Escape

Carneval is here. I had not heard of it being celebrated outside Rio and New Orleans until I came to Maastricht but now I indeed find myself corrected. The lovely people of Southern Limburg sure do love their carnaval. The streets are filled with people dressed in the ever-adorning colours of red, yellow and green. Parades keep on going up and down the street. And by nighttime the entire adult population is as wasted as they come. It started today but some people took a head start yesterday making my walk to Kalina's a memorable experience. For some reason it makes men delusional and all the men were checking me out. Some old men tried to dance with me. Thankfully I've mastered my "f*ck off"-look which discourages even the most drunken specimen.

Nevertheless, as you can gather I am not too keen on the event. The intention was to escape the mayhem to Amsterdam but Kalina had to go to England so I found myself puzzled over what to do. To add to the despair, next week is also my birthday and I had a vision of myself stranded alone in Maastricht with a bucket of chocolate, being on facebook the whole day. So I booked a flight to Finland. I thankfully know some people who will be there so I have company, my family will entertain me and I have the luxury of a car and a fully-equipped, clean, functioning kitchen. I intend to cook a lot, try some recipes. Lets hope this is not a first sign of nesting, I'm still too young.

So today I'm in a better mood, there are some parties that I can attend, people will be happy and all is well considering I will leave Maastricht the next morning. Fingers crossed the buses, trains and planes all stick to their timetables.

Oh yea, we had a really cool evening of playing Wii at Barbara's and Marius' place. Love wii! The only clutch of the evening was leaving their place, the last bus did not go to Maastricht so we had to walk from their place in the middle of the night. Five kilometres may not seem like much but it is the most I've walked from point A to point B in a long time. On our nocturnal walk we stumbled into the ponies pictured above. They were quite scary, perfectly still and just staring at us. Reminded me very much from the cow incident about a year ago....