Sinterklaas
Every once in a while there is this moment that is exactly like the perfect picture in your head of how you would want your life to be. Last weekend was a succession of those moments. Lotte lives in Bondi for 2 weeks now, because her hostfamily is in Melbourne and they couldn't bring Lotte. Now Lotte has her own appartment, with a living room, kitchen, bathroom and a double bed. So Lotte invited me to stay at her place for the weekend. Can you imagine? A weekend without kids, getting out of bed at 11 and deciding yourself what food you want to eat, because you can do the grocery shopping yourself. You probably can't imagine, since you're not an aupair, but, believe me, it's pretty great.
On Saturday we went to the beach. The whole day. Nice! Not so nice after we got back many hours later, since our skins had turned a bit red instead of brown, but never mind. Saturday was a really relaxing day.
Since we could decides ourselves what we wanted to eat, Lotte and I went out for breakfast on Sunday, after some kind of crazy Ozzie night. I couldn't think of having bacon and eggs for breakfast, which a lot of people eat here, so I chose pancakes with Maple Syrup, icing sugar and fresh strawberries. Not really better than bacon and eggs, but certainly the most delicious breakfast in my life.
Apart from having a good weekend, I've had another really good day last week. The 5th of December. Sinterklaas! For those of you who don't know what Sinterklaas is; I'm sorry, but I'm not going to explain, I've tried that with a few foreign people and nobody really understood it. We celebrated Sinterklaas right in front of the Opera House, with a bunch of Dutch people. I don't think many people can say that they've celebrateed Sinterklaas while sitting next to the Opera House. Several people were laughing at us, probably because they didn't have a clue what we were doing and we had more food around us than presents, so it just looked like a failed dinner.
Another great thing is that I've finally driven in a car! It may sound strange, but I felt like I didn't have a lot of freedom here. In Holland I can just grab my bike (and the last month I could also grab the car) and go wherever I want. Here I depend on the ferry which is a 20-minute-walk away from me (and walking is not so easy here with all the hills) and on the bus that seems to leave on random times. I don't mind walking uphill and downhill, but it just means that you can't 'just' go somewhere. So being able to drive the car is a big change for me. Since it's Alex's car, he wanted to do a test drive with me first. When I started, I almost forgot that I had to drive on the left side, but I remember right before I got off the driveway. For your information; the car is not manual, it's automatic. And it doesn't have a normal size like the ones in Holland, it's a 4x4 and it's pretty big. When you go through the gates in the garden, you've got about 10 centimeters left on each side of the car, and the driveway is extremely steep. But I managed to get it out off the garden! Then I drove for about an hour in Rose Bay, Watsons Bay and Vaucluse. And I'm sure I'll do that quite a lot more.
Alex also got a mountainbike out of the shed of which I didn't even have knowledge of the existence. I was super excited about being able to ride a bike, until Alex told me that it's compulsory to wear a helmet. I don't like helmets. They give me a headache, make my hair go fuzzy and look funny. So maybe I'll just hang it on my steering wheel, just to make myself feel better since at least I didn't leave it at home.