Random thoughts and observations

Sorry for being silent for a while.  I shall try my best to post something at least once a week in future.

I went to Amsterdam last weekend and wandered around a bit with a couple of the other girls.  It's a gorgeous city.  The buildings are lovely, the canals are fun, the interaction of city with tourists in certain areas is fascinating.  We wandered through the red light district, albeit at a quiet time for the area, and it's fascinating to try and notice the differences between what you see here and what you'd be likely to see in a Canadian city.  We seem rather prudish when compared to Amsterdam.

I'm getting much more comfortable with my host family.  They're a lot of fun.  The kids are entertaining and the parents have interesting bits of information.

I think I may come across as an introvert while I'm here and I don't think that's going to bother me much.  I quite enjoy the company of several of the other girls in the area but I'm finding when I hit the weekend that I often need quite a bit of space.  This is where having a housemate becomes interesting.  I've ended up holed up in my room a fair bit because I reeeally don't want to deal with other people at the time.  I also seem to be needing to go to bed earlier than I did at home most of the time.  I'm getting tired and bitchy much closer to midnight than I used to, and I don't want to inflict that on the kids so I'll just give up and go to bed earlier, so the likelyhood of me staying up late for parties?  Fairly low.  Oh well.

My sanity savers are an interesting revelation for me.  My tv shows and games I was expecting.  Playing GW2 with Frost and the guildies also something I was expecting.  And they are very, very helpful.  Another thing that's been a mainstay is radio.  Specifically NPR, oddly enough. (You know your a cross-border girl when...)  It's one of the news radio stations I can get at my host family's house and I've been listening to it every morning.  The travel channel and Animal Planet channel are a couple more.  Funnily enough, one evening when I turned on the tv the show on the Travel channel was called Descending.  Two guys going to the great scuba diving locations all over the globe.  The episode that night was all about them going to great diving locations of the coast of Vancouver Island.  I had not realised how much I missed the landscape and look of home.  I'm having fun here and enjoying getting to know the look of Holland, but seeing the mountains and ocean off the BC coast was like a breath of fresh air.

 But one of the big things that's keeping me grounded right now is my almost daily conversations with a friend in Japan.  Ax got to Japan shortly after I got here and he's staying for three months, and the time difference is much more convenient for chatting with him than chatting with home so we often end up having conversations that'll stop and start on and off as long as both of us are awake at the same time.  It's been incredibly helpful for me.  On the days when I wake up and I'm feeling particularly homesick but it's too late to try and contact home, a half hours chat with Ax can make a huge difference in how the rest of my day goes.  It's a familiar and known voice or way of phrasing things in the midst of unfamiliar or only slightly familiar noises and images.

I'm still homesick, though I don't notice most of the time now.  Sometimes I'll hear or see something that reminds me of home or highlights a difference and I'm suddenly feeling homesick.  Not usually to badly, but earlier this week on first day off I woke up almost in tears and it got worse from there.  I was lucky though, because Frost (being Frost) was still awake.  I was able to talk to him and my Mum which helped a hell of a lot, but I spent the first half of that day bursting in to tears every ten minutes or so.  So yeah.  It's still there and it spikes.  Which is why I am extremely grateful to Ax and Frost, because they are the ones who are generally up when I'm feeling this way.

I'll try and post more regularly, and try and think of more interesting things to talk about, though I'll still vent when I need to.

Bye