24 and counting....

Wow, I can't believe it's been two months since America and therefore also two months since my last blog! Writing about the latest happenings in my life seems to always be easier when every day feels like an adventure, like when you're travelling in a big RV with two dear friends across America. Life seems much less adventurous once you're back in your hometown, and normal everyday life takes over again. Of course that's not to say nothing happens in my day to day life, just that it often doesn't really seem to warrant a blog as much as travelling does :) But here goes anyway: my latest happenings.

So I got back to Amsterdam from LA on a Wednesday somewhere halfway through September. After a few days spent at my parents' place catching up with them and beating the jetlag, I made my way back to my own place in Utrecht again to find a big 'welcome home' sign on the front door and 3 new housemates having taken up residency (the latter wasn't a surprise by the way...) Let me introduce them to you. Instead of Maaike, who moved to Peru for a year this July, I now have 26-year-old psychology student Mirjam as my 'next door neighbour'. Directly across the living room, Lydia - who moved to a bigger place on the other side of Utrecht - made room for Judith, a 26-year-old med student. Lastly, Loes moved back to the south of Holland to pursue her career and to move in with her boyfriend, making her room available for 26-year-old recently graduated marine biologist Eva to move into. The change of housemates has been fun as the new girls are really nice and have brought plenty of laughs with them already, although it has been strange too to all of a sudden be thrown back into the 'getting to know each other phase' after having lived with the same girls for 4 1/2 years.

Once returned from America, it proved harder than I thought to shake the holiday feeling completely and focus on my thesis again the first week or so back. So instead I just focused on catching up with everything else :) Had my dear friend Coen's goodbye party some time that week too, who I saw walking through security at Schiphol airport about a month later, off towards his year in South-Africa. Long goodbyes are never fun... Seeing someone again though after they've been away so long is very exciting, as happened to me when I saw my good friend Yves again last week. He had been to Indonesia for 8 months and lives all the way up north of Holland, so we hadn't gotten around to seeing each other yet since his return. It was very cool to see him again and have a proper real-life catch-up :)

Somewhere between saying goodbye to Coen and saying hello to Yves I also had a lovely weekend at the beach with my fam. Despite the predictions promising us a really rainy weekend, the weather was just perfect for walking along the shoreline, and it was so nice and relaxed to be there :) Beach is always a winner with me anyway, haha.

By that time I had also finally managed to get back into study mode and was doing my final few interviews with military women. Last week I had the final two, so now I 'only' have to actually write my thesis and I'm done! No more uni ever... Not sure what to think about that yet. I'm currently floating between finding that fact rather scary and daunting, while on the other hand being really excited about it. So the jury's still out on that one :)

And now I just turned 24 this Sunday! This year I'm delaying the proper celebrations for it until I have finished my degree as well, which will hopefully be somewhere around January. But I had a lovely relaxed b'day with the fam yesterday and today I came home to Utrecht to find the living room and my room completely decorated for my birthday, which was so nice! I have the best housemates :) Tonight I had a small but lovely celebration with current and former housemates too, so I'm not letting it go by completely unnoticed. Besides, all the birthday wishes I've been receiving from some of you have made sure I've felt very loved on my birthday too :) So thank you to all who made my birthday extra special in one way or the other!! You're awesome :)

Anyway, that's it for me for today! I hope you're all enjoying what's keeping you busy, and I'd love to hear all about it so please feel free to leave a comment. For now I'll leave you with 10 new photos and plenty of love :) Mwah!
xx