1 day to go...

Tomorrow I leave Ljubljana to go back home; an end of 5 months Erasmus period. :-(

This week nothing special happened, a lot of dinners and lunches with friends. One highlight was a trip to Trieste and to a really small village in East Slovenia. Together with Satu, Verena, Maual and Thilo we went on the trip. Trieste is a big industrial city with a unexpected nice centre. The village was small but nice with a beautiful wall around.

Soon I will let you know what the highlights were of my stay…

Weekend Ljutomer

After a big goodbye party in Royna Dolina with an ending in KMŠ and a short sleep of 1 hour I went with Markus and Mitja to Mitja's mother in Ljutomer. I couldn't wake up after 1 hour sleep and Markus and Mitja had to wake me up several times. After a nice Burek breakfast we went for a 3 and a half hour trainride to Ljutomer, in the east of Slovenia. Mitja showed with her sister, Barbara, the nice surroundings. Saturday we visit Jeruzalem, a wine area, Ptuj, a nice old city and my friend Judith in Maribor. Sunday we visit a little wheatfactory and a casle in Grad. The mother of Mitja was great and made us nice and big traditionel dishes. Some stew with sauseges, soups, apfelstrudel and some local cheese dessert. It was delicious. Unfortuntaly I forget the batteries of my camera, so I didn't made an pictures. Markus did, only with a traditionel camera.

Weekend Maribor

Hello everyone. How was your New Years Eve and Christmas? Everything here is still great... but only the date of leaving is coming closer and closer. For your information, I will arrive on Schiphol on the 29th around 20:20.

Last weekend we, Marie, Satu, Verena, Anssi (who is living in Maribor) and me, went to Maribor by car. And our trip started not so good... We went to Graz to do some shopping and visiting the city. Close to the border we found out that it was a public holiday in Austria, so everything was closed. But we went for a lunch with Verena's brother. Another little thing was that we wanted to visit the slalom race on Saturday, was it canceled...

But besides the little conflicts the weekend was nice and relaxing. Fridayevening, after Graz, we went out to some local bars in Maribor, Tagos and KGB, and one discotheek called Samsara. Saturday we went, with a hangover from yesterday, to the citycenter and the shoppingmall Europark. In the evening I visit my friend Judith. She is doing volunterwork in Maribor and lives also in Leeuwarden. I met her here in Ljubljana. Sunday, the last day, we went to see the delayed skiing game. It was interesting and a quit big event. After the game we went back to Ljubljana.

Ciao.

Happy New Year

Srečno Novo Leto!

Christmas in Ljubljana

The 5 nights are over, my parents have visited me! First I want to tell, we had a snowy with Christmas.... Yes, that’s long ago and I can even not remember if I had a with Christmas in my life. 2nd Christmas it starting snowing and it still snows, snows and snows.

The night of 24 I had really nice and cozy Christmas dinner with Erna, Hanna and Satu. The made dish was exciting of a duck with mandarin sauce and besides that we had some traditional Finish and Estlandic salads and a delicious Estlandic cake and Icelandic ice cream as dessert. It was great! Unfortunately I had to leave earlier from the dinner to pick up my parents of the train station. But it was nice to see my parents and sisters again.

The first two days I showed them Ljubljana. We went for a stroll through the city and the second day we visit the castle as well. Both Christmas days (the 25th and the 26th) I made a reservation in two restaurants, were we had some great dinners.

The third day we went to Bled. It was still snowing and really hard. Actually it was pretty cool: no tourist, but a beautiful lake and castles covered in snow. Unfortunately I do not have the pictures. I will ask Janneke, my sister, to send them and I can put them on my site.

Only two little sad things happened. First of all, my bike is stolen. It was not that really worse if it was not a bike who I borrowed from a friend. The second one, my phone is broken. And in this world you can not live without any phone. I will try to fix it otherwise I have to live a month without.

Besides these two little accidents I had a great time with my parents and sisters. The New Year is coming and I hope it will be a big party. Just let me know, how the Christmas was in Holland.

See you, Sjoerd

Christmas and New Year

Through this blog I would like to wish everybody a Merry Christmas and a Happy, Good and Healty 2006.

C u in the new year.

Snowboard Sjoerd

Friday I went for the first time to a skipiste and I tried snowboarden. And I can tell you: IT WAS GREAT!

Together with the Germans: Marie, Thilo, Manuel and Henning (and later some Spanisch people: Miguel, Maria and Joan) we went to Karavec, half hour drive north of Ljubljana. We went with the skilift up and rented 5 snowboards. I can tell u that snowboarding for the first time is really hard afterwards I feel like training rugby for the whole day; it was exhausting. But ok, we went up and Manuel tries to teach me some tactics. Ofcourse I couldn't manage it and I thought this will be nothing for me... So I just went to the top and just tried it and after a will it went better and better... at least I could stand for some minutes.

The morning was clear, but the afternoon was foggy. Marie and I went upstairs and the wind was blowing hard and the snow was sneering along my face. We could only see 2 meters or something. We went down snowboarding, but after a will we decide to walk down. On the end the security came and help us down, because we were the last on the piste. Down we could still ski till the end of the day.

In conclusion I can say that I have to learn a lot more but I like it. In one word: GREAT and I want to do it again soon...

Fotos

A massive update of my pictures. The studentprotest, the snow, the biketrip to Kamnik and Budapest could be find on my flickr-photo account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/34651202@N00/