Blast from the past

Of course I had to jinx it. As if I was ever going to have a smooth trip home when I said out loud that hope nothing happens. I ended up stranded at Köln's railwaystation, stuck in the train not knowing what was going on. By some weird chance there was a Finnish family sitting next to me on the train, on their way to the same flight so thankfully I got a taxi with them to the airport. I would have not figured out that there was some fire in the tracks ahead of us, preventing the train from continuing or even if I would've, I still would have had to pay the 95 euros it took from Köln to Düsseldorf airport with a taxi. Insanely good luck considering the circumstances but I would sometime like to experience travelling without any malfunction during any leg of the journey, is that too much to ask?

Also I had to jinx it with this other thing as well. I was just talking to Kali about obsessive exes and used my first boyfriend as an example and how he'd still tried to contact me last year. And of course today he tries to befriend me on facebook and even dares to send a message on fb that it's been such a long time that I can't be upset with him. So I replied that it has indeed been a long time but I still recall you being a nutcase so perhaps just give up trying to contact me ever, argh. Oh how I wish I could full-out rant about his crazy ways but lets just leave it at this. Also I was a total bitch with him but I guess some people never learn.

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....

A Bad Habit

Keeping things real here, lets address my drinking behaviour. I party here in Maastricht every now and then; I know, you would have never guessed. And when I do some people find it unfair/irritating that it is somewhat difficult to tell when I'm drunk. There aren't any usual telltale signs such as me getting overly loving or aggressive. I may agree to things I normally wouldn't, I say yes more often than I would otherwise. For example:

X: "Mia, do you want to com and watch a football match, Germany vs Norway, tomorrow"
Mia: "Sure! I'd love to"

I don't forget things like keys or phones nor do I get lost. But I drink and text. Here again it's disturbing when I text I just get a bit more sarcastic and manage to write grammatically correct so people don't realise the extent of my drunkenness. It's not something completely idiotic but also not something I would do if not under the influence, when I remember in the morning what I've texted I tend to laugh. They would make a great book though.

Last night's party was excellent. A lot of people showed up so drinking games didn't actually feature that prominently (too many people to get any kind of discipline or grab everyone's attention) but there were some rules I'd set in the beginning that people had to obey. There rules were as follows:

1. If you complain about the music you must take one shot


2. You must refer to everyone by their nationality, not their name. If you forget -> drink


3. If you mention anything university-related you must go to the naughty corner and take a shot


4. You can only swear by saying perkele, vittu or saatana. Failure to comply will lead to you taking a shot


5. Whenever you hear a song by Britney or Kanye West you must drink

This worked fabulously, people got used to the name thing pretty quickly. Some countries were a bit difficult as there were like 5 Germans and 3 Romanians but they had numbers in addition to natiolity. I myself broke rule nr 4 the most... I can't swear in Finnish. In the naughty corner people had to act/ask questions that were of rather sexual nature, a lot of fun. Overall, a memorably party.

On a non-party related note, I must write down a conversation I had with Deborah. I was standing next to her and as it happens, her face is at level with my boobs (= she's shorter than me). I then said "This must be familiar to you from childhood..." To which Deborah replies "No actually I was a bottlechild from early on." My love to Deborah, lovely German girl who I quite often laugh at, not with.

As you can tell I'm at a pretty up-beat mood. I also got an email from my thesis supervisor about the research proposal I did one afternoon, day before the deadline. It passed and he didn't even have criticism about it. Hahahahahahahaa..

Time guildens the memories

Today I missed Newcastle University and hated Maastricht's Uni. Reason? Uni Maas does not believe I graduated from Newcastle. Seriously. I have given them my transcripts, diploma, everything they requested. But apparently I only delivered them to the registrar's while I should have also known to send the exact same documents to my faculty. Why they don't have a centralised system is beyond me but nevertheless. I then went to show my BA Diploma in person, the original with holograms and watermarked paper and everything. The woman in adminstration did not think it was real!!!! Reason? The signatures weren't handwritten. Obviously they expect from a university of 17,000 students for the vice-chancellor to handwrite his signature on every single diploma... I mean there was an easy solution, I emailed my former faculty in Newcastle to send some proof to Maastricht and they replied immediately today that they have now sent it. So thumbs up for Newcastle. But Uni Maas gets shitty reviews from me.

Yea, so in Newcastle I loved the university but hated the country. In Maastricht I love the city but hate the university.

In other news, today I was just walking home from the university and on the bridge there was a group of teenaged Dutch boys. They had two fancy cameras and as I passed them by they took my picture! And started taking more. I had such a classic response though, I lift my hands up to protect my face and kept on walking. The paparazzi are after me!

Voices...

I listen to music a lot these days since have this lovely new computer.. And I keep hearing two sounds that are making me paranoid. First, the sound of a new message on skype. Second, the sound of new message on facebook. So there are a lot same sounds in the songs and I'm sure they put them there just to annoy me. They get a kick in me thinking somebody loves me and has written me only to have me discover it's all just in my head.

