they went to bed, because they were tired and I was jetlagged. I spent the whole Christmas vacation catching up with friends, partying and reading :) and eventually went to Russia for New Year's. It was really nice to be home and see that, even though I was gone for quite some time, things haven't really changed. Friends are still friends, family is still family and it is great to have them around!!!

I'll hopefully be able to tell you more about my trip to Russia, my Twilight obsession and my new exciting life shortly...