Eind (for now...)

I haven't had the time/energy/motivation to post a wrap-up blog, so here goes...

First, my final mini-trip within the larger adventure was a beautiful vacation in Greece. Of course, the country is pretty well-photographed so the pictures are nothing new, but I can safely say that it is a beautiful place (especially the islands, I wasn't a huge fan of Athens.)

Windmills on Mykonos island. They look a bit different than Dutch windmills :)

Windmills at night.... because I think it's pretty.

Failed night shot of Fira, Santorini

Santorini island is a destination of many cruises....

The world-famous sunset at Oia (which had people cheering once the sun dipped below the horizon...)

This is the best shot of the Parthenon that I could get.... they were doing a lot of restoration work, and it was swarmed with tourists.


---------

Internship adventure in summary (i.e. cities that I visited in some way, shape or form)...

the Netherlands
Enschede (where I lived!), Vlaardingen, Leiden, Delft, Almelo, Hengelo, Groningen, Schiermonikoog, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Giethoorn, Zwolle, Maastricht, Eindhoven, Haarlem, Venlo, Baarlo
Belgium
Antwerp, Brussels, Gent (or is it Ghent? I actually don't know the English spelling), Liege, Kortrijk
Germany
Dusseldorf, Berlin, Munich, Hanover, Freiburg
Denmark
Copenhagen
France
Paris, Versailles, Strasbourg, Loire Valley, Mont St. Michel, Normandy beaches, Lille
Switzerland
Bern, Geneva, Lausanne, Basel, Interlaken
Austria
Salzburg
Spain
Madrid, Seville, Granada, Cordoba, Valencia, Barcelona
Morocco
Marrakesh, a tiny bit of the Sahara desert
Greece
Athens, Mykonos, Santorini
United Kingdom
London

Not sure if I missed any places, but anyway, it's a lot more travelling than I usually do when I'm in Calgary.

København! aka Copenhagen

A "brief" glimpse at the long weekend of adventure-ness (my first time to Scandinavia!)

The train from Germany to Denmark goes on a ferry!

For real! And you get out of the train and can take pictures and eat food and stuff.

A drink with some alcohol content that I actually enjoy (admittedly, it pretty much tastes like Martinelli's, but it feels cool to be drinking Swedish apple cider =P).

Did you know Lego is Danish? 
I didn't ...

Lego mock-up of one of the really touristy spots of Copenhagen (Nyhavn, aka New Harbour)

The "free town" within Copenhagen. Interesting, but gave me a weird vibe when walking around, though I can't quite describe that it was.

"Hey, there's something under construction behind this wall, so we'll put some art on it so you feel better about missing out on what used to be/will be here."

Live version of Nyhavn.

Close to the hostel... not sure if this was art (it had the name of a cafe on it) or an accident-turned-billboard...

The way iced tea should be. (I'm addicted to "housemade" iced teas in this continent, restaurants that do their own iced tea are awesome....)

SURVEYORS!! 

The famous little mermaid. I think this explains why I had "Part of Your World" stuck in my head this morning....

My wannabe-artistic-but-failed photo of Tivoli Gardens, the second-oldest amusement park in the world.

Slightly better picture of the Gardens, later at night.

This was at the train station and (sorry for the epic window glare problem) but U of C'ers, does this remind you of something?!


Anyway, that is all for now folks. Tune in next time to hear about interesting realizations I've had.
OR it will be another wait and maybe some pictures. We shall see...

A spike in viewership!

For whatever reason, there was a big increase in pageviews today, so I felt inspired to write another post :).

Recently, my brother and another brother came to visit! It was pretty exciting. We totally touristed the clogs off of these tall Dutch folk. In just four (+ two) days, we managed a bunch of stereotypical Dutch things:

We visited Keukenhof (huge flower gardens, surrounded by even bigger tulip fields..)

Kinderdijk, a UNESCO world heritage site featuring old windmills that do not seem to spin anymore....

