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.