Remember me?

Sorry, I've been a bit slack lately and just realised I haven't posted anything for a while. Actually not much has happened lately - we have been keeping out of trouble and really just living the quiet life at home!

As usual the weather is a topic of conversation/news here. Not sure if talking about the weather is necessarily just a preoccupation here in NL or if it happens everywhere. I guess when "strange" things happen (ie droughts, bushfires, floods etc) everyone talks about it, but it often seems to be the first thing everyone mentions here! And yep, another record has been broken!!! We have just had the warmest January on record EVER. A coincidence considering that big, scary report released in Paris during the week officially acknowledging that the earth IS warming up! Maybe even guys like Johnny Howard and George W. Bush will now admit climate change is real. Anyway, we had an extremely short taste of what winter is meant to be like a couple of weeks ago - we actually had 4 whole days of minus zero temperatures! Yep, I even had to scrape the ice off my bicycle seat before riding to school in the mornings. That is all over again now, with the average daytime temperature back up to about 8 C

On our never ending quest to get a house/apartment/flat/more than one room (!!) we spent a couple of hours last Thursday on our day off driving around Nijmegen on a bit of a reccie. We checked out a few different neighbourhoods where we have been applying for houses just to make sure they were ok. As a result we have narrowed our areas of preference and have decided we definately don't want to live on the OTHER side of the canal! I have to laugh - since living in a small city of only 160,000 my concept of distance and travel time has really changed. The other side of the canal is probably way closer to the "centre" than say Northcote is to the CBD of Melbourne but there is no way I could live there, it's just too far away :-)) The whole exercise is pretty academic anyway, with only 3 years on the "waiting list" we don't really stand much of a chance at the moment of getting a house. But it made us feel like we have some control over the situation and gave us something to do on a chilly, foggy Thursday!

We had a fun night out Saturday week ago. Our friend Niek sent some kind of broadcast sms to everyone he knows here in Nijmegen and we ended up with about 15 people going out to Merleyn (a bar that reminds me a lot of Fitzroy). Niek came here earlier in the evening to eat dinner with us, and he then slept the night on our lovely air bed :-)

School is going along ok - I moved into another, higher group two weeks ago and it always takes a while to get used to new teachers again. I try my hardest to speak more, but am still getting pretty frustrated at how difficult it is. My reading and writing skills are so far ahead of my speaking skills it's not funny! Oh well, I just have to keep plodding along and hope one day it will all come together.

Alli xxx

PS Happy birthday Dad :-))