Amsterdam, during the last Queen's day (or is it Kroningsdag?) of... this generation. We didn't get to see the King and Queen live (like in-person) but we did see them on big screens and we witnessed a legit coronation, not just one that you see in a movie.

Also experienced (but not pictured):
  • pannekoeken (hooray, Dutch pancakes!)
  • FRESH stroopwafel (I do not know if I can go back to the storebought ones, especially if it's from Superstore....)
  • uncannily beautiful weather (something I would classify as NOT typical Dutch....)
  • fried Dutch fast food (including fries with awesome sauces, kroketten and bitterballen)
  • other random Dutch-type fast food (doners are the burgers of Europe... and I got to introduce my brother to a kapsalon, haha.)
  • the charming city and parts of the campus in Delft
  • Indonesian food
  • a little bit of hot pot with the saints in Delft :) delicious
  • (falling down the stairs, but that was just me. And in fairness, the stairs in this country are called "traps" for a reason)
  • Konninginenacht (Queen's night) in The Hague -- we only stayed for an hour though, but it was enough time to see most of the carnival going on
  • the city centre of Arnhem
  • dinner with my former flatmates, including playing 30 seconds (a Dutch game, where you try to describe items on a card and your team has to guess), Taboo, and teaching them how to play telephone pictionary... which is always ridiculously awesome when you play with people whose first language isn't English (the Dutch are amazing at English, but occasionally the difference between a 'quad' and 'squat' gets them xD)
So, as you can imagine, I'm pretty exhausted. This, coupled with work, and insane allergies that make it hard to breathe.... I think I will go to bed now.

Welterusten!

Happy day

In summary form...

  • Woke up to find that my bicycle was NOT stolen, but someone stole the strap off the back (I use it to strap on groceries/things I buy). Kind of sad... but then I realized that I am thankful to the Lord that nothing more was stolen (and that I should not be so attached to material things, haha)
  • Booked a hair appointment and my telephone conversation was completely in Dutch :) Except when I said "space" (asking if there was space)
  • Went to visit a sister who moved here from South Africa and was very sweet and open. This is a long complicated story (of how her aunt got in touch with another sister who used to live in Delft but now lives in Antwerpen who tried to get her to email me and another sister, but only that other sister got the email, but then we sent back information from both of us, and then the one who is here emailed just me, but then we both went... I purposely made that make no sense), but one of the Lord's sovereign hand in all situations. Just as all our situations are.
THE END.
Yes, I am lazy with blogging, I apologize. I think it's costing me readers, haha. Next time there will be some pictures or something...

Windy

It's been super windy the last few days here... I can see the trees moving outside my window, and when you bike, it feels like you're not moving (even though the ground is completely flat.)

Anyway, I haven't updated in quite a while, so here are some pictures :)

Went to visit CERN in Geneva!

And went to the Geneva auto show! I thought these were really cute...

It was massive. But there were no semi trucks :( so I was disappointed.

Jeep for Cindy (except I'm sitting in it and everything is so shiny...)

Flower clock

The lake was SUPER BEAUTIFUL.... and it was a really nice day.

And then a totally different weekend (aka yesterday...)

Bible distribution at Utrecht Central station :) 


Brand (aka fire)

I feel like I wrote about this before, but I couldn't find it immediately, so maybe it was hidden in one of my other posts as a post script or something.

Anyway, if you try to search "Enschede" on Google, one of the first things that will come up is the fireworks disaster, which happened in 2001. I actually used to bike through the area where it occurred; all the buildings are new so the community is quite nice-looking but some people don't like it. Well, tangents aside, one of the main things is that this is probably the thing that Enschede is most "well-known" for.

Fastforward 11 or 12 years, and now I am here in this little city. In brief...

My parents came to visit in September. One morning while biking to work, I noticed it was harder to breathe than usual, and it came to my realization that there was a building on fire a short distance away.

