Another oversized update...

Despite saying you'd hear from me quite soon again last time, I seem to be getting a bit slack with posting new messages up here, so once again, my apologies...

I have to start by saying (to David in particular)that I've noticed despite what you might think, there are hills to worry about in Holland... I've been having driving lessons out on the road again instead of in the simulator since two weeks now and trust me, there are a lot of hills in and around Utrecht :) And possibly even more roundabouts, which just drive me crazy... But I still love driving :) Even when I had my first driving lesson on the road as early as 7 in the morning and it was still very dark, I loved it. (Though there was a strong reluctance to get up when my alarm went off even earlier that morning, haha) And it was kind of scary to drive on the highway that morning too, with the simulator crash in the back of my mind all the time... Luckily I didn't crash this time :) Would have been a lot less damage-free I think :) All in all, I seem to be doing okay with driving if you don't count the amounts of times I stalled the car and how much I've exceeded the speed limit, haha.

Since last update I've also had the two big exams I told you guys about and I absolutely aced them, even beyond my own expectations :D First semester done :) A week of holidays followed, in which I went to the beach one beautiful but cold afternoon. I only realised how cold it really was once I was on the beach and my hands turned blue after just 15 minutes walking :) And the waiter of the place where I bought a hot chocolat afterwards hinted at me I was looking like I was freezing, as he said I might want to sit underneath the heating lamp they had in their cafe :) Walking on the beach cleared my head though and it helped me to get over my very bad cold I had then too :) The beach is just always amazing, even in winter :D

It was two of my flat mates' birthdays that week too, so we had a bit of a celebration for that, which was nice. We watched a movie together and of course had to have a birthday cake :) It was coowl...

And then I went to Hengelo for an XL-weekend at my parents' place which was also nice. It's somehow different being there just on weekends or on weekdays too... But on Wednesday I had to go back to uni and that day turned out to be a really bad day. The whole world seemed to be against me, or at least the bus company and the uni-people... I also had this "discussion class" from my driving school where they talk about all kinds of difficult situations you might get into, which was soooo useless and soooo frustrating!! But you get your second driving test for free if you go to those classes if you fail your first one, so I guess I'm stuck to it the next two times still... Otherwise I would definitely skip those classes!! When I finally got home around 7 that evening I had a very long hot shower and was glad the day was almost over :)

The good thing about it all was that the next day seemed to be even better than I thought it would be. It was the day I went shopping in Amsterdam with Roos and Anouk :D We left quite early to make as much use of the day as possible, haha. Well, shopping we did :) Don't think we even went into all the shops on the Kalverstraat (main shopping street in Amsterdam, it's the Kings Avenue of the Dutch monopoly board, haha) And we were there almost all day!! We only took a short break for lunch at this cafe around noon, and the rest of the approximately 7 hours we spent in Amsterdam, we spent shopping :) It was heaps of fun :D And my feet were killing me when we finally sat down in the train back to Utrecht. But the day was far from over then. Roos and I had dinner together in Utrecht (Anouk had to leave...) before going to our separate homes to get changed for going out that night. We went to Tivoli and danced the night away on some pretty bad music :) When I was finally in bed, I was so happy to lie down and not stand on my two feet anymore :)

I got horribly lost at uni the next day, as I had class somewhere I never had class before. Took me almost an hour to get to class, when it should have taken me half an hour, haha. Got there eventually though, after having asked about 5 people for directions :)

And then my weekend in Hengelo started, although I missed almost half of it, because I have been sleeping the mornings away almost completely. Woke up at 1 o'clock Saturday afternoon, while I had to be in the city by 2 (and it takes about 20 minutes to get there...), coz it was my friend Rick's birthday and we had to buy some presents for that still... After buying the presents, we went to Maarten's house with the three of us (Yves, Maarten and I) on just two bikes, which turned out to be really funny. My bike suffered a near-flat tyre and a broken brake from the adventure of two people on it, and we ended up walking to his house eventually to prevent any more damage from happening :) Well, that evening we went to Rick's birthday and it was fun :) Really nice to have my high school friends all together at the same place at the same time again for once :) It only happens at birthdays I think, haha. So yeah, it was good :)

Anyway, I really should update this website more often, because once again it turned out to be an oversized update. I seem to be really good at oversizing updates... Guess I got my inspiration from all those BIG THINGS you have in Oz ;) I hope I didn't bore you too much with my long update!! I'll try to spread my news out over more shorter updates, but I'm not making any promises anymore, haha. Would love to hear from you guys some time...
-x- Love Carine