My first ever trip abroad was to Ghent in Belgium. I was six weeks old at the time. It was my first of many, many visits to the country on our southern border. By now I've been to just about every major Belgian city and you'd think I wouldn't be all the impressed by the country anymore. You'd be wrong though. In those twilight zone days between Christmas and New Year's Eve, I went to...
This time next week I'll be high up in the air, flying over the Atlantic Ocean towards Cuba. The fact that my flight from the Netherlands to Cuba via Mexico takes about 8 hours doesn't bother me. I'm used to long flights, always have been. No surprise if you take into account that my parents took baby me on multiple intercontinental flights. I enjoy those flights now. That time between departure and arrival is a...
I'm quite stubborn. This means I'm usually your worst nightmare in any kind of discussion. Sometimes it means I will not give up on what I want just because I thought it'd be fun. But most of the time it means something much simpler: when I see a climbable hill or mountain, I have to climb it. It doesn't matter if I'm half-crippled like I was in Scotland. I see a hill, I climb it....
Back when I took my first insecure steps into the world of street art I had no idea how hard it is to actually create something that's not butt-ugly. Apart from that my first attempt ended with me almost shitting myself and realizing spray paint is a difficult medium; I'd accidentally painted my entire hand a Satanic shade of red and the paint had dripped all over my stencil. Street art was hard. About a...
One of the questions I've been frequently asked in my blogging career is: 'Are you really Dutch?' Now I have no idea why I'd lie about that. I'm about as Dutch as they get, but you don't want to know how often I've had to explain that no, my country didn't start World War II; I'm Dutch, not German. And no, I'm not Scandinavian; Denmark is a different place alltogether. Most of the time a...
Every now and then I need to get away from life in the Rotterdam area. I need to get away, explore a new place and experience as many new things as possible. Now I hadn't really gone anywhere since August, so by December I felt like the walls were closing in on me. That's when I got in touch with Ella from Ella Was Here, bought some train tickets and went to visit her in...
Dear 2017, God, it feels good to see you disappear in the rear view mirror. I didn't dare say or write any of these things in your final days, in case you'd come back to bite me in the ass one last time. Actually, you did that anyway by having me run my last race of the year in a storm that almost blew me into a pond. Thanks mate. I guess you understand why...
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