We also ate together at an all-you-can-eat buffet, the last dinner that we had in Enschede (if I remember correctly).

In January of this year, I was biking to my new apartment and I passed by the restaurant where we had eaten... except it looked kind of like this:

It turns out that it had basically burned down during the Christmas/New Year's holiday week (I had been away). You can barely see their little lion statue is still almost perfectly intact.

Then, maybe a week later, around 5 or 6 of the stores adjacent to the restaurant also got burned down. I realized that they were cleaning up too quickly, so the picture I took (yesterday) looks like this:

(the building remains that you can still see are actually from the restaurant. The big pink containers are holding the pieces from the shops, which used to be standing in that area behind the fence.. if that makes any sense).

And, I think one or two weeks ago, my roommate told me that another shopping strip got burned down also, though it's somewhere in the south so I've never seen it.


This city has a kind of suspicious track record with fire-related incidences.

Bijbel distributie

Today I am in Eindhoven! (Another city in The Netherlands)

We went out today to hand out New Testaments and it was really cold out... the wind knocked the banner over multiple times. But, in just 1.5 hours (or less...), we handed out 55 bibles, with 45 people who were interested in hearing more about bible studies or seminars in the area.

I was quite impressed :) both with the heart of the saints (there are only 2 families who are really here in the city, so the other few carloads came from other cities) and the openness of the people. Though I experienced quite a few rejections, it was very sweet when you got to spend a little bit of time talking to someone who really wanted a bible.

It's too bad that our toes were freezing and most people were in a rush to go wherever they were going.

Prijs de Heer!

Change

Do you ever get that feeling that everything you know is changing and you can't keep up?

I wonder if I would feel like that more or less if Facebook didn't exist...

That saying probably applies here -- the only thing that doesn't change... is that things change.
(or something like that).


--

In other news, a quiet week to come.

And foodgawker is one of my new favourite websites. It makes me miss home. I want to bake but I don't want to buy flour. Haha. (Amongst other things, like cinnamon and nutmeg and oats and... the list goes on.)

The hills are alive....

with the sound of trains being delayed....

Haha. No, they aren't really.

But Salzburg, birthplace of Mozart and location of The Sound of Music was... full of snow. Perhaps it would've had a musical ambiance, had it been able to penetrate the freezing air.

I have nothing witty to narrate, largely due to tiredness, so here are some pictures!

It was cold!

Teehee, horse with gore tex jacket.

The view of the Old Town in Salzburg, from atop of their fortress-castle-thing

I was amused by the super green football (soccer) field, in the middle of winter... with people playing on it.

This is apparently the Mirabell gardens, where "Do Re Mi" was filmed. I think. It was hard to tell what things were, due to the snow... and all the plants being dead.

Austrian schnitzel!

Did you know that Red Bull is an Austrian company? I didn't. In Salzburg, they have a little Red Bull museum in Hangar 7, which is close to the airport...ish. It's about 20 minutes away from the airport if you walk, or if you take a bus from the train station, you get off a couple stops before the airport. Anyway, they have this nice showcase of Red Bull planes and cars and stuff. And nice restaurants where you can eat while viewing their lovely displays. And clean bathrooms.

The Law of Revival

I was thinking about what I wanted to write, but I couldn't properly formulate it into words, so I will just leave you with a verse and a quote:

"Most gladly therefore I will rather boast in my weaknesses that the power of Christ might tabernacle over me" (1 Cor. 12:9)

"We should not continually look at our weaknesses, for they are manifested so that through them we would see Christ. ... When we gaze upon Christ, who is newly revealed to us in a particular characteristic, we will be enlivened within and revived." (W. Lee, The Law of Revival)


I'm definitely feeling a need for revival these days.

Home away from home

Unfortunately for all you nice readers out there, today's post will be a healthy dose of text, and it might not be the most interesting. It's going to be one of those daily-life-adventure kind of things. Except there won't be cool adventures where I do dumb things like put my laundry into the dryer... it's all pretty average.

