Sunday, October 14, 2007

parties, animals, picnics, van gogh, frisbee, and middle school throwbacks

That long title is just to give a short outline of everything that I feel I need to talk about within this post. Since it's been almost a week since my last post, a lot has been going on, namely: parties, animals, picnics, van gogh, frisbee, and middle school throwbacks. That doesn't really make sense by itself though, so let met explain each of these things and in so doing I think I will be able to give you all a somewhat clear picture of what I've been up to for the past week.

PARTIES:
On Tuesday night my friend Alanna and I decided to host a small get together of friends. I volunteered my room as the location, and we created a facebook event inviting everyone we know here (which was only about 20-something people) and we assumed that maybe ten or less of those people would actually show up since we didn't think of this idea until late Monday night. Well, as it happens almost everyone that we invited did show up, and many people brought friends as well. This picture is early in the night when only about 12 people were there, but this doesn't even begin to describe how many people came by the end of the night. At one point there must have been about 25 people within my room and another 10 outside in the kitchen area, it was crazy. I don't plan on hosting anymore parties this semester, but I enjoyed the night and later after everyone had left Alanna helped me clean up so that wasn't too painful either.

ANIMALS:
On Friday my friend Scott and I took advantage of a free trip to the zoo organized by his RA's. The Artis Zoo is located just around the corner from my dorm, so it's extremely convenient, and although I did go to the zoo once quite briefly, I hadn't gotten the opportunity to walk around at all and see all the animals. So when Scott asked if I wanted to go, I jumped at the opportunity. We walked around the zoo for a few hours and saw loads of animals including: baboons, lions, jaguars, elephants, llamas, gorillas, etc. etc. They also have an aquarium within the zoo so we went in there and saw lots of beautiful colorful fish. And then before we left we made sure to catch the penguin feeding and the seal feeding. We both really wanted to see the lion feeding, but apparently Friday is the only day of the week that they don't feed the lions. Unfortunately I didn't bring my camera with me, so I don't have any pictures to share.

PICNICS:
After leaving the zoo Scott and I headed back to my block to meet up with Alanna for a picnic dinner. I don't know if I've talked about the weather here in Amsterdam yet on this page, but I'll say a little bit now. For the most part the past month and a half has been full of overcast and rainy days with a periodic beautiful sunny day every few weeks or so. But this past week the weather has been entirely un-Amsterdamish. As I think back over the last week, I don't think it's rained once, and almost everyday has been sunny and around 65 degrees, it's glorious. It still gets really cold at night and layering is definitely required, but the days have been really beautiful and I've spent most of the weekend outside picnicing, writing, reading, and playing scrabble by the canal. So, as a result of the continued beautiful weather, the three of us decided to walk over to the nearby park and had a nice little picnic with a wonderful pasta-salad concoction made by Alanna, and a nice bacquette with brie and mozerella, it was a delicious meal.

VAN GOGH:
On Friday nights the Van Gogh museum opens up until 10pm and they have a bar and a dj and sometimes some live music as well. With our student museum cards we get into most museums in Amsterdam for no charge, so this Friday I went with a bunch of friends to the Van Gogh museum. I'm slightly ashamed to say, I haven't yet been taking advantage of all the wonderful museums in Amsterdam, but, I plan to visit many more, especially when I have visitors, so don't worry, I will see them all before I leave Europe. After having a drink at the bar when we got to the museum, we all started wandering around the galleries. There are some really amazing pieces in the museum, but unfortunately we only had about an hour to walk around before the museum closed, so I'm going to have to return for another visit, especially to see the current exhibit on Barcelona that is up right now.

FRISBEE:
This is a short one, but yesterday I threw a frisbee around with my friends Scott and Eric out in the park near our dorm and it was really awesome. It reminded me of Oberlin and playing frisbee with Adam out on North Quad when it finally gets warm in the spring.

MIDDLE SCHOOL THROWBACKS:
So, instead of going out to a bar or a club last night, my friends Scott and Eric and I decided to spend the night in Scott's apartment playing a bunch of random games and having a few beers. We had decided on this course of action because we were all pretty tired and didn't feel like staying out too late or anything like that. Well, after attempting to leave and go to sleep at 2:30am, we started listening to a series of wonderful middle school throwback songs. We spent the next two hours listening to everything from What If God Was One Of Us? by Joan Osbourne to Father of Mine by Everclear, and everything inbetween, it was extremely fun and I can't wait to download all of those songs and make myself one of the greatest mixes in history.

Well,that's all my main points, so in other news: I've rearranged my room yet again AND Scott put my tapestry up for me! It looks amazing, and I think my room decorations are finally complete. Here is a picture so you can all appreciate it as much as I do.

1 comment:

Mom said...

I love how much you love your room. There's no place like home eh...

Love mom