Just got back from a big party downtown. First time I celebrated the new year without either of my parents. The music wasn’t that great, but since I don’t regularly go out like this, I nevertheless enjoyed myself!
I’m wishing everybody a great 2006 and I hope to get back to writing a little soon :)… […]

Mja ja… de eindejaarsperiode komt er weer aan… tijd om mijn verlanglijstje nog eens te updaten… Wie weet zit er wel iets tussen waarvan je denkt “Hey! Laat ik dat eens kopen voor Tijl!” ;).
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Star Wars Episode III - Revenge […]

Last Saturday I celebrated my first Thanksgiving together with 13 other people form the UU congregation I went to earlier this month. Lynn was organizing it, while somebody else was hosting it. Lynn invited me when I went to the Sunday service earlier this month, and I thought ‘Why not?’ :).
So earlier that morning I […]

Just found an interesting thingie online. A website on which you can check the countries you visited in your life and which then shows a map of the world with all the countries you visited highlighted.
I’ve visited 13 countries: the United States, Egypt, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and […]

Thought I’d share some more stuff with you guys about what we did in Paris and in Belgium :). In short I can say I had a very nice time with Susanne :).
She hadn’t told me she had invited friends to join us in Paris, so I was a little surprised to be meeting six […]

Tomorrow’s the day… ;). I’m getting up at around 5.45 am, and I’m leaving at 6.45 am to Lille where I’m gonna take the ‘Train à Grande Vitesse’ to Paris at 8am, where I should arrive at 9.04 am. We arranged a meeting point at 9.45 am around a certain fountain in center Paris, so… […]

Yes, yes! Susanne’s going to visit me next September :). Somewhere early September, I’ll be taking the TGV (Train à Grand Vitesse / High Speed Train) to Paris where I’ll meet Susanne and visit the Louvre with her (among other things). She’s in France right now for a festival in Bordeaux, in which she participated […]

Last weekend and the weekend before, I visited three cities: Leiden, Bruges (Brugge) and Mons (Bergen).
We went to Leiden on the 16th to bring some stuff to and back from my room. We ate some pancakes and then went to town to enjoy the morning-afternoon market. Enjoyed one of those nice stroopwafels as usual […]

I got myself a job today! I’m going to work in a Belgian chocolate factory called IBC in July :D. I’m not sure what exactly I’m going to do, but apparently I’m going to be at the computer control of the production or something… Next Friday I’m going to pass by to present myself and […]

Yesterday I went to Ghent with my mom and my sister to visit Marjolein and Danny and their 3-year-old daughter Hanelore. They moved from Belgium to Australia two years ago, so I hadn’t seen them in a while. And moreover, I had never seen their daughter before in real life. She’s sooooooooo cute :P.
It’s weird […]

Heh… I was messaged on MSN yesterday evening by my ex-girl-friend. We first updated each other a bit on our latest news bulletins and gossip ;)… And at the end of our conversation she said this:
My friend: Shall we meet up some time in the summer holiday then? My thesis is about the feeling of […]

Yesterday evening I watched the slides of my trip to New York with a slide projector and wow, they look so much better than on my screen! Now I remember why I prefer taking pictures on slide film :p. Maybe my screen isn’t as good as I thought it was either… Hmm… :)
Anyway, a lot […]

And the New York Photo Album is also finished. Unfortunately no pictures from Susanne at the moment. Maybe later, but there’s little chance, since she doesn’t want any casual pictures of herself online, to protect her career. :-/
But anyway… Enjoy the pictures of high buildings, baseball in Central Park, art, flowers, etc. :)
Tip: Use the […]

The La Palma photo album is ready :). Enjoy the views of the telescopes, sunsets and roaring ocean ;).
Tip: Use the slideshow feature ;).
PS: In the meantime I also moved my Toscane and Umbria pictures to my new Gallery.

It was a tough job, but all pictures of New York and La Palma have been scanned, cropped and contrast enhanced with the aid of the excellent Minolta DiMage Dual Scan IV slide scanner and Corel Photo-Paint ;).
I hope you’ll enjoy them :).

My birthday present for noodle finally arrived today. It’s almost a week late, but well… that’s life isn’t it ;). I’ll just blame the Malaysian post office :D.
Anyway… I gave her a nice card, and a Yankee baseball which I bought in New York. (See on the left ;)) I know, I know… Yankee is […]

Bah, I slept 24 hours in the last 2 nights :P.
Three days ago we woke up in La Palma at 1 pm. We drove down to the ocean to watch mother nature, went back up around 4 pm, had dinner and went up the mountain to do observations till 7 am. Then we went back […]

I’m back peeps ;). After seven days of observing in La Palma and gathering more than 100 Gigabytes of data with the bunch of us, we headed back home. It was a great, fun, educative and unique experience and I’m soooooo glad I went :).
Anyway… I now have 8 rolls of 36 pictures (about 280 […]

Well, it’s been a while since my last post. Mainly because I had little time in the last few days of my holiday in New York and certainly not when I was packing for La Palma :). I’ll be trying to fill in the gaps either here in La Palma (unlikely) or next week.
We departed […]

