The countdown begins...

Hello everybody! First of all, I want to **thank you** all for checking out my blog regularly! I've gotten so many nice comments and I'm really happy that I can share my life with you and that you actually care enough to read my silly stories.

Today I started back up in the lab after my holiday. With only about 5 more workdays left before I'm finished my internship, I'm trying to gather enough concentration to work efficiently. I'm actually striving to get more experimental results as well as wrap things up. Since I accidentally cooked my cells to their death before leaving to Paris, I have even more catching up to do now!

After getting home from Paris on Friday, I slept for a full evening and night (after updating my blog, of course) and the very next morning I went to pick up Andi at the train station (remember him from my older posts?). He's my hero - he actually worked overtime all week then traveled 16 hours on the train just for a weekend visit to good ol' Groningen!

That evening (Saturday), we had a gettogether with the international kids and student managers in Blekerslaan, the newest and hippest hangout in town. Hahahaha! We watched Wallace and Gromit and chilled for the most part. Some of us even slept over in the empty rooms, being too lazy to bike home, which gave the night a feel of staying in a cheap motel. It pays to know the student managers in situations like these!

Sunday finally felt like a real vacation. It consisted of sleeping in and doing almost nothing. In the evening, Andi and I met up with Myriam in the centrum and the three of us ended up going to see Superman Returns at the local cinema. It was a terrible movie. The positive point, however, was that I finally got to hear the Superman theme song again. I've been trying to figure it out since the last time I went to the theatre weeks ago, and kept ending up with the themes for Indiana Jones and Star Wars instead. I give two Euros to the next person that can hum the Superman theme song!

Monday, after a yummy Austrian dinner (a simple but deelish version of mac and cheese), I gathered up the Kornoeljestraat gang to our common room (Andi, Myriam, Wicax, Ricard, Lucas and I). We had planned to hit Monday night at Sally's but it was raining outside so we dropped that idea. We ended up playing cards all night, using my souvenir pack of cards from Schipol airport, while polishing up my souvenir bottle of Nobeltje from my visit to Ameland (see Wicax taking his share of the liquor in the pic). We tried to do flaming Nobeltjes but it just wouldn't light up so there are no fancy pics to show there! This ended up to be one of my best nights in Groningen. I learned some really fun games that I hope I never forget, including "Lying" (not "Lion") where you bet on if the person next to you is bluffing. In that game, by no coincidence it seemed, the person sitting on the left of Wicax always seemed to win! So we switched to another game called "carré et signe", or "square and sign". This was hilarious - we split up into two teams and when someone gets a 4-of-a-kind, you must let your teammates know using a secret sign while the opposing team tries to guess what your secret sign is. Our sign was so secret that even within our own team, we kept missing it!

Yesterday I spent most of the time on buses and trains. I brought Andi to Schipol airport then turned right around and came back to Groningen in time to have dinner with Maaike, my favorite babe in town. Maaike and I discussed the ups and downs of being a girls while eating yummy food and going out for ice cream. These are the good moments, the little things in life, that make me happy.

With 9 days left in Groningen, I'm feeling panicked and sad and excited all at the same time, and now I have to deal with the annoyance of the Heathrow terrorist threat situation as well (I'm flying through Heathrow).

I feel like I'm changing the backdrop in the theatre version of my life.....