For now my last post from The Netherlands. I am writing this post from Schiphol airport while waiting for my flight to Denpasar via Hong Kong. Supposedly it’s raining in Bali right now, so I won’t be escaping the rain but at least it is twice as warm 
I managed to keep my back pack fairly empty and in my cabin luggage I am bringing some books and my Ukulele 
I hope to find some time to learn to play it properly..
Till next post!
It’s nearly been two weeks since I arrived back in The Netherlands (or ‘Amsterdam’ as some people prefer to call it ). I’ve spent my time going around the country to see as many people as I can. It’s a strange period as on the one hand I am back for good in that I am not going back to the US anytime soon, but on the other hand I am already leaving the country again in a week.
One thing that I noticed over the past weeks is that there is not better way to re-integrate (or integrate for that matter) in a country than to be there around the national festivals/holidays. The period between April 30th and May 5th is a special time here, as it contains 3 major holidays: Queensday on the 30th, Remembrance day on the 4th and Liberation day (or Victory Day) on the 5th; each day has its own atmosphere. Queensday (and Queensnight, which is the night before) is a day of total celebration: everyone is out on the streets where they are either holding or walking by flee markets or they’re out on the streets dancing to one of the many DJs. Though each city has something going on, Amsterdam is definitely the busiest place during Queensday. On Remembrance day we commemorate those who died during past wars; WW2 is of course the war that gets most emphasis. At 8p the entire country holds 2 minutes of silence, followed by the national anthem. Finally Liberation day is a festive day with festivals all around the country with all kinds of performances (all Dutch artists but some known outside the country as well, such as Junkie XL).
That’s it for now: below I added some pictures from the last two weeks.
Yesterday I safely arrived home! The flight felt quite long in that I did not really sleep (maybe 2 hrs) so yesterday I was struggling to stay awake. Today was a nice sunny day, so staying awake was quite easy. It is great to be ‘home’ (at some point is starts to get hard to identify where home is..) again, and see my brothers and parents again. I already had the luck to meet with some of my friends already, and I hope more over the weeks to come. As I will be roaming around the Netherlands for the next few weeks don’t expect too many posts from me.
By the way, you may have noticed that I integrated my blog with Facebook’s Open Graph as an experiment. Its still a bit ugly as I didn’t really spend enough time making it fit in: maybe later.