Later I also went through Wall Street. A block before I was going to cross Broadway, I passed two policemen with quite impressive guns. They were kinda dressed as if they were going to assault a building to free hostages :P. Going through Broadway I passed by Liberty Park, turned left and got at the […]

A bit later I took the free (!) ferry to Staten Island, which was supposed to pass close to the Statue of Liberty. And indeed… The first pictures I took were from the Manhattan skyline, a bit later I took a few of the Statue of Liberty. We didn’t go that close, but since I […]

On Thursday afternoon we were supposedly going downtown to visit Lower Manhattan. Susanne was 40 minutes late though at the Starbucks Coffee where we were going to meet at 1 pm. Something unexpected had come up and she wasn’t going to be able to go downtown with me.
Thus, I was on my own for the […]

At 7.30 pm, Susanne called me she was ready with the rehearsal, so we met at Juilliard to go have a Malaysian dinner with Danny and his girl friend, and Ryan, another musician.
We went to a restaurant called ‘Penang’ and had a really really nice dinner there. I have no idea what exactly I’ve been […]

After the lunch, we headed back home so that she could practice a bit. In two hours, she was going to rehearse with Danny, a pianist she’s playing with. In the mean time, I read some more in my NY city guide, but with the sounds of her playing, I couldn’t really concentrate on reading […]

At 10.30 am I went to the Starbucks Coffee where we had arranged to meet, I was a little late, but of course Susanne wasn’t there yet :D. So I ordered myself a hot chocolate and checked out the info I had on the Natural History Museum. After a few minutes she arrived, ordered herself […]

Later Susanne went to a movie about violinists with somebody, so I went out to town as well to look around some more and to find myself a new battery for the camera, since it was dying on me. After almost 40 minutes of wandering around in the labyrinth of streets, I found one luckily, […]

As you could read in my post yesterday, I went to Central Park yesterday until 1 pm since Susanne had to practice. So, at 1 pm I headed home, and guess what… I jumped into Susanne along the way as she just was about to go home herself on her rollerblades. Pretty cool sight :), […]

I just checked something online about undeveloped film going through x-ray security screenings. I had read in my New York City guide that x-ray screening can damage undeveloped film. But at the screening in Brussels, I said that to the guy taking my carry-on bag, but he said everything had to go through and said […]

This morning I woke up at around 9.45 am, so I got almost 9 hours of sleep. Susanne was supposed to come over at around 11-12 to practice until 1 pm, so I had some time for my own until 1 pm. First I made my first NY posts on my blog, later I had […]

This morning I woke up around 8.45 am. We had planned to go to the American Museum of Natural History at 10.30 am, so I had some time to do other stuff beforehand. So I thought I’d check it out whether there were any new asteroids already since the last time I checked last week… […]

After we watched the sun set from onto the Empire State Building, we went down and went to Times Square. She had mentioned before that Times Square is *the* place to be at night for advertisements and neon… WOW. This is pretty incredible. I’ve seen it on tv of course, but when you’re standing right […]

After some more pictures and wandering around I took a cab (cool guy) to Susanne’s place and was very relieved to see her again, alive and well :). Pretty soon after, we went out to profit from the sunny weather and pleasurable temperatures. She guided me through several streets, the subway, and more and bigger […]

I guess I worried a bit too much about the flight and all the paperwork accompanied by it… Everything (at least almost everything) went as smoothly as you could get it. I took the train at 5.41 am to Brussels National Airport, and arrived there at 7.12 am or something like that. I went straight […]

I didn’t sleep too well last night, took me about an hour to fall asleep, I think, and I woke up thinking about all kinds of stuff that could go wrong etc. But my internal clock didn’t fail with lack of sleep… I had put my alarm clock on 4 am and at 3.57 am […]

Thanks for the hilarious adaptation, Vaga ;).
(in case you have no idea what I’m talking about… look harder :p.)

Dear friends,
It’s less than 24 hours now until my plane departs for the beautiful New York skyline… It’s gonna be a stressful time tomorrow, I think, with all the trains, planes, busses and taxis to take, but it will also be day of excitement… Finally seeing Susanne again after 7 months of not having seen […]

Well… It seems I’ll have to find my way to Susanne’s place on my own :(. She’s not going to pick me up at the airport, since it’s way too big there and we’d never find eachother anyway. So… It’ll be exciting from the start lol. I’m already going be blood nervous about getting on […]

Yesterday I went to the Kooyker (Dutch-widespread bookstore) to check on books about New York. Me and Susanne kinda agreed that it could be useful for me to have some ideas of things that I wanted to do, visit or see for 2 or three days and leave the rest for Susanne. But of course, […]

I hope all of you had a happy Easter weekend :).
I had a nice dinner with Femke on Saturday night and watched Monster on dvd. It’s a movie about ‘the first female serial killer in the United States’, a prostitute who killed 7 of her customers. Good but very hard movie. This is not a […]