Okay y'all: I have a maandnetkaart and a day off from school. Where shall I go? I'm interested in getting the heck out of Noord-Holland, but don't want to travel more than 2 hours or so each way. So Maastricht is out, unfortunately. :) Any other suggestions?

I stayed home in the end because I started feeling really shaky and dizzy and I couldn't imagine myself biking like that. In the end it was a good choice, because I feel very much worse than earlier. No idea how high my fever is, but I went to bed for a while and woke up just now wearing a lot of clothes, a jacket, a woolen hat, two pairs of ( Read more... )

I'm sick. I woke up in the middle of the night on Saturday with my throat hurting so badly I couldn't sleep. Several cups of hot chocolate later I went back to bed, only to wake up on Sunday morning to find that I had lost my voice. The annual Winter Cold (okay, so it's only autumn, but it feels cold enough here to be winter) had struck again. My ( Read more... )

Ack! Haven't had time to update lately-- it's been chaos. My mom, dad, and sister came to stay with me last week, which was wonderful, but now I'm really behind in my schoolwork. I'll catch up, but it's a bit of a scramble at the moment! We spent a few days bumming around Amsterdam, toured around Leiden (where I study) and made a quick trip to Den ( Read more... )

I've had so much to read for school this past week that I've already gone through two highlighters. And I'm not even a highlighting freak or anything ( Read more... )

I've been reading that people who are allergic to cats often can tolerate the Siberian cat, a big, furry, Maine Coon-like cat from Russia, since it apparently has very little of the chemical which makes people react in its saliva. I've been searching around looking for breeders of the "Siberische Boskat" in the Netherlands, and have found several ( Read more... )

Sometimes I feel like this is a really terrible time to be alive in this world. Terrorism, beheadings, paranoia, religious fundamentalism, nationalism, child hostages, anti-Americanism, and the erosion of civil rights back home in the US. I could try to shut out all of this depressing shit and just focus on being a happy little MA student studying ( Read more... )

Haven't really felt like updating lately, though I have been reading my Friends page daily. The weather's turned cold, school is a mess (it's two weeks into the semester and they're still coming up with more classes I have to take and rescheduling the ones I'm already following...), and my life is moving ahead in fast-forward mode ( Read more... )

Got grilled today at 9:00am by a panel of professors to determine if I am capable of doing the more advanced research MA. This whole experience was made much more unpleasant by the fact that I had to wake up at 6:30 to get there on time, and by the fact that one of the professors was only there to ask "nasty questions", as he put it. Like when I ( Read more... )

Yayyyyy! Life is good! Had a wonderful morning-- Laura and I went walking and photographing mushrooms in Het Zwanenwater, a nature preserve-- and now I am fixing to head to Haarlem, where I will meet my dad. I haven't seen him for over three months, so I am really excited!