It draws to a close

Thursday June 23

Thursday morning I spent with my cousin walking around her adorable town. We stopped for coffee, perused the shops, stopped for toasties and tea, then I dropped her off at work and I continued to walk around a bit. Eventually I made my way back to her flat to grab my bags with just enough time to take her key back to her, say goodbye, and catch the train. I took the train from Shrewsbury to Liverpool in order to catch my flight back to Amsterdam. This entire process was rather uninteresting except that the Liverpool Airport kind of sucks. Well once you pass security it is nice, but the rest of it wasn't. Otherwise, it went quite smoothly, well there was a Starbucks that didn't have ice and therefore couldn't serve me a cold drink - seriously? No ice?

My flight arrived into AMS around 9:30, I bought some snacks, and got on the next train to Groningen. Fortunately for me Tess was in Amsterdam and we made plans to meet on the same train for the ride home. We met about half an hour into my ride - and she brought beer! What a forward thinking girl! This was ultimately a life saver as we had two drunk 17 year olds behind us and a half an hour train delay - it made it much easier to handle.

Otherwise I arrived home quite tired and went to bed.

Friday June 24

I didn't get up to much during the day Friday, some stuff to get ready for packing, like laundry, some packing, some cleaning, nothing too exciting.

That night, however, was a bit of a different story. As the school year was coming to an end and many people were leaving there was a bit of a general farewell party in our common room, and this party was an 'elegant farewell' so lots of people dressed up, it was nice. It was quite a party to remember, it lasted all night, eventually we made our way into the city. I'd love to say the evening ended as elegantly as it had started, but then my stories would not have been nearly as good. Lets just say it was ridiculous and hilarious and I fell asleep on my floor around 8am. Keepin' it classy.

Saturday June 25

Naturally due to the previous night's shenanigans no one was really moving too quickly, well to be honest no one was really moving at all. I woke up around 11, and went to buy pancake ingredients as I had promised to make fluffy "North American" style pancakes. Now, this didn't happen on Saturday because no one was awake and I needed McDonald's more than was appropriate. I watched Misfits for most of the day before going to find people around 3pm, most people were still asleep.

I packed for most of the day, slowly but surely getting it all in - well not really all, I did leave a bunch of stuff behind. That evening I team dinnered it with Tess before hanging out with Josefin's friends from Sweden for the night. Basically they just make you do shots after singing some sort of Swedish drinking song.

Sunday June 26

I successfully made a batch of very fluffy, very delicious blueberry and a batch of chocolate chip pancakes, I even splurged and bought maple syrup. This was a considerable feat because I did not have any means to measure things out. I had one bowl with vague markings. The pancakes were a hit! Yes! They love'd 'em. Which was good because I didn't know how they would turn out. You see, pancakes everywhere else are more like crepes, thin.

Post pancake binge I went with Tess into the city for one final bike ride, one final stroll, one final cafe, one final trip around Groningen. We walked around which was nice because you don't often meander the streets of a city you live in, especially when I was there I was always biking to a place yet I never really stopped to look around too much. Being Sunday most things were closed but we found some nice streets and shops - that we would have liked to go into. Eventually we stopped for a coke and took in the lovely sunshine. This was the first day of sunshine we had in a very long time, it had been consistently rainy and muggy. It was really nice to just relax in the city.

We made it back to Winscho later that afternoon and I finished packing, stressfully weighing my bags that both appeared to be over weight. As such I had to reevaluate and I ended up taking a bunch of stuff out and packing it in my backpacking pack that I would take on the plane. I also left a number of things behind. We hung out outside for a while, I said some goodbyes, then dragged some people to my room to give away a bunch of my stuff. We just hung out and chatted for quite a while. It was difficult to imagine leaving that place. We made plans to see each other for breakfast before I left and I headed off to bed. Staying up late and needing to be up early for a full day traveling meant I was going to be getting hardly any sleep, but I was a-okay with that.