Back when I was doing a German teacher training program in college, I managed to convince a teacher to let my class go to Düsseldorf "to practice our German with native speakers". In reality, I just wanted to see a city I'd heard a lot about. Sadly, college canceled the trip less than a week before we'd leave. I was furious. My classmates and I had made an entire program, which included a visit to the...
Back in June, I was extremely excited to visit Jordan. It was the first Islamic country I ever visited. which made the whole thing extra special to me. Reading about Islam and talking about the religion with Kanra from The Lunar Descent is interesting, but experiencing it first-hand was something I'd been looking forward to for a long time. On top of that, Jordan has amazing Roman roots, some pretty cool street art, Wadi Rum...
The past few weekends saw me staring at the blank pages of my blogging notebook. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't fill them with words about street art, comic books or upcoming trips abroad. I realized there was only one thing I wanted to write about: my experiences at university. I've hesitated multiple times, put my pen down countless times, told myself it's not interesting for the audience every single day. But hey,...
I consider myself lucky enough to have learned Latin in high school. I know that most who give the language a try find it a pain in the butt, but I always found it a walk in the park. At some point I joked I must have Roman blood in my veins, because I was so quick to translate anything. Although my Latin classes are now far behind me, I still love anything Roman. You...
On a warm night in June, I was on a bus that would bring me to Wadi Rum, Jordan. I was excited to see this famous desert. In my mind, I already saw myself roasting marshmallows over a campfire, talking with others from my tour group till midnight. It would be the perfect end to a perfect day, which I'd spent exploring Petra and climbing to an illegal viewpoint. I couldn't wait to sit back...
"You want to see the viewpoint?" My friends and I had barely made it out of the Siq, the gorge that leads to Petra's famous Treasury in Jordan, when the first Bedouin approached us to offer his services as a tour guide. "You want to go to the viewpoint?" The man pointed to the left, where we could clearly see steps leading up to the edge of the gorge. "Do we really need a guide to...
"It sure is beautiful though." "It sure is." My friends and I were staring at the Monastery, one of the lesser-known Nabatean ruins in Petra. At that moment, we already knew our visit to the rose-red city would be the highlight of our visit to Jordan. We were also already getting ready to leave the Monastery behind though, as we had to be back at the bus at 4pm and still had an entire ancient...
I loved movies when I was a kid. Don't get me wrong, I still love movies, but back then movies were my life. I used to watch The Lion King and Lilo & Stitch on a daily basis. Sometimes my dad would leaf through the TV guide and mark movies I'd like. That's how I ended up watching Spirited Away at 8 years old. I had no idea what the story was about. I just...
"You want to go ahead?" our Jordanian guide shouted down the path to my friends and me early in the morning. "Yes!" we shouted back. We were already thirty meters ahead of the group and, with all due respect, we did not want to walk to Petra with these slow people. Sticking with them would definitely ruin our chances of taking any good pictures of Al Khazneh, the legendary Treasury. The place would be crawling...
Deadline, another deadline, linguistics test, literature test and a third deadline. That's what the last week of my first block in university looked like. By the end of that week, I was completely exhausted and in desperate need of a break. Lucky for me, my parents were on vacation in Holten, a small town in the east of the Netherlands. They invited me over, as I had Friday off. I immediately accepted that invitation. Even...
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