I miss London. I miss that big busy city with all my heart. Don't get me wrong, I love living in a small town in the Dutch polder. I love to wake up on a Saturday morning and hear absolutely nothing except for some chirping birds outside my window. Yet sometimes I find myself staring out of the window at the ducks in the pond behind my house and think: 'I miss London so much.'
I spent only a few days in London back in October, but every single one of those days was filled with awesomeness. The city is so alive compared to my sleepy hometown. I had to keep my eyes open the entire time; if I blinked, I'd miss something amazing. I'm not just talking about buildings or monuments. Actually I'm mostly talking about the people. I saw so types of people I'd never see back home and sometimes I really couldn't help but stare.

Stare like that. I have a creepy stare.

Things that would catch half the town's attention are completely normal in London. Drunk man yelling at inanimate objects? Okay, we'll just let him be, happens all the time. Guy at the stop lights who looks exactly like Jon Snow? Nothing to see here. Men wearing turbans? Plenty of those around here. School class full of five-year-olds in the cutest school uniforms ever? Yeah, we see that cuteness every day in this city. Oh, and a taxi cab driver who's reading a magazine while driving his cab through the crazy London traffic? Totally normal, why does that even surprise you?

Back home I don't see any of these types of people. Drunk men usually stay inside or fall over into some bushes on the corner of the street, where no one sees them. There's not a single dude here who looks like Jon Snow (and I choose to believe I actually saw the real deal that day in London). Seeing a man wearing a turban in the Dutch polder is as rare as finding a unicorn and school uniforms have never been a thing in this country. If a taxi drives through town, everyone is surprised and wondering what kind of fancy person is sitting in that backseat.

It's nice to live in a small town, but you rarely see any colorful characters. People leave their culture at home, cabs are for posh people and if you want to get drunk, you do it at home. It's almost like a culture shock when you arrive in London as a small town girl. After a while, though, if you keep your eyes open, it turns into wonderland. No matter how hard you try not to, you'll find yourself staring at all the people all the time. There's something awesome to discover on every street corner. Compared to that, my hometown is sleepiest place on earth.

Stay Awesome!

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Nothing much ever happens in my hometown near Rotterdam. Sure there are a few crazy people around: the paedophile from down the street, the mentally handicapped guy who likes girls a little too much and one or two violent drug addicts. But they keep quiet and if you didn't already know they where there, you'd never know.
How different it was in London, where the crazy people are impossible not to notice. I saw a man try to beat up a map of the Underground because he couldn't find out where he was. One man must've thought he was a tour guide: he kept pointing out invisible buildings to an imaginary crowd. One... one even wanted to kill my dad...

It was our last night in London and my parents and I where looking for an Indian restuarant. As we were walking down the street, a man came walking towards us. He had dark brown skin, dreadlocks, wore saggy pants, overpriced sneakes and an oversized shirt and sweater. You know the type I'm talking about, if not from real life, then from internet and movies.
This man kept walking straight at my dad. My dad simply refuses to step aside in situations like these. Usually the other person steps aside, sometimes shoulders bump and on this occasion, things went very wrong.
My dad and the man didn't just bump into each other's shoulders, it was a serious collision. If it had been me, I would've been flying towards a painful meeting with the sidewalk's concrete. My dad made an indignant noise and already started to walk away when the man started yelling at him. I'm giving you the uncensored version so yes, do expect things to get nasty from now on.
'Hey! Are you fucking blind or something? Didn't you see me or what? You fucking stupid man?'
Now here's one, no, two things you need to know about my dad: he's a black belt in karate and doesn't step down from a confrontation like this one. Never.
My dad turned around, looked the man straight in the eye and said: 'Sure, I'm stupid.'
I can remember thinking he was going to give us a karate demonstration. That nothing could go wrong for my dad. I was so naive.
'Yeah? You fucking stupid?' the man yelled. 'You want me to kill you or something?'
When I heard those words, I froze. I couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't even think anything except for 'it's over, we're done'.
'I'm gonna fucking shoot you in front of your family!' Tha man, only a feet or two away from my dad, reached for something inside his pocket. I didn't want to find out what he was reaching for. Neither did my mom.
'Come on, let it go, let's get out of here,' she practically begged my dad in Dutch. I was afraid he wouldn't listen to her. He never listens to anyone when he's enraged.
'We're going,' he said in the same language while maintaining eye contact with the lunatic that wanted to kill him. Then, suddenly, he walked away, my mom and I right at his heels. I was terrified the man would follow us, but all he did was yell more threats and throw more F-bombs at us.

We never made it to an Indian restuarant. My mom was trembling with fear and I walked around like some sort of zombie. All I wanted was to go back to our hotel room. We ordered pizza and took it back to the hotel. It'd been a long time since I'd been that scared and it'll be a long time before I'll feel completely comfortable in London again.

Stay Awesome!

PS. Sorry for all those swear words...