Well, normally stories have a beginning, so I will start with the first day I met one of my flatmates.

Okay actually I will back up. Did I ever blog about the process of getting this room in the first place? *goes to check* I didn't! Well, let me tell you...

Once upon a grey day in Holland (it might have been sunny, but 6 out of 7 times it's grey, so I will guess that this was one of those majority-like days), I was searching for a place to live. Lo and behold, I found an advertisement on the student union website of the university here (this is where I found my first place, by the way -- it's like a gold mine for finding accommodation, at least for me.) I sent a quick email asking about how long the room would be available and got a response saying that it was available until the end of April. The response also invited me to come meet the current people living at the flat.

Actually, prior to coming here, I knew that I would only be at my first apartment until the end of December, and that living with other people might be a possibility and I wanted to be able to meet them first, so I'm glad that I was invited to meet them. But it was a little bit intimidating... I'm not good with first impressions and first encounters. (Or second or third or... well... let's say I'm not good with people, in general. Not that I don't like people, just that I'm not very extroverted.)

The fated appointment was at 20:30 on a nice Thursday evening. I wandered around the city centre and did some pseudo-shopping before going to the apartment, which was close to the city centre. Actually, I think this was the day I fell off my bike, cause I remember I had to detour back to my apartment first, but that's another story for never time because people seem to get paranoid when I do silly things like that. But don't worry, nobody got hurt. Except for my boots. And my jeans, a little bit.

I knew where the apartment complex was because I pass by it every time I go to and from the train station from my old apartment. Shopping alone gets boring pretty quick, especially when you're not buying anything, so I ended up being early. This gave me an opportunity to wander around the front of the complex, which was not interesting. It was also kind of sketchy because there is a coffee shop across the street, and here in the lowlands, coffee shops don't sell coffee.

Well maybe they do, I don't know. I've never been into one.

Anyway, what happened next was a combination of ridiculousness and stupidity on my part. I wish I could re-tell it properly, but I honestly don't remember everything that happened. I just knew that I wasn't sure how to get to the apartment (on the 3rd floor), so I walked to an adjacent building, thinking that it might be a sort of "reception" area (not a real reception, but the area of the apartment where you can access the stairs and elevators). Once I walked in, I realized that it was definitely not the right place. There were some older, kind of... dirtier... for lack of a better word... looking men, who looked like they might be homeless. One of them said something to me, but it was in Dutch and I really couldn't understand. I wanted to try and ask how to get to the apartment building, but all of my Dutch left me at that moment, and thankfully a guy working there came to talk to me. I am pretty sure he said something along the lines of "you must be in the wrong place". He told me that I could get to the apartment by using the stairs, which were just outside and to the right. I thanked him. He also told me where I was, which (if I remember and understood correctly) some kind of institution where they help people with addictions. It wasn't as sketchy as it sounds, and I had a good laugh... with myself... later.

Since the door to the stairway was locked, I figured that I should probably ring their doorbell, so I did just that and they buzzed me in. I made it up to the third floor, walked in and joined them in their living room, where we had an "interview" of sorts. They asked me about myself, I asked them a bit about who they are (but it's harder when there's 3 of them and 1 of you) and then they showed me the room. The whole meeting took about 40 minutes, I think. Then they told me that they were meeting with two others who were interested in the room later that night, and I think they had already met with one earlier as well. I asked when I would hear back, and they said probably the next day. So I went off on my merry way.

I got an email later that day (like, past 11pm) asking if I would like to stay in the room. It was pretty exciting. I felt like I had gotten picked for something really important. Which is kind of true, having a place to live is very important... but yes. The whole ordeal was like a job application process, only for housing. I hope I never have to do it again.


Oh wait, I do. Because I still need 2 more months. Well, we'll see what happens.

