Ice skating adventure

Ten days until I go home for a visit! Time is flying, I can’t believe we are almost starting a New Year!

Lately, I have been getting into the holiday spirit. I went ice skating this past weekend was a lot of fun, but for the first time in my life I had to wear hockey skates and felt like I had no clue how to skate anymore. I used to figure skate when I was a kid, so I’ve only used figure skates, but there is a first time for everything. The skating rink in Eindhoven also has an indoor speed skating track and its open to the public so it was really neat to skate on it 400m loop its tiring after a few rounds!

Also Kendal and I went and picked a tiny little x-mas tree for my house. We call it the “Charlie Brown” tree because it is a bit sad looking, but we thought it was cute so we had to buy it.

The Charlie Brown tree

Vitall has been good. Anky has been away, so just been taking it a bit easy and since the weather is still nice going out for hacks. I went into the woods with a friend near her house about 20 minutes away from Anky’s stables and I rode her mother’s horse. We went for a 2.5hr trail ride the other day. I hadn’t had so much fun in ages just going out and being silly again on a horse. We were galloping up and down hills, jumping over logs you name it we did it. But the only thing was that the mom’s horse didn’t really know what a “half halt” was, so stopping sometimes was a bit of a challenge. I don’t think I used the word WHOA so many times. But we were like little girls laughing the entire time, until our feet hit the ground. As the Dutch would say it was LEUK!

Lately, it has been everyone’s mission for me to speak Dutch seeing as I have now been here for two years in January…again where has the time gone? So, now I have to say one Dutch word a day and slowly build it up. We will see how far I get. I can understand a lot, but some words I just can’t spit out, but at least I am trying :). But I notice it gets harder and harder to speak “normal” English. I have started to speak “Dutch English.” I catch myself sometimes going “Alex did you really just say that?” and I have to chuckle.

This weekend, Cat, who used to work for Leslie, has moved to London and is coming for a visit. Really looking forward to it, as it’s been about three years since we have seen each other, so I will report next week on how our visit went.