Current Music: Garth Brooks – “Calling Baton Rouge”

Wow, New Year celebrations here are sooo cool! So I went to L and A’s house and we all hung out from 20.30 till 0.00. At midnight everybody had champagne and kissed everybody else, and then we all went outside and wow… it was a 360 degree light show! You can buy your own fireworks here, real ones, and everybody sets them off… so there were little kids with sparklers and guys setting off rockets and poppers and whatever else there was… literally the entire neighborhood was out on the street for over an hour, celebrating. (What we’d never thought about was, what goes up must come down… A took the remains of a rocket on her head. She was okay though.) Then we went over to another family’s house for a while, and then the four of us – me, the twins (L and A), and a friend of theirs, J – took two bikes and went over to a party about 15 minutes away.

That was where things started getting interesting. :) We only had the two bikes, and Linde had already drunk a few glasses of wine and champagne and claimed she couldn’t ride one, so she rode behind J and I rode behind A. We had a nice ride – screaming out Happy New Year and generally disturbing the peace – but then we couldn’t find the party and had trouble getting through to call someone to get directions (too many people on mobile phones) but we did eventually get there. It was someone’s house, and they had a carport-like area set up for us. It was a little overwhelming for me at first – loud music, lots of smoke, tons of people I don’t know speaking a language not my first – but I ended up having a good time. S, one of the twins’ good friends, is really sweet, and I met a few other nice people too. So we danced and drank and talked (screamed, over the music) and had a nice time. P also called and said maybe he could come by for a little while after he was done working (yes, on New Year’s Eve, poor thing) so that was nice too.

But then I noticed that L was looking drunker than I’d ever seen her, even talking funny. It was understandable – she normally doesn’t drink to excess, but it was New Year’s Eve and so she’d been drinking even before we left her house, which she probably forgot to take into account. Anyway, I told her that, and she stopped drinking, but it was too late; a few minutes later she went to the bathroom and threw up. J and I were sitting in the living room (with everyone staring at us because we were speaking English… I got asked about six times to speak Dutch, my response being, “Wat moet ik dan zeggen?”) drinking S’s ‘special cocktails’, and A came and found us and said that L wanted to go home. And she really didn’t look very good, kind of gray. J and I were having a good time and not really ready to leave, but we did anyway.

Anyway, so the bike ride home was the funniest part of the whole evening. J was also very drunk, and she’s a little crazy anyway, so I was laughing so hard at her all night… she went to a summer camp in America like L did, so her English is very good and she likes it better than Dutch, so we sort of slid back and forth between languages all night. But anyway, she’s also extremely tall, even by Dutch standards, and she had ridden her bike over but she, like L, was in no state to ride it back. So A and I pedaled. L sat behind A and the idea was for J to sit behind me. However, since I was riding her bike (at a height of barely 1,64), I was pedaling with my toes (with severe pain in my crotch after a few streets, LOL!), thus the bike was swerving from side to side and J kept insisting that she was seeing double. Anyway, she finally got on but we were naturally moving much slower than the twins – both of us are heavier than they are, plus it was impossible for me to pedal very fast – but J knew the way home so we just went slowly (a couple blocks behind the twins). It was one of those times when absolutely everything is funny. J kept talking about how she needed her birth control pill because “I’m gonna have, like, a thousand babies”, and she at one point addressed a burning fire beside the road. Then when she was giving me directions, she said in a perfectly normal voice, “Left right straight.” Which of course did not help AT ALL… And as we were laughing about that, P called. But I needed both hands to steer the bike so I passed the phone to J. I figured he might be done working, so I told her, “Vraag maar of hij klaar is.” But she paid no attention to me, started a cheery little conversation about, “Hi, I’m a Dutch friend of Jess’s, you’re working, that sucks, you must get like 300% pay for that, blah blah blah.” So I said again, “Hey – vraag maar of hij al klaar is!” Still nothing, continued on with her merry little conversation. She never did ask him if he was done, just chatted away, told him I’d call when we were home, and hung up. I sighed and said, “…Of niet!” but then that was funny too and we were off again…

Anyway, so we got home around 5.30 and J went home since we didn’t have a bed for her, and the twins and I crashed and woke up around 14.00… and IT WAS SNOWING!!! We ate, watched a movie, talked, J came over again… and it kept snowing. Then L had to go to work and I didn’t really want to stay anymore. I was having a good time but I knew if I pushed it, it wouldn’t be fun anymore, so their mom drove me home. We had to scrape off the car… lots of snow, at least to my eye. Picture a 50-year-old mom with long gray hair and a teenager looking at the most snow she’s ever seen, throwing snowballs at each other! LOL!

So now I’m back in good old Utrecht. No plans for tomorrow, but Saturday I’m going to Belgium with T, a friend from Emmeloord. He’s around 24 and lived in America for a while (was married to an American girl but now divorced) and so he, like me, wants mac and cheese… so we’re going to Antwerpen. And to make it a fully American day, we’re going to Subway… apparently there’s a Subway in Amersfoort. This I gotta see!