Recently in August '23

August is almost gone, and with it the smells of summer. Day after day, the vibes I get from the weather are more autumny 🍁. Temperatures are finally going slightly down and it’s starting to feel more cozy. It’s been a long, yet satisfying month!

✍️ Website

There haven’t been major updates on this website over the past month. However, I have made a small update to the 🚆 Trips page. When you first look at it, it looks the same. Once you click on a certain trip however, you get a list of all of the legs within that trip and the transport method. This was reasonably easy to do as I had this data from my old itineraries section. And I think it’s nice to see if a certain trip was train-only, a mix between trains and flights, or others. It also gives more insights about where I was during the trip.

🍄 Life

In the beginning of the month, I had an interesting train experience: I traveled onboard of the 🍽️ Dinner Train, whose sole purpose is to… have dinner on the train. Every weekend, it departs from a different city. The origin station is the same as the destination station. We just went on a gentle train trip for around 2 hours and had dinner on board. I would definitely recommend.

Later, I visited my friend Sebastiaan in Amsterdam, which was nice, and I “forced” him to finally watch the Barbie movie. In addition, I took my Dutch intake exam for the next classes, which I should begin by the end of October. Exciting.

I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned it here, but at some point I ordered an electric bike. After weeks and weeks of waiting, I canceled the order, and instead ordered a Gazelle. That one took less than 2 weeks to arrive and I’m extremely satisfied. I can also say I took a few bike rides this month. I might write a post about this bike at some point in the future.

We also visited Zwolle, which was a surprisingly nice city. I do highly recommend it to everyone if they stay a little longer in the Netherlands. Perhaps it’s a hidden gem. Finally, and perhaps less exciting, I got my last two wisdom teeth 🦷 removed two days ago. It’s been an experience!

📚 Reading

In the beginning of the month, I finished reading Minoes, a Dutch book. That was the longest Dutch book I’ve ever read and I can say I understood the story quite well. Of course, there’s words here and there that I do not understand, but that’s how it goes. I also started, but did not finish If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

🍿 Entertainment

In the entertainment category, there are quite some nice things. On the 3rd of August, we went to see Bianca del Rio, just like we did last year. The comedy show did not disappoint, and I could not stop laughing the whole time.

After having convinced Sebastiaan to watch Barbie, he told me I should watch Oppenheimer, which I did. It was great, but I feel like it was too long for the story it depicted. Especially since a break in the middle. Fortunately, I did not have to go to the toilet, but I hate having to miss part of the movie because there was no breaks. In addition, this cinema does breaks for some movies, but not for this 3 hour movie? Odd.

Finally, we went to a Candlelight 🕯️ concert in Eindhoven. The artist played many songs from Ludovico Einaudi, which was very nice. So nice and so calming that at some point in the beginning I almost fell asleep 💤.

Finally, I want to share the first EP from Christiaan, Les Mélodies de la Pluie. I think you should definitely give it a listen. Below there’s an embedding from Spotify, but you can also find it on many other platforms, such as YouTube, Deezer, etc.

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