**Happy New Year**

I know, it's a little late, but I wish you all a very happy 2006!! Hope you had really good celebrations and had a good start of the new year. I heard from several people that it was a really hot start at least... Don't you just love fans and airconditioning at times like that :) At the moment, I'm totally loving heaters, which is another great invention of mankind. The snow is all gone since a week or so, so we're only left here with the cold...

About my New Year's celebrations, they were awesome :) Didn't do much during the day, to save up energy for the night ahead. I made way too many apple turnovers, which is kind of tradition, but that's really the only thing I did... On New Year's Eve, there's always this cabaret thing on TV, which is always really funny, so we watched that in the evening. It was coowl. And pretty soon after that finished, we were counting down the last 10 seconds of 2005!! Now in Holland, we are allowed to have our own fireworks. The noise of them actually woke me up in the morning already, it just went crazy all day!! But we only lit our fireworks at midnight. We always buy our fireworks with heaps of neighbours, so the stuff we have is pretty awesome. Just look at the photos :) And please do note the fact that you can see fireworks, because they are the only ones out of probably about 20 where it actually showed up on the photo too!! I'm not too good on timing, haha.

After midnight, a couple of friends came over to my parents' place, which was really cool. We just had cheap champaign and lots of fun together and it was just awesome :) And pretty early in the morning when I finally got to bed, only to be awake 4 hours later again, because I was going to my grandma's to wish her a happy new year too. That was nice, so all in all, I had a really good New Year's. But by the end of that first day of 2006 I was completely done for. And I definitely didn't want to think about the fact that I had to go back to Utrecht and start uni again a day later.

But the day came anyway, whether I liked it or not, so I packed up all my stuff again and went back to Utrecht. When I got home, our whole living room had changed heaps. Loes (one of my flatmates) had had her parents pick up all the furniture we had over the holidays and she had bought a new dinner table and chairs and the ugliest clock you've ever seen (just look at the photo...) Our excuse to put it up anyway was that it's retro :) And during the week we did some more work on our living room to make it look really awesome :) Like we bought this little cabinet via the internet, which we picked up one night. With all four of us, because we couldn't decide who was supposed to pick it up :) (we're just with the four of us until the end of January, for those of you getting confused because I'm usually living with 4 other girls..) It was so funny!! We took the bus down to the place of this lady who was selling it, and the look on her face when she saw four girls standing in front of her door to pick up this little cabinet was just so funny :) She must have thought we were crazy. Just like the busdriver must have thought the exact same thing when we came running to the bus with it, so as not to miss it. Every single corner we went around, all the drawers nearly fell out. We were just laughing at ourselves so much :) We also put up heaps of posters at the end of the week, because the walls were just a bit too empty. So now it looks pretty cool already, even though it still needs some more stuff done. It's so much better to have dinner now though, because we're not all crushed together anymore like with the old table. Love it :)

The biggest newsflash from Dutchland as far as I'm concerned is of a whole different kind though. I finally signed up for driving lessons!! And I'm starting next Wednesday :D I'm so scared, but it's also so exciting :) Can't wait to start and really can't wait to have my driver's licence :) That's probably going to take quite a while still though, because in Holland it's not allowed to practice with your parents, so you're totally dependent on the driving lessons to learn how to drive. Which also makes it heaps expensive, but it'll be so worth it once I have my full licence :) Can't wait...

So that's really all I've been up to since my last update. Hope to hear what you've all been up to some time. And if the summerheat gets too much for you to handle, you can send some over to me if you want to :) I won't mind at all :D
Love Carine