Bike, bike, BIKE… I finally have one!!! :-) It’s a blue and white Gazelle (only 60 Euros) and I bought a basket for the front and bungee cords for the rack on the back… it’s a boy’s bike, but so what – it works and it’s small enough for me (barely) and that’s what counts. And I love this whole basket thing – it’s black wire and it snaps onto the front with a little combination lock, so you can just snap it off and carry it into the supermarket or whatever, dump your stuff in it, then snap it back on for the trip home. Or you can leave it snapped on and no one can take it, because it locks to the frame. And biking itself is a lot easier than I thought it would be (mostly because I can follow the people around me, LOL!). S said he wasn’t going to get a bike for a while, so I went and did it on my own yesterday, and I’ve been riding pretty much nonstop for the past 24 hours… and now S is out buying one too, haha!

And the distances aren’t bad. There are a couple of nasty hills near our place, but you just have to keep thinking “Next trip, I’ll be going the other way!” :-) It’s 12 minutes to the station, 15 minutes to the centrum, and 30 minutes to the JBI, where my language classes will be. That’s exactly what the international coordinators were telling me. S was e-mailing me at camp with horror stories about hour-long rides to classes and so on and so forth… Remind me never to listen to him again. ;)

Further news… I rearranged my room, a.k.a. the living room, to accommodate the new bed/couch better. It’s sooo comfortable, especially now that I have my new pillows. I decided to not keep it folded out unless someone’s sleeping over – as a double bed, it kinda takes up the entire room, and I don’t need all that space to sleep on, so I’m just leaving it in couch form and sleeping on it that way. It’s just as comfortable, and there’s less work in the morning. ;)

As for my new phone, I guess I’m not very popular… nobody’s calling or SMSing. Besides O, the only one to send me a message yet is D (no, not you, D, the other D… LOL!). G emailed from Ireland, all excited that we can SMS now, but then I tried it and it doesn’t work. Maybe I have to put something in front of her number. We shall see…

Okay, getting hungry. I just went to Edah – didn’t really need to, just didn’t want to stop riding my bike – and I think I’ve discovered the Dutch equivalent of frozen yogurt. Maybe I’ll have some of that. Oh, and there’s this ice cream place in the Hoog Catherijne called Swirls – soooo good! I had a chocolate milkshake there today – the biggest size they had, for only 2 Euros. Granted, the biggest size they had is an American ‘small’, but who cares? Maybe that’s why Americans are all overweight.

“That’s all, folks!”