I've been to a lot of places: from San Francisco to Sydney and a lot of places inbetween. I've seen ghettoes and ghost towns, I spent a night in a motel that was inhabited by drug dealers and listened to the endless wail of police sirens in Miami, Florida. You'd think that all that big city craziness would have prepared me for staying home alone in a quiet small town. Think again. I may have some experience with the big city, but at heart I'm still a small town girl - and this small town girl does not like being home alone.

I grew up in a town with a population of about 28.000. Not exactly small, but the people here are old-fashioned and everyone somehow knows everyone. It's always quiet here: people like rest and peace.
Staying home alone in a peaceful place like this shouldn't be that difficult at all. So why am I going paranoid every time I have to stay home alone?

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That, exactly that, is the reason why I go crazy when I'm home alone. Honestly, nothing ever happens in this town, but every time I'm home alone, the apocalypse seems to start right outside my front door. Suddenly there are suspicous people roaming my street and gangs of college kids using drugs. All the crazy things that usually happen in the not so pretty parts of big cities seem to be happening on the playground in my street. The silence is bad, but when I hear something, anything I wouldn't usually hear, I run upstairs to grab my dad's wooden sword and pretend I'm a ninja (ie hide in my room, under the bed). If I'd be living in the city, I would never dare to leave my room again...

I always liked to think of myself as a person of the world. Because I've 'been to places' and 'seen stuff' and 'done things'. So why was I so thoroughly terrified when I had to travel by train all on my own? Probably because I actually am a small town girl, used to cycling and walking, not chasing after leaving trains or running from creepy dudes on the subway.

I made a schedule to replace the person who usually comes with me

My first trip by train was a real adventure to me. Usually someone's with me who knows their way around the public transportation system way better than I do. I trust that person with my life, I'd follow them to the end of the world, even all the way into Mordor, just because I don't know which bus to take. You can see how troubling it was for me to go out on my own, all the way from my peaceful little home town up to Rotterdam's Central Station and then on to Groningen, a city in the north which is considered the far end of the world to most people from my town.
But I made it, I didn't even loose my dignity by chasing after a subway that was leaving at the very moment I stepped out of the bus. Instead I did the grown-up thing to do: I got myself a newspaper and read it. But only the comics, which didn't made it such a grown-up thing to do after all...

Then, after a quiet ride on the subway, I had to get out and get into another one which would bring me to Central Station. Panick! Alarm! Hopping off one line and onto the other was something I had done once, back in December, with my parents, but that didn't make the prospect less scary. It would be a real accomplishment to get lost on Beurs station in Rotterdam, but I can get lost on the way from my bedroom to the toilet (FYI: down the stairs that are straight in front of my bedroom, take four more steps and you're literally in the toilet bowl).
I avoided getting lost by loosing the dignity I had so carefully preserved when getting off the bus; I saw a flashing sign with 'Rotterdam Central, leaving in 0 minutes' and made a run for it. The gods were with me that day. I caught the tube and arrived safely at Rotterdam Central - 50 minutes before my train would leave...

See, it does show my train after all

Those 50 minutes felt like a decade. I was so worried about missing my train that I checked every sign twice, just to make sure there actually was a train going to Groningen. Then I had to check them a thrid time, because my train wasn't on any of them!
Turns out I was just too early to see my 7.05am train on a sign that only showed which trains were leaving until 6.54am... Anyway, I don't know how I did it, but I found the right train. And that's where the journey really began.

It takes almost three hours to travel from Rotterdam to Groningen. Along the way I've seen a lot of people come and go. People on the train seem an entire different species. There's just so many types. It didn't take me long to realize that a nervous seventeen-year-old was one of the less remarkable types you can meet on the train.
There are parents with noisy children who go and sit in the quiet areas anyway (but you'll forgive them, because their children are so cute). But those people are better than the grumpy alcoholic who makes the entire compartment smeel like beer. And what to think of the hostile reader? Yes, hostile readers do exist. There was a college guy sitting opposite of me who was reading Game of Thrones. I wanted to ask if he liked the book, but he almost growled at me when I looked at him. Maybe because my interested face looks a lot like my creepy face... which looks a lot like my normal face...
But no matter what type of person is sittin next to you, they're all trying to avoid eye contact. The readers are obviously at an advantage. There are also people who avoid making eye contact by staring out of the window at the extremely diverse Dutch landscape. There are two rules for Dutch train views:

1. The farther north you go, the more horses you'll see.
2. North, east, south and west al look the same: grassy polders filled with cows

All the same is staring at the dull Dutch landscape my favorite way to avoid eye contact. It is by any means better than the passive-agressive staring others prefere. It seems paradoxal, but it actually works. Unlike staring out of the window, for there's always the threat of making eye contact through the reflection - even more akward and feared than normal eye contact.

So I sat in the train for hours, curled up in my cornerm trying to become invisible. My suitcase was blocking the chair next to me and I felt terribly guilty about it. Not that I could do anything about it; I was too small to reach the luggage compartments.
it was a very uncomfortable ride. I felt my heart stop every time the train stopped, because I was so afraid I'd forget to get out of the train in time.
But I safely arrived in Groningen. And you wouldn't believe how proud I still am for travelling across the country on my own, for the very forst time!