Groningen Lately

June 7 - 9

Most of my days for the last week were spent working on homework, planning my trip to France, and otherwise trying to soak up everything I can before I am forced to board a plane home. Don’t get me wrong, there are many reasons to be excited about going home but it is difficult to want to leave this life. Especially because the longer I am here the more normal it seems. It is almost like when you get past the ups and downs of getting used to this new place it just becomes normal and everyday life which means it is easier to get to know people.

Anyways, I’ll talk more about that later. I had two assignments due on Friday that I spent my time working on. This included a group meeting or two, editing, writing, etc. Nothing too thrilling, but it did mean that once I handed them in on Friday I was done yet another semester of university.

Wednesday night saw myself and the three girls I hang out with most have a taco night. It was so lovely. We haven’t cooked together for quite some time because it seemed more cost effective to just eat smaller, worse meals, than cook good meals together. Money really causes problems. Anyways we sat down around 8 for tacos and I think we didn’t leave the table until about midnight. Fun.

Thursday night Tess and I had plans to go to the pancake boat because she couldn’t come the last time I went. Our dinner for two turned into dinner for seven. It was really nice to have a big group sitting around stuffing our faces with pancakes. It was lots of fun. This time I split a savory one and a sweet one. The savory one wasn’t too much to write home about. In my opinion it had too much going on and the flavours were all over the place. The sweet one, however, was delicious! It was the Swedish one – they have named some of them after countries to theme them – it had apples and raisins baked into the cinnamon pancake and was topped with cinnamon ice cream and whipped cream. So good. We were all bursting when we left.

I finished up my edits on my final individual assignment and debated going out to Jazz night, but exhaustion won out and I went to bed instead.

Friday June 10

I headed down to a café to meet my Friday group for a coffee because it would be the last time we would see each other and we thought it would be nice to have a proper hang out before class. It was nice to be able to get to know a few Dutch people as most (all) of the people I regularly hang out with are fellow internationals. That is fun too, getting to know more about Sweden, being harassed about not knowing Spanish, etc, but it really leaves me knowing little about actual Dutch life.

After coffee we went to class and low and behold it was a waste of time. I left part way through to hand it my assignment and be done with it. Felt good.

I came home and had a nap, at least I think I had a nap, I’m sure that I just didn’t do much of anything for a lot of the afternoon.

That evening three of us made a chicken curry before deciding that it would be a good night to go out. Then we heard about a ‘room crawl’ in the C-corridor. Conveniently we know people in the c-corridor so we were allowed to join in. Basically each room provides a different drink and then you move from room to room. If you are assuming that hilarity ensued, you would be right. It was a really fun night; everyone had a really great time (read: everyone was very inebriated). We never left the house; I made it to bed at 8am. Clearly this would cause problems for my sleep schedule and motivation to do anything on Saturday but it was well worth it.