A time to make party!

After weeks and weeks and weeks of work, we finally held our World Cup International Student Party in our own little Selwerd 1 flatbar, which is located about 200 meters from my room. The organizing committee (we were 10, with 9 international plus Jorn) had worked our butts off pulling this party off. International parties in student housings had been banned a few months earlier but we could do it legally because we had a real bar. But we had to plan very carefully to make sure that it was safe and fun at the same time.

The whole day Friday, we worked and worked to do last minute stuff. My favourite part of organizing was making the decorations, which consisted mainly of circles made out of cardboard and painted like soccer balls. People even took them home as souvenirs. We had free Sangria, cheap beer, good music (thanks to our pro DJs Andi and Flo), awesome posters and tickets, fantastic decorations, and of course, costumes ("dress up like fan").

Though the party officially started at 10pm, there were less than 30 people until about 2:30 in the morning. Then things really started to kick off! We managed to draw in about 120 people, just enough to break even on the budget (the whole thing cost us about 350 Euros). The crowd was awesome and having a great time. There was limbo contests, dancing, and couples making out. Jan-Fré, the bar manager, even enjoyed himself so much that he dropped his beer glass on the floor at the end of the night. Our "graffiti wall", which consisted of a long roll of paper and big markers, was full of funny and mostly illegible comments towards the end of the celebrations.

At 6 am, we finally had to kick the last of the partier out and the committee sat on couches and ate leftover pizza before hitting the pillows.

The next day, satisfied with a job well done, we returned the music equipment, cleaned up the bar, and I sat in front of my computer and tallied up the numbers from the event. We made a slight profit and decided to spend it on a self-reward for the committee, which was a super nice dinner the next week.

My life as a celebrity

My interview was finally published in the De Universiteitskrant, the university of Groningen paper! The editor of the international page found my weblog and featured me in the section called People, a blurb about the life of an international student that is published each week. He came to my workplace on a Monday and chatted with me for about an hour or so. He's also a writer in a dutch biology journal so he was really interested in what I do for a living. Most of what was actually published was terribly misquoted since he only jotted down a few notes by hand (I would never say the word "orderliness"!), but he was nice about the whole thing. It was really cool feeling like a celebrity for a week of my life :)

International meet the Dutch

I went to see the Netherlands play in the world cup in our flatbar with Andi. We dressed up as orange as we could to support the country that temporarily adopted us and ended up being not only the only two international students there, but also the two biggest fans! Watching games at the flatbar is fun because there is a beautiful HDTV there and, of course, free beer (for the first half hour of the game). In the pic is Jan-Fré, the bar manager and some nights, my best friend.

When we were there, we got interviewed for the De Universiteitskrant (the UK) by the editor of the international page, who found me through my weblog! He ended up writing a really funny article about how the international kids don't really get too much into the Dutch football spirit (with the exception of us, of course!). Well, I say the Dutch had less spirit - there were only about 7 other guys in the bar that night.

A little taste of Germany

The next weekend, I traveled to Hamburg, Germany with Flo (German) and Sjoerd (Dutch) to see the opening game of the world cup on a giant outdoor screen. On the way there, we got stranded in a teeny town (can't remember the name of the place!) at the Dutch-German border because it was so friggin' hot that the rails on the bridge were expanded out of shape. While stranded, the passengers had to sit outside and wait for alternative transportation. That is when we met an old couple from Alberta whom I recognized as Canadians from the flags sewn on their luggage and fanny packs. I asked them so seriously, "Are you from Canada?" and they said, "How did you know?". Gees!

After we transferred to an intercity train in Germany, we ran into some friends of Flo's on the train! Because we were so late, we hadn't gotten a chance to get a ticket before boarding and were planning on buying on on the train. But as we wandered around looking for a place to sit (and getting gently led out of the bar car in first class), we ended up missing ticket check. We finally found a private booth that was empty, probably because the air conditioning was not working. So as we sweated and sweated, the train attendant finally offered us free drinks to cool us down and he became our best buddy on the train. He had no clue we were hitching a free ride!

Of course, we arrived in Hamburg late because of the earlier delay, but no matter. We quickly found one of the closest tvs, which was balancing on crates outside of a turkish fruit store in the middle of the streets. They were having a real outdoor event, cooking up German sausages on the BBQ and all. We had beers with the locals (we had Dutch beer in a can and they had German beer in a bottle) while sitting on more crates, and cheered for Germany as a merry old group.

At halftime intermission, we rushed to the main park with the giant outdoor screen to catch the second half of the game. Outside drinks were not allowed in the park so the front entrance was littered with thousands and thousands of half empty beer bottles that one woman was going to make a goldmine out of. Inside, it was so crowded that we could barely see what was going on the game despite the size of the screen. In the end, however, Germany won.

Excited about their victory, the Germans and tourists posing as Germans flowed out into the main strip of Hamburg and the party just started to pick up. The sun went down and the city came to life. We ate Italian food and sang Kareoke, and finished off the day with a fantastic bar hop in attempt to absorb everything the nightlife had to offer. The bars in Hamburg are so funky and unique, and the neon light signs shone in excess. My favourite bars we went to were the retro ones, one with groovy brown flowered wallpaper and comfy couches, another with old playboy pics on the wall and a 50's sci fi movie playing on a film screen.

Tired and exhausted, we caught the first train out of the city back to Holland at about 5 am in the morning. Flo and I slept and slept while Sjoerd bravely stayed awake the whole morning, making sure that we didn't miss our transfers. Funny enough, we got stranded in the same little town at the border once again when we missed the connection while buying tickets at the booth. Next time we'll just hop on the train with no tickets again.



