"A Christmas Story"

Where to begin? Hope you all had a great Christmas... Mine was sort of white, depending on whether you count Boxing Day as part of Christmas or not :) Dutchies do. We actually call it 'first Christmas day' and 'second Christmas day' litterally translated. Some say it's for the inlaws :) (And I'm afraid it's true too, haha)

But it started snowing in the evening on Boxing Day. It's snowing right now too, so everything's all white and pretty again :) Quite some contrast to last year's Christmas in the hot 'wannabe-city' of Adelaide ;) But it was a nice Christmas all the same. More or less the same as ever: Christmas Day at home in Hengelo with my parents, my sister Renske and Paul, my sister's boyfriend. We had a beautiful Christmas dinner and it was just a nice day together :)

Boxing Day, Renske and Paul left to have the Christmas celebration of Paul's family. (Told you the two christmas days are really meant for the inlaws :)) After briefly dropping in at my grandma's place and wishing my mum's side of the family a merry christmas, me and my parents went to the 'Stroet Christmas Celebration' at one of my aunt's place. I hadn't seen most of my relatives yet since I came back here, so of course I had to be "assessed" by all of them. The "Jeez, you've grown", the "Oh, you've changed a lot" and the "You look more and more like so-and-so" statements were heard quite a bit :) But it was an awesome day and it was good seeing everybody again after so long.

One of my uncles had brought his new guitar with him to play Christmas songs. And then before I knew it, I was tricked into playing some songs too, so I did. I loved it, even though I usually don't like to really play and sing in public... And they didn't run away screaming, so I guess I didn't sound too bad. They actually wanted me to play some more when I stopped!! It was just awesome :D It got me out of doing the dishes too, which is always good, haha.
So all in all I had a great Christmas, even though I missed all of you too.

Some other news of a totally different kind: I'll have a new room mate after my holidays next week. Last update, I said we were going to have interviews that night, but that turned out to be a disaster. After everyone had come and gone, we didn't think any of the girls would really fit in with us, so we were still 'roommateless' by the end of the day. But then Lydia had this friend of hers who was still looking for a room, so we had her over the next day and we decided to have her as our new room mate. We'll see how it goes, but she seems really nice :) And we sold our huge and outdated 70s TV, painted our walls 'applegreen' (with the paint that Loes accidentally tipped over and spread all over the kitchen bench, haha :D) and have almost sold our hideous furniture, so there are a lot of changes at my place in Utrecht for the new year. All very exciting :)

So there it is, my christmas story. Nothing much going on otherwise. Looking forward to New Year's Eve. Don't have any real plans yet, just that I'm getting together with a couple of friends after midnight and we'll see what we'll do then. It might just be an all-nighter, but it's definitely going to be a night with little sleep. I'm excited about it though :) The fireworks are always awesome and it's just always a fun day and night. You'll definitely hear more about it later :) I'll upload some christmas photos later, but for now, I think I've written enough again :) Hope you're all doing good and having a great holiday :) Love Carine