Another cause for joy, with my new laptop I can connect online from my room. The wireless is more efficient in this or something. So I'm in my room most of the time, love it. I can block out the disaster that it our kitchen with its mountains of bottles (me & my friends' doings) even though they are under the table, its dirtyness (my flatmate and his "storage") and piles of dirty plates (he has not done his dishes since December). I'll clean the house again by Tuesday though because I'm having a party.

I've invited some people over next week and the aim is to play drinking games. I've already made up some cool rules, it's going to be great. I'll even decorate with rules and special elements. I always need to have a party to look forward to, how else would I survive here... ;)

One of my favourite sayings

Life's a bitch and then you die.

Loveletter

I just said goodbye to a really good friend of mine, Silvia. She was here in Maastricht on Erasmus and now it's over. She's flying back tomorrow and I just had to say goodbye today because I couldn't stop the tears and I didn't want for it to become anymore difficult for her tomorrow... But it's horrible to see her go. She's been such a big part of my life here. I see her so often at her house, she's such an amazing person with whom we always had so much fun. We've gone through the same relationship troubles and everything... We were like our own little Sex and the City. She's so open, unassuming, beautiful, intelligent and funny. I sometimes find it hard to believe I've found so many great people here, there are only a few gems in this world and she is definately one of them.

I first was rational about her departure. Logic says of course I will see her again. It was great for me to meet her and that eventually chances are that I will say goodbye to the most of the people here. Then I wrote on this book where she collects like well-wishes of her friends and I got really emotional. So I tried to stay positive, cheer her up because she was quite sad and I just wanted her to feel better. But now that I left her place and said the final goodbye, it was so difficult. I'm feeling sad for her because I knew she would have liked to stay and that when she goes back people won't understand what she left behind and will just assume she'll resume her life as normal. But I'm also kind of lost myself, what will my life be like without her?

Other things seem trivial. I will resume writing about silly things once I get over this.

Resolute and serious

I have come to the conclusion that I will never get married.

On an unrelated note, I now have a new laptop. Love it. Way prettier than expected. Though it was full of these silly games that I immediately went on to remove. Not the usual solitaire ones but crappy ones like Chicken MAtch 3 and Agatha Christie's Murder on the Nile, what ever these may be they are now out.

I'm so bloody serious. No sense of humour. Like Obama.

Life without laptop

Surely it comes as no surprise to anyone that I am addicted to computers/internet. So having lived the past two weeks without one at home has been life-changing. As a consequence I've discovered some lovely parts of Maastricht, read all the books I brought with me and spent a lot of time at the library. As it turns out, without my laptop to distract me I only have books and the TV to entertain me at home and since my flatmate also wants to watch TV, it is quite often out of the question. So I've been hanging out with Kali a lot (admittedly I do that anyway but now we can't have our catch-up sessions on skype) and generally avoiding home.

We have a rather stupid course at the moment where we have to do a paper and submit a research proposal for our thesis. The weird part is that the essay is 100% of our grade whilst the research proposal is only pass/fail yet it actually takes more time and in the long run is more important... And having to work on both of them only at the library isn't going too well. I hate studying here and writing is practically an impossibility since the keyboards here suck.

Which is why it is a very good thing my mom is coming on Saturday to bring me a new one which will enable me to work from home. I also seem to have contracted bronchitis so I shouldn't really be at the library at the moment but staying at home is not really a tempting option either.

Since this turned out to be one of those "I'm not too keen on studying"-posts once again, I should also point out that I got an 8 from the last course, the one for which I only revised a day. I'm just so damn smart that studying is just pointless. ;)

Back in Maas

Feels like I've been back for ages when in fact it has only been two weeks. But so far it has been really nice to catch up with all my darling friends and the parties have been abundant. So much so that I have actually relished the few nights of non-events.

Also the 15 bottles of alcohol that I brought with me are almost gone. Not that I drank all of them myself - I have been a very good friend and have promoted Finnish alcohol to the extent that I have converted quite a few. Minttuviina (mint vodka) remains a crowd pleaser but also new favourites such as kissanminttu (mint & chocolate liquer) and raspberry cider have emerged.

In February when Maastricht goes crazy over carneval me and Kali are going to Finland. Not to draw any links with the alcohol but since our previous plans fell through we have now decided on that. We'll go on a cruise and then make a little trip to see Suvi in Tartu. So much fun to be had.

My mom will be coming to visit me next weekend, an event sparked by the fact that my laptop broke and she will bring me a new one. I can't buy a new one here in the Netherlands as I need a Finnish keyboard. Not that I write in Finnish a lot but since my lastname involves these lovely letters (which I can't now write because I'm using library computer) it would be a bit of a hassle.

Without my laptop I feel isolated from the world and need to keep myself occupied all the time because going home would be useless as I have nothing to do there except sleep. Sigh.