Jetzt geht's los!!

News of the week: World Cup of course!! It has officially started and everybody's all excited about it over here, because Germany is as close as it's ever going to get :) We even had to split the European Championships with Belgium when we organised it, so no chance the World Cup is ever going to be organised by The Netherlands. Everything and everybody has turned orange over here, it's crazy...

And I have to admit, I was one of those excited orange people just last weekend, when I went to the pre World Cup game between Dutchland and Oz :)It was so awesome to be there as one of the crowd!! The atmosphere was absolutely great :) Probably 90% Dutch, which was already obvious from the time I got on the train from Utrecht to Rotterdam... Totally crowded with people dressed in bright orange clothes, and one little boy dressed in yellow and an Australian flag around his neck. He must have felt pretty intimidated, but by the time we got to Rotterdam Central, a few more Ozzies joined the crowd and broke up the monotone orange with their 'gold and green'.

I met up with my friends Rick and Jelmer at Rotterdam Central, where we decided it wasn't worth it buying a train ticket to the stadium, because you had to squeeze in to actually get on the train. And once you finally managed to do that, you could hardly turn yourself around in the train, let alone for someone to walk through to check on tickets... Turned out they had this massive check on tickets when leaving the train station at the stadium though!! Lucky for us, it was so busy that they didn't really look at the tickets all that well :) Saved us a $60 fine :)

Lined up to get into the stadium, and then we were there!! One of the crowd :) Three of the many many orange people... You could just feel everybody being all excited and waiting in anticipation of the game. Singing all these typical Dutch soccer songs, haha. I'm not all that much into soccer or sports, so I didn't actually know most of the songs, but Rick is an absolute soccer fanatic and was singing along with all of them full blast. It was awesome :) I sang both national anthems though... Probably the only person in orange singing Advance Australia Fair :)

And then the game finally started!! There were these three Australian guys, all the way from Melbourne (what are the odds, hey...) sitting right next to us, being true-blue Aussies, loving their sports :) They were yelling out to all the players and shouting out things like "C'mon mate, there's nothing wrong with ya!! Get up mate!!" whenever a Dutch player got knocked down, which happened quite a lot :) It was so funny to watch them. And all the Dutchies doing the exact same thing with the Aussies :) If you've watched the game, you would have heard how the crowd went totally mad at the referee when Australia got a penalty. I cheered when they scored though, resulting in some minor bruises on my arm from my friends... Got to love them :) But anyway, the Dutch played pretty crap, they should have won. And if you are all completely honest, you all know it's true. But I always love watching the crowd react to the game more than watching the actual game anyway, so I absolutely loved it!! To be there, it was just great :)

Well since that game, I haven't even been up to all that much. I've done two discoveries though. I discovered the benefits of having food in the freezer (even if it's just crappy junk food) for emergencies, like public holidays when you're home alone and nothing is opened to buy stuff and you totally forgot about it :) Hypothetically speaking of course, I wouldn't forget such things ;) I also rediscovered what Dutch summers can be like, with frost at night and hail during the day only last week, when tonight we're going to have a BBQ with 30 degrees outside.

Last Thursday I went to a sort of 'meet & greet' kind of thing with my friend Roos, of a Dutch singer/songwriter called Spinvis, organised by my uni. It was really coowl!! He just came to talk about his music and answer questions and stuff, and it was just fun!! A bit tedious after a while, because some people seemed to be asking questions just for the sake of asking questions towards the end, but fun all the same... At the end he also played two of his songs, which was really awesome :) I really liked it anyway...

So that's more or less what I've been up to lately!! For those of you who don't know yet, I got accepted into my new uni course 'Liberal Arts & Sciences' about two weeks ago, which is pretty exciting :) Been trying to work out what subjects I want to do next year, but there's just so much to choose from. I'll figure it out at some point though :) Anyway, I hope you're all doing good and enjoying the long weekend!!
-x- Love Carine