Friday, July 2, 2010

HUP HOLLAND HUP!!!

This past week has been a scattered one. Luckily it was warm all week long so its been a consistent week of warm weather again which I am loving every second of. My team is done with games until July 25th so we are now on our "summer break" which means no practices or anything to do on the weekends now. Tuesday night the team I am helping coach had a game. I gave 2 lessons before the game and caught them myself, which I actually did quite well at..only got hit in the shin once which i'm taking as a win. We won 25-1 in 5 innings. The other pitcher was basically throwing front toss so it wasn't a shock to me that we killed them. I rode my bike home with Lotte after since Frans was working the bar in the cantina and we didn't want to wait around. On Tuesday I was getting ready to finally go out and explore on my bike when it started raining out of nowhere. It only lasted like 15 minutes and cooled down a little but then it warmed right back up. Wednesday we went to the beach and I had forgot that a couple weeks ago Margreet had told me how every beach in Holland is topless and there are some fully nude beaches, but that at pools you cant be topless and how she used to go topless back in her 20's. Well we rolled up on the beach walking to the spot we were meeting Niels, Jamie and Elmo and I saw way more chest then I really needed to in one day. And the interesting thing is that all of the topless ladies were older. I swear there could not have been a girl under 35 that was topless. We only stayed at the beach for a little bit before we went back to Gyselles house and hungout there for a while before coming back home.The boys had a softball game so it was girls night at home which was nice. We ate dinner then watched a few episodes of Criminal Minds since they own almost all of the seasons.

Wauter invited me last sunday to go with them to the theme park on thursday. It used to be called 6 flags but is now Walibi World. It is literally a kangaroo mascot or whatever you want to call it. We left Bergschenhoek at 7am to get to the train station, meaning I had to wake up at around 6:15am. I almost declined just for that reason haha. Wauter, Michael, and Reinier picked me up and then we met everyone else at the train station. We met up with Henk, Erik, and Eriks girflriend and her friend. I cannot remember their names. This was my first train experience and we had to switch trains 3 times on the way there, I just stayed in the back and followed them bec I had no idea what was going on. When we got to the train station at Utrecht we went to the starbucks!! My first one since i've been here!! When I ordered an iced tea they were very disappointed thinking I was going to order something super "american" haha whatever that means. And of course they had to brew my tea so we almost missed the train waiting for my iced tea. That was awesome..ha. After we got to our final destination we had to get on a bus with tons of other kids and take it to the park. It was exactly like the rides and parks in America although probably smaller with less things. We went on a water ride for our very first ride so we immediately were soaking wet which ended up being nice when we were waiting in lines in the sun. Overall it was a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun on the rollercoasters that took your picture. On one of our last rides we went on the Goliath and the boys made a plan for our picture to do the "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" thing...I told them I was going to mess it up with one of my really cute pictures I take but I didnt...Wauter bought a copy of the picture and emailed it to us so Ill post it below...I am sitting next to Reinieer. In front of us is Micahel and Henk, and the very front is Erik and Wauter.
We missed our train on the way back and had to wait 30mins for the next one which sucked bec we were all exhausted and our legs and feet were killing us. We got back around 8:30pm and then Frans, Lotte and I went to Rotterdam to Dorien's (a girl on my team) graduation party at a bar. It wasnt really a party it was just people standing around and they were mostly older so the softball girls that were there all stood at one table. It was pretty cool except for the fact all I really wanted to do was just sit down. I definitely slept awesome last night.

Today was the hottest day of the week. It was literally unbearable to move. Even the shade was hot and so was the wind. So we spent most of the day inside. Frans, Lotte and I went into Bergschenhoek this afternoon because I needed to find a cheap straightner to buy since mine decided to die last week and he had to get some dog food. I didnt know there were that many shops in town, less then 5 mins from the house, so i'm going to go adventuring there while the family is gone the next 2 weeks. We also made a stop to pick up some Rose Beer which is my new favorite drink. Its delicious. We were home in time to watch the soccer game. We played Brazil today and everyone was so sure we were gonna lose at least 3-0 but we ended up winning 2-1. It was pretty crazy afterwards, we watched it at home and people around the neighborhood went outside after the game and blew horns and one house actually set off a bunch of extra fireworks they had. Very safe... But now Holland moves on and plays again on Tuesday, while Amanda will be here so it will be fun to watch that together. Especially if Holland and Germany end up playing eachother because they are huge rivals. No plans for tomorrow besides watching the clock for it to be that much closer for Amandas arrival on sunday night!!

A Few Stories I've heard the past couple weeks that I forgot to mention...
1. One of Niels' best friends is Sinon. He is actually from Iraq and most of his uncles and family were killed because they would not sign anything saying that they supported Saddam and were slowly killed off. Once his mom and dad realized they would soon be next his mom took him and his 2 older brothers (he was 5 at the time) and they rode in a small hidden compartment in a truck out of Iraq until they got to Turkey. His dad came about a year later. They ended up in Holland and after waiting for many many years to get their Dutch citizenship they finally got it and his dad died not even a year after. I dont remember exactly what it was but it was something with his brain, either a tumor or something like that. Very sad. He is a very nice boy.

2. Margreets mom was held in a Japanese camp during WWII. She is now 80 years old. When she was in the camp her teeth had decayed so badly that they had to be filled with cement and many years later it started to expand so she had to find a dentist. After being referred to a dentist she found out that the dentist had also survived from a camp and he became their dentist from there on out as Margreet grew up.

3. Jennifer (the girl with the American mom) told me last Sunday at our games that once we get back from our break and have our first home game her mom is already planning to come to the game. Whats so funny about it is that she said her mom never comes and her mom only decided to come after she heard I was from Colfax and knew where it was because she is from Roseville. I look foward to meeting her mom later this month!

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