Whew. A good run and and a little taste of Germany.

A trip to the pancake ship

After waking up at 3pm, still tired from our trip to southern Holland, Andi and I decided to do more tourist stuff and eat "breakfast" at t' Pannekoekschip, otherwise known as the Pancake Ship. This is one of the many houseboats on the canals running through Groningen, but this one was converted into a restaurant that sells Dutch pancakes. I had been wanting to go there ever since I saw it on my first day of arriving in the Netherlands.


Dutch pancakes are very strange, more like giant omelettes than what us Canadians know as pancakes. You can have them sweet or savoury, with beans or salad or molasses on top, and the special ones come with a little Dutch flag in it.


After eating a huge meal, we walked around the centrum to digest and passed this store window. Let this give you the smallest taste of what kind of orange craziness infects the Netherlands during the football season. Can you see the orange chicken you put on your head?

Back to southern Holland

That weekend, I went back down to the southern part of Holland once again, this time with four Austrians (Ulli, Manuel, Christian and Andi). The trip was off to a rough start for Andi and I since we were hanging with our friends at the 24 hour pool hall the night before and so had about one hour's sleep. But we slept on the train and when we woke up, we were in Rotterdam, the most modern Dutch city around. The reason for its modern touch is that in 1940, it was completely destroyed by German bombs. From the 50's to the 70's, the city was rebuilt in a sort of half-hazard manner, with buildings of strange architecture being plopped down with no sort of order, so the streets never follow a straight line.

Apart from the strange city layout and funky architecture, Rotterdam is well known for its harbour, the heart of the Dutch economy. To experience this firsthand, we went on a 45 minute boat tour of the harbour, which was huger than huge! The tall cranes and big machinery and thousands of train-car-like thingies (what are they called?) made me feel like I was in the middle of an episode of Bob the Builder! Throughout the whole tour, there was a continuous narration describing the history and facts of the sites, translated into 4 or 5 languages. But we were on the outside deck so I couldn't understand 90% of what the recordings were saying.


After the boat tour, we walked across Rotterdam's most famous landmark, the Erasmus Bridge, a 2,600-foot cable stayed bridge linking the north and south of Rotterdam. I had walked across a mini version of the exact same bridge in Madurodam, but the real version was more than impressive.




Upon arriving on the other side of the bridge, we decided to go visit the Football Stadium since there was a game between the Netherlands and Australia starting in an hour or so. We tried to take the bus there but each one that came by was so crammed with fans that we could never squeeze on. Finally, we decided to just hoof it. It was not hard to find since all we had to do was follow the stream of orange people that was heading to the stadium like a trail of ants. Closer to the stadium, the line up of tour buses beside the train tracks went farther than my eye could see. In front of the stadium, just before the game started, we entertained ourselves with gawking at the crazy and creative orange costumes around us, from full-sized fuzzy orange lions to half naked guys covered in orange body paint. We got offered scalped tickets but there were never enough to let us all in. Finally, when the crowd was all in the stadium, there was only us (not in orange) standing outside and feeling somewhat sad about not being part of the chants and excitement that was streaming out of the stands from within. That is when we decided to hop on the bus back to the train station to continue our adventures.

We took the train to Den Haag. This time the weather was treating us much nicer so we hit the beachfront where we were welcomed with soft sand, dancing expositions by girls in bikinis, many many tourists and a sand castle competition. I felt more like I was in California, with the ritzy hotels and tourist shops, than in the Netherlands. Anyways, we were quite tired by then so we satisfied ourselves with sitting down at one of the restaurant patios to soak up some sun rays and have some coffee, which was served by the most confused and slow servers in the universe. After a dose of caffeine, we went up the boardwalk and took pictures of the sites. On the way out, I took the opportunity to meet some parrots that were willing to pose in a photo with me.

We took the bus back into the main part of town with much difficulty due to the sheer amount of tourists. Manuel ended up having to go to town alone and wait for the rest of us to catch up. While he was there, he missed the firetruck fiasco that took place in the Burger King by the bus station at the beachfront.

Back in the city center, we walked around to see some old buildings and finally ended up in a bar that Andi and I discovered last time we were in Den Haag. It's a coffee-shop and bar in one, a little gem that some Indonesion guys that brought us to on our last visit. When we finally found the place using our foggy memories and directions from locals, we relaxed and watched the first half of a football game before finally heading back to Groningen, exhausted and sunburnt.

Kareoke night!

Every Friday is Kareoke night at Sally's. Me and some friends (Janelle, Anna, Sebastian, Patrick, Jeanette, Omar, and more) decided to try it out. We warmed up with a group version of I Will Survive, much to my dismay! So cliche! Afterwards, some blunt dude in the bar told me that I should never sing again. So, to defy him, I went and sang Brown-Eyed Girl with Janelle. It was just easy after that. By the end of the night, I was up on the stage with Mr. Kareoke (Craig) and we sang New York, New York because I wanted some jazz. Then I went on to a solo career with What a Wonderful World. I think my performance improved after a couple of beers because after my solo I actually got compliments and Craig invited me to sing "real music" at a jam session night he goes to every Sunday at this place called Big Brother. Although, I haven't gone to sing there yet because I have early morning meetings on Mondays.

Me and the more energetic of my friends closed the bar that night. I love seeing the sunrise after going out.

And susan's blog was born....

Suffering from a fit of insomnia, I browsed my flatmate Andi's blog..... And then I was inspired to start a blog of my own to share my ups and downs of Groningen with you - my friends, colleagues and family around the world.

I've decided to start from the beginning of my history here. I promise that I will try to get the page up to date on sleepless nights and boring Sundays.

Enjoy!