Efteling!

Captain America has been absolutely wonderful and took me to Efteling for our 6 month anniversary! 

Efteling is a theme park and I've been there before, but really wanted to go again. I had so much fun on all of the rides, including the Python on which I was too scared to go last time (a double loop is not necessarily my favourite thing). Conquering my fears it was! Quite frankly, I was pretty excited about it going to a theme park, just like a little child, and I think I really needed to spend a day without thinking about anything serious. And we had ice creams, and baklava, and hot dogs, it was nice and sunny, so what else could I want?

And I found TEA!

It was a wonderful day, made me so happy! Just a perfect way to celebrate ;)

Two months!

There's only two months left from my year abroad, it's absolutely crazy! It feels like I've only arrived a few weeks ago and yet so much has happened since September. I really don't want to leave, especially that next year is finals year and it will be so stressful and busy. Not fun at all when you compare it to my time in Leiden, filled with baking and cycling.

I'm not quite ready yet to make a review of this year abroad, I'm not even ready to commit to a date when I leave the Netherlands. In the meantime, it is my intention to enjoy summer time, explore the surroundings (I'm yet to go to the beach here), keep baking and be happy. Sounds like a good plan to me.

Overgrown with dirt.

Ever since I started sharing accommodation with other people, first in the boarding house, then in college and an apartment in Leiden, I had to deal with filthy people.

And I don't people people who don't shower, or have a bad breath, dirty long nails or something like that. I mean people who, whatever they do, always leave dirt behind. It's completely beyond me how you can go about life in such a way.

Hair in the shower drain or in the bathroom sink is like a never ending story. Same goes for toothpaste in the sink. But the battle really starts in the kitchen. After breakfast time, breadcrumbs take over the kitchen counters. I have a suspicion that people live under an illusion that there is some sort of a breadcrumb fairy in the house who sweeps away all of the breadcrumbs that they leave behind. They must live in Wonderland or something, because neither in Poland nor in the UK have I encountered any breadcrumb fairies. Needless to say, food in the sink is also, apparently, cleaned up by an appropriate set of fairies. Those fairies must be pretty busy by the way, since they also take out overflowing recycling bins, pack and unpack the dishwasher, clean the fridge from mould which inhabited the veg crisper and do all sorts of other stuff too. Oh, and dirty knives and forks left in the sink are the recent occurrence, so our housekeeping fairies need to deal with those now.

I'm quite far from a perfect housewife ideal, but all this dirt drives me crazy! How are people not disgusted to prepare food in a dirty kitchen? Or take a shower in a dirty bathroom? Goodness gracious, it's absolutely awful and this is all I have to say on this matter.

Apocalypse (or about King's Day again).

Preparing for Monday, I felt as if I was preparing for an apocalypse. My fridge has never been so full eggs, milk, butter, veggies, cake (of course!), meat and fish, everything is there so to make sure we, two very hungry people, survive Koningsdag.

I've even polished the entire house, so that when we are stuck at home for almost 48 hours, we don't need to worry about sticky floors,dusty corners and sinks covered with toothpaste. Apocalypse is definitely not the best time to do a spring clean.

And we've survived!

There was a flea market in Leiden: it seems like at least half of families in Leiden decided to get rid off their stuff that morning. There was nothing of particular interest to me there, but it was a sunny day, quite warm, so it was a pleasure to walk around for an hour or so. Party noise have withered away by 11pm (sic!) and the day in general wasn't as apocalyptic as I feared. But in any case I'm glad that we're back to normal now ;)