Summer Recap, Travelplans and 30 before 30
Sunday, September 6th, 2009After a long break from the blog, It’s time to announce my glorious comeback! (read: I’m going to bore you all with poorly constructed sentences and an overload of pictures again)
After I managed to skip the European winter by travelling in Latin America, It was very depressing to come back in a rainy and cold Holland at the beginning of March. All the warm weather and memories were traded for rain and eating hotchpotch (stamppot in dutch) while watching reality TV. But when the spring came my depression faded away and while finishing my degree I did a couple short side trips to keep it all interesting.
I visited my Friend Tom in Helsinki. He was having a very tough time doing an internship at the Dutch Embassy. (means; Ice-skating, drinking and visiting cool places with the ambassador) I visited him with Walther and we went to Talinn in Estonia for a day which was very cool:
Talinn brought us back to the middle ages…
My Swedish friend Daniel told me good stories about Copenhagen, so I visited him for 2 weeks and the city crushed all my expectations. It’s very beautiful, clean and spaciously set up. If you’re not looking to party during week days (Monday-Wednesdays seem impossible) and you don’t do currency conversions in your head while spending their stupid Crones, the city has no downside! Every time I visit Scandinavia it feels like Holland is about a decade behind to them:
Copenhagen has a lot of canals and marinas.
It didn’t hurt that the sky was always this blue for the full two weeks 
They have an autonome hippy area in the city where you’re not allowed to take pictures. Christiania is kinda communistic and very liberal but they seem to live off tourists for about 90% which is quitte lame. It’s definitely worth a visit though.
We (Andy, Daniel, John and me) also visited Odense, a smaller city in denmark about 1.5 hours from Copenhagen. It’s the hometown of Hans Christian Andersen. Didn’t we all grow up with his fairy-tales? 
After Copenhagen I rent an apartment in Amsterdam and lived there for the summer with John. Amsterdam is a great place to be, especially in the summer and with a lot of friends close by.
I took zero pictures in Amsterdam (guess I’m too proud to act like a tourist in ‘my own’ city. But Daniel took this nice pic of the canal (Keizersgracht) faced left from our house.
After all the hard working on the degree (….) I felt like I deserved a vacation, so I visited my friend Salim and his girlfriend Sophie on Ibiza! Iwan, who didn’t have a problem with a week of partying and going to the beach, came along and we had a great time there.
Salim and Sophie had a smashing view from their appartment. It’s just so nice to have breakfast (Corona included obv) at the balcony watching over the ocean like this.
We pimped it out the right way at Ibiza in this bright and shiny Seat Marbella ‘89! True Glamourboys!
Me and Sophie in front of Es Vedra, the magical mountain. Hippies are convinced ufos landed on the mountain…
Hey!! M’n vader is hier ook (inside joke) A lot of people that visit Ibiza only go to the clubs and the beach that’s closest by… but it is actually a very beautiful island, especially in the north.
Now that I finished my degree and fall has made his entrance in Holland, I feel like it’s time to hit the road again! In 2 days I’m flying out to Barcelona, where I’m going to live with 2 friends in Gracia, one of the nicer neighbourhoods of the city, for two months. After that I will go to Latin America again until after new year, and the plan is to move to Cape Town, South Africa afterwards. All in all no reason to feel sorry for me…
30 before 30
On a different note, after talking to some friends I decided to make a list of 30 things I want to do before I’m 30 years old. The list is in random order and not everything is equally easy to accomplish but I always enjoy setting goals and I won’t feel as if I failed if I have a couple points left to be done when I turn 30!
Here we go, feel free to comment if you have suggestions.
- Spending quality time and maintaining a good relationship with my family
- Strengthening friendships with friends that are worth it.
- A degree
- Speak fluent Spanish
- Be conversational in an extra language
- Good at dancing salsa
- Still working out on a regular basis
- Maximize my potential in poker
- Diving at five different top locations in the world
- Learn to (wave) surf
- an Antarctica expedition
- Helicopter skiing
- Have a decent handicap in golf
- Complete an Olympic triathlon
- Visit 25 countries for the first time
- Cage diving with great white sharks
- Teach a protégé to beat Mid Stakes No Limit online
- Visit a grand slam final tennis
- Read 3 books a year that intellectually challenge me
- Do something significant for charity
- Make a safari tour in Africa
- Live in Cape town and Tokyo for a couple months
- develop myself with NLP
- Do at least one wine tour a year.
- Sail around the world
- complete a meditation course of a full moon period on a fitting location
- visit the Galapagos Islands
- I’ll keep this one private
- see 28
- don’t regret things I haven’t done
Hope you are all doing well
Keep an eye on the blog, I plan to update it with a decent frequency…
Take care,
-Veron