In related news, I am very happy with the place I am at now. I remember asking the Lord about my housing situation and for Him to give me a place where He wanted me to be (this was after my 'interview'), and then I got the email of 'acceptance' later that night.

My flatmates are very friendly, generally studious, more social than I am, and cook interesting food. One of the perks of living with other people is that we take turns cooking, so I get to try both eating and making new recipes. So far, I have embraced some of my classics from home (adobo, cucumber and corn, scalloped potatoes, baked salmon, fried rice) as well as trying some new things (spinach tomato pasta, avocado pasta) and making random snacks along the way (frozen bananas with dark chocolate.... best ice cream substitute ever).


I have a tendency to ramble once I get going, so let's end this here.

Oh, random post script - there was SUN on my way home from work. HAPPY DAYS! I love it when the days get longer.

Blitz... the Dutch way.

There's this game that I used to play at home called Dutch Blitz. It's one of those "speed"-type card games where you try to get rid of your cards as fast as you can.

This beautiful picture that I stole from this fine website thanks to Google...

Well, the other day, my flatmate asked me if I wanted to play a game with her. With all of the free time I have (no sarcasm here, no school = quite a bit of freedom, aside from work hours) I happily agreed.

So we decided to play Ligretto.

Taken from these nice folks here, again courtesy of Google image search...


As she described it to me briefly, I told her that it sounded like another game I had played before. And sure enough, after I read the instructions, I played a few games of the original Dutch Blitz which is actually a German game called Ligretto. To pile on the awesomeness, I was playing with a Dutch girl who got it as a present from our German flatmate. 

And the word Blitz is originally German anyway.

( There was also a confusing but interesting variation that we tried... Maybe it will be confusing enough to stop all those crazy Belizeans who are too good at the game... XD )

Quatre! Or cuatro...?

I can't spell in different languages, forgive me. It was supposed to be French, then Spanish... and I refuse to look it up. Haha.

The final installment :)

Spent less than a day in Valencia (arrived around noon and left around midnight on a night bus) and just visited the Ciudad l'Arts .. and.. sciences... haha I forgot the Spanish again, but it's basically the City of Arts and Sciences and I absolutely loved the architecture. I think I like modern stuff more than old stuff, personally.

So you'll see a lot of shots of the buildings. I think it's made up of.. 5 different buildings? And it spans like... 7 blocks. There are multiple bus stops for the same place.

Looks like a whale!

So there are three main components to the Ciudad... one of them is Europe's (supposed) largest aquarium. I wasn't actually SUPER impressed with the aquarium itself, although it was still nice... but my favourite part was the dolphin show :).

Power ranger headquarters! I think this was actually the planetarium. Didn't have time to go in...

Too busy frolicking here, in the Science museum :)

View of the grounds at night

Then after the short stop in Valencia.... it was off to Barcelona!

Nice architecture... but is this Gaudi's? ... I actually can't remember...

But I know this one definitely is! And look at that line-up.... Didn't go inside =P haha. 

More Gaudi!

The famous Gaudi Sagrada Familia which is never finished. This side looks better than the other side.

Why hello there, beach in December...

And Olympic stadium...

I feel like Michael Jordan's footprint was not as big as I thought it would be. I wonder if it was for real...

View of Barcelona... looking down at a fountain (it's hiding behind those four pillars).

A different Plaza de Espana, taken from the top of a bull-fighting-ring-turned-shopping-mall.

Said bull-fighting-ring-turned-shopping-mall from the outside at night.

Previously mentioned fountain but from the other side. It lights up at night!

Fake Arc de Triomphe in Barcelona...


 And that's all, folks! Tune in next time for... maybe randomness about living with other students, which I had never experienced until now. :)


on faith, food and flying
The thoughts and experiences of a college kid on faith, love and life in pursuit of Christ, the loveliest One, while enjoying misadventures and quests for food, which so happen to take her around the world.
 
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