Recently in July '23

July is now coming to an end, and so is summer in The Netherlands per the looks of it. It has been raining for two or three weeks already, and the prediction is that it’ll continue over during this week. This, of course, after a few days of what I would consider unusually high temperatures in The Netherlands. Let’s recap this month.

✍️ Website

This was a reasonably calm month when it comes to updates to my website. Maybe that means I was busy with other things. Nevertheless, I made a few updates to my 🚀 Impossible List, and, in a turn of events, added a dark theme to my website. It will be enabled by default if you’re browser or operating system is set to work with dark mode. In the end, the choice is always yours and you can set whether you want a light or dark experience in the footer of the website.

🍄 Life

First of all, I went to 🇵🇹 Portugal for around two weeks. While I stayed at my parents for most of the time and met with different family members, I also had the opportunity of going to Lisbon and meeting some of my friends. It was nice!

Towards the end of the month, I met Martin for the first time in real life. During this mini-trip to Germany, I managed to take quite a lot of 🚝 trains from different companies. The trip to get there took around 7 to 8 hours! And I must say I am very surprised: there were no delays at all, whether it be with Deutsche Bahn, or any other company.

Not only did I take a lot of trains, I also experienced for the first time two different types of trains: a diesel train and a steam train. The diesel train is… well… just a normal train but louder, of course. But the 🚂 steam train… that was definitely something. It was on the Harz Railway, which provided some great views. Thanks for suggesting that!

In other news, I am going to start going to the gym more often: twice a week instead of just one time a week. I think that, in the long run, that will lead to better benefits. In addition, I have been more invested in learning Dutch. I am going to start classes again in around a month, and I’ve now been exposing myself to different formats of media in Dutch in a daily basis. For example, podcasts, TV shows with audio and subtitles in Dutch, and books or newspaper articles.

📚 Reading

Continuing the topic of the previous paragraph, I became member of the local library, the Bibliotheek Eindhoven, which allows me to borrow not only physical books, but also e-books and e-magazines. With this, I started reading Minoes again, a Dutch book. I think it is quite nice to read on an e-reader since it is much easier to figure out the meaning of some word that I don’t know.

🍿 Entertainment

On the entertainment chapter, I’ve watched the first season of Anne+, a totally Dutch series and also started season two. In addition, I have watched Barbie in the cinema, both in English and a dubbed-version in German. Considering that I don’t speak German, it was quite interesting that I manage to grasp around a quarter of the dialogs from my knowledge of Dutch and having watched the movie before. I have also watched Elemental with some friends in Portugal. I do recommend both movies.

All in all, it was a great month! See you in August!