My IKEA Cabinet

My Cabinet, originally uploaded by gniezen.

The cabinet is finally done! For work-in-progress photos you should check out my Flickr photostream. My parents are coming to visit me tomorrow! They arrived with Emirates in Dusseldorf (Germany) today and travelled by rental car to Valkenburg, a small town near Maastricht in the Netherlands. Tomorrow night they're staying over in a hotel in Eindhoven, and they will be travelling through the Netherlands the whole of next week. I hope to join up with them next weekend in Amsterdam!

The new academic year starts on Monday, so this will be the first time that I'll be on campus with all the students there. My supervisor and promoter have also returned from their holidays, so I'll probably have a few meetings with them during the week to discuss my progress and on how I need to proceed from here.

I've signed up for Dutch for Beginners classes at the university, starting on 7 September. The schedule is quite intensive - two hours every Monday evening and two hours every Wednesday evening! It runs for the entire semester, so I hope to be a lot more comfortable with speaking Dutch by the end of the year. So far it's been getting easier to understand and read, but it's really quite difficult to try and speak it properly if you have Afrikaans grammar and constructs running around in your head.

Canoe trip

Canoe trip, originally uploaded by gniezen.

A group of South Africans in the Netherlands that I met through Facebook had a canoe trip close to Eindhoven today. I wanted to join them and left my flat at early this morning to take a very relaxed 13km bike ride to the starting point for the canoe trip in Valkenswaard.

From there they took us by bus 14km south to a drop-off point in Belgium, We got in our canoes (I shared a three-seater with two nice girls from Amsterdam) and paddled back lazily to Valkenswaard. We stopped halfway for lunch in Borkel, a very small town barely on the Dutch side of the Netherlands-Belgium border.

Unfortunately I left my camera/phone at the starting point (as there was the possibility of our canoe tipping over) so I wasn't able to take any photos of the canoe trip itself. It was great to just unwind a bit in nature, and to see & hear people speak in Afrikaans for the first time in two months! ;)

Oppikoppi & Rotterdam

Oppikoppi Brochure circa 2008, originally uploaded by gniezen.

With almost everyone I know being at Oppikoppi this weekend, I thought I should make this 2008 Oppikoppi brochure I found in one of my books my title picture (as a tribute :).

I spent most of the weekend in Rotterdam, leaving on Friday evening at 18h00 (and realizing as I got on the train that the weekend return ticket I bought was only valid from 19h00, luckily my ticket wasn't checked) and returning tonight (Sunday) at 19h00. On Saturday evening I had dinner with some of my family - my aunt Danielle makes a killer bobotie (from a recipe she got from a South African guest house). I also received a new bicycle bag from my uncle Marcel, which will make it a lot easier to do grocery shopping on my bicycle (and without having to perform a crazy balancing act as is currently the case).

Most of my weekend was spent reading a new book by Neil Strauss called "Emergency - One Man's Story of a Dangerous World and How To Stay Alive in It. It chronicles his quest for second citizenship and learning survival skills "Just in Case". It makes for very engaging reading, and also made me realize how extremely lucky I am to have been able to obtain second citizenship so easily (almost the entire first half of the book is dedicated to his struggles in getting it). The book makes you think about how much you would need to know and be able to do to become completely self-sufficient and survive on your own.

Bier Professor & Park Hilaria

I had ambitious plans for this weekend - I was going to travel to the largest national park in the Netherlands, Hoge Veluwe, bike around all day and visit the art museum there. Unfortunately my plans got a bit sidetracked as it was one of my fellow PhD student's birthday party on Friday night - we went for dinner at the Trafalgar Pub and for drinks at the Bier Professor afterwards. The Bier Professor is a small little bar, but with a large selection of more than 130 (mostly Belgian) beers. I ended up enjoying the conversation so much that I went home a little bit late and decided to sleep in on Saturday morning.

It ended up not being such a bad decision, as I was able to get some washing done and make a delicious brunch. I figured out how my new convection oven works (it's a combo-microwave, but up to now I have only used the microwave function). Why doesn't all ovens switch off automatically when you set the timer? ;)

Last night I went to the Park Hilaria, a "kermis" (carnival/festival) in Eindhoven. I wasn't expecting it to be quite so huge (it stretches out for more than a kilometre in one of the main streets that was closed up) or so busy (thousands of people). There were hundreds of stalls and amusement rides - I will probably go there again on Thursday with some of the other international students when it's not so busy and crowded.