In the past week

You know temperatures are rising when...

1) You actually feel warm and sweat a little on the way to school

2) Flowers are blooming (: (I now have a mini-garden in my room! New flower buds bloom almost everyday whee)

3) People start dressing differently at school (less coats, more fashionable)

4) You are shocked and horrified when you put on your jeans as they are looser than usual (okay this is just in my case), but then you realise oh that's because you aren't wearing extra layers of tights/stockings beneath the jeans.

Oh yes I have also gotten myself a new camera via Amazon, the Sony T77 (brown)! Which is slimmer and feels so much more fragile than my old one that I think I'm going to have to protect it with my life.

Haha okay travel adventures continued:

Maastricht

This is in Southern Netherlands, and apparently is supposed to be quite different from the rest of the Netherlands. The place is really pretty, with an extremely quaint feel all about it. I would say that if there was a prize for adaptive reuse of buildings, Maastricht will win it hands down! One building I loved was a cathedral -there are tons of cathedrals around Europe, but this one is amazing because it was converted into a book shop! It was just so amazing, and there's really no better place for books to be in. There's a cafe at the end of the cathedral, and a metal structure in the middle of the cathedral that provides the other "floors" of the book store. And look up at the ceiling you can see the faded paintings that cover the ceiling. The other buildings look old, yet when you look into the glass windows you see that it's very nice inside, with soft yellow light shining out of the windows. Niice! I think it'd be so nice to go to school here (: Thanks to Ryl and JY's friends for hosting us and letting us stay in their rooms!

Oh and first experience in a coffeeshop! They check our IDs before they let us in. Of course being the good girl I am all I did was breathe in second-hand weed (Ryl and JY's friends and their friends from school tried some). This coffeeshop is really nice though, they have delicious milkshakes and have games lying all around for customers to play with -if not for the smells it'd be a fantastic place to hang out I think! Haha.

Amsterdam

Well, Amsterdam just has this vibe about it -I could feel it the moment I stepped out of the train station! We found our way to our accommodation -and were very excited to stay in a houseboat! Then we saw our rooms and didn't quite know how to react -the rooms are TINY haha -barely enough room for 2 people to do packing/unpacking at the same time! haha. Basically if you stand up, you are still taller than the upper bunk (while I was lying in the upper bunk Mich was STILL taller than me)! Haha. And there are no steps to the upper bunk so you have to step on the ledge of the lower bunk and somewhat awkwardly clamber up into the upper bunk (I whacked my head on the top of the cabin at least 3 times getting up and down throughout our 2night stay there).

Amsterdam is SUPER PRETTY with its canals (: I'd love to just go back and chill there (1.5 days was definitely not enough to enjoy the city)! Ahh I'm so lazy to describe everything and everywhere we went I'm so sorry! Just a list -Van Gogh Museum (It's so nice to see all his works up close and to get a good look at the brush strokes, and to discover new favourite paintings -I particularly like the Starry Night Over the Rhone -it was gorgeous (:), the Red Light District (didn't dare to look the women in the windows in the eye because I know I wouldn't want to be objectified like that), Anne Frank's House (eye-opening, I'm glad it serves as a reminder of what else Amsterdam has been through -also a reminder that there are many others like Anne Frank and provided the wider context that people today are still being discriminated against based on race -which is something Anne Frank's father fought against after the war), windmills at Zaanse Schans (really pretty, I loved the green fields and blue sky -otherwise the place gave me a very Stepford-Wives feeling), the RijksMuseum, and the Heineken Brewery (Very theme-parkish but fun in that way haha).

I really wish I had more time to soak in the city though! I'm sure that Amsterdam is so much more than just a city for tourists and it would have been nice to walk around and discover more about it (such as it never occured to me that Dutch colonial influences acted in more than one direction -in Amsterdam you find loads of Indonesian restaurants too -okay so geeky)!

Oh and Dutch people are really nice (:

What I also like about the places we went is how people cycle everywhere -and their bicycles are not those hard-core-mountain-biking bicycles that we see in Singapore and in the UK, but those nice looking kinds with high handlebars and high seats -I'd love to ride around in one of those there! And also seems like such a perfect mode of transportation for a date -on the backseat of those bicycles. Wahahaha. Okay dream on.

Well okay back to more normal life in the UK! I have 4 essays to write this month and I don't know how I'm going to accomplish that uh-oh.