A 10km birthday party!

Nico, Jurgen and I are signed up for a 10km run in Breda and it just happens to fall on Nico's birthday. What a great way to celebrate!

You can find the route here: http://www.bredasesingelloop.nl/media/2008_10km.pdf

Want to join in the fun? Then sign up here: http://www.bredasesingelloop.nl/content/view/70/96/

An easy way to give

Quite a while ago, I heard about this site through other English language teachers: http://www.freerice.com/. It's a vocabulary game you can play and for every word you get right, 20 grains of rice are donated through the UN World Food Programme.

Just recently, I heard about this one: http://www.freepoverty.com/. This is a geography game that I love! For every location that you answer correctly, ten cups of clean drinking water are donated through the Water Aid Organisation.

And this one is especially for dog lovers: http://freekibble.com/. It's a daily trivia game about dogs and when you answer, right or wrong, 20 pieces of kibble are donated to different animal shelters. http://www.freekibblekat.com/ is the same, but donations go to, you guessed it - hungry cats (Thanks to cat loving Sam who pointed this one out).

These games are fun (and slightly addictive, depending on your personality type ;)) and easy to play on any old computer. And here's a time when advertisers, sponsors, whatever you want to call them, appear on websites for something good.

So go play!

I'm back!

So it's been over four months since my last entry and I'm going to get my excuses out of the way right now: I was working two jobs, going to Dutch classes twice a week (with 10+ hours of homework per week) and doing my MA. Then I was having a life, and during that time, I couldn't be bothered to sit in front of a computer and write my tales. Now I have one job, my new Dutch teacher is on holiday until mid-August and I'm taking a semester break from my MA. I still have a life but now I have a bit of extra time to pen those famed tales. But instead of boring you to death with four months worth of drivel, I will do the highlights (in no particular order) instead.

Highlight 1: Today it was hot - around 30 degrees - and that's hot for this part of the world. Lots of people go to the beach (or have been relaxing on the beach for weeks already as most of the population heads south to Greece or Italy or Spain or insert other hot country here), or they go to a nice park and sit in the shade of a tree and have a picnic, or they sip rosé at a riverside bar. What do Nico and I do? We have lunch at our favourite socialist bar - Nijmegen is known as Havana aan de Waal (Havana on the Waal river) after all - and decide that we would cycle to Kleve in Germany. It's only about 25kms away so a 50km round trip is a good cycle. We also decided to take the "high road". Yes, the road that has many hills. This area where we live is the hilliest in the land, so as we were on our way, we saw many serious riders in all their kit speeding up and down the hills and dinging their bells whenever they were approaching so we could get out of their way. Eventually we got to Kleve and stopped at a city park, complete with ponds and fountains and cool trees. Instead of cycling back along the same route we had come from, we decided to do a loop (up more hills) to get back to Nijmegen. As we were doing this, we ran into a fair. Rather than going through it, we thought we'd take the next road. But it didn't quite turn out like that. Instead we ended up in mountain bike / dirt road territory. BIG hills, mud, dirt, rocks. Whatever suspension I may have had on my bike is now gone. Completely. After Nico's sense of direction got us out of there, we had added QUITE A FEW extra KMs to our journey. And then we faced another hill. At the end of this one we grabbed an ice cream and another LARGE bottle of water from a service station and headed towards Nijmegen. It was a few minutes later that we were on exactly the same route as we had come in on! Typical :) But we found a nice detour and MORE HILLS and after a while (I lost track) we ended up at home - sweaty, thirsty but well exercised.

Highlight 2: The vierdaagse. This is the famous four day march of Nijmegen. Those with slight bouts of insanity think it's acceptable to walk 40 or 50kms a day (you choose!) for four days in a row. Luckily, it coincides with Nijmegen festival so for seven days there's live music, good food, rides and general fun to be had in Nijmegen - most things for free (except the toilets, of course)! Nico and I enjoyed four of those days / nights - a couple with friends. On the very first day, Jessica and Geert came over for a day / night of fun, though I will never forgive them for introducing Nico to the Nintendo DS the following morning!! But here are some happy snaps of the evening:

Highlight 3: The EK - the European Cup football championships. Almost the whole country was washed in Orange in support of the Dutch team, who made it through to the quarter finals and unceremoniously crashed out to Russia. Spain won the whole thing...they've been winning a lot lately...the football, the tennis, the Tour de France. Anyway, for one of the matches we caught up with friends in Eindhoven and went to the old stomping ground 't Pandje. Patrick and Sam must again be thanked for their patience during the kaassouffle incident. Here are some pics, courtesy of Patrick and Sam:

Highlight 4: Eurovision Song Contest. Come on, who doesn't love this. We watched it on a wall (I kid you not) at Jessica and Geert's place in Breda, along with Sam and Just Jurgy. Good company, good food, good drinks, not so good music, but funny dancing (Sam just loved doing the Robo so much) and hats:

Highlight 5: Last, but definitely not least, Nico and I celebrated one year of marital bliss on May 18th. To celebrate, we went to Gent in Belgium for that weekend. Stayed in a lovely hotel and were upgraded to a €300/night room. Seriously. Who pays that for a hotel room. We might tell every hotel we stay at in the future that it's our anniversary, just for the upgrade!! It was a great weekend and if you're ever in Gent, go to the soup kitchen - the BEST place for lunch. You can choose from four soups of the day and you get a bowl of it, delicious fresh bread and an apple for next to no euros. We don't have photos of the soup kitchen but here are some others:



And with those five highlights, I'm ending this post. Fingers crossed (or uncrossed, depending on how bored you are after reading this post) that I'll be updating more regularly in the future. But for now, I'm off to bed.