Easter in Spain - Part One

Easter in Barcelona - when booking the flights I realised that it was very expensive to fly from Amsterdam directly to Barcelona, so made the choice to fly from Brussels (because it saved over 100 euro and then I could fly back on the same flight as Milli and Bex too).


Driving to Brussels is usually a 2 hour drive (2.06 if you ask GPS Bonnie). However.... driving to Brussels on a Thursday afternoon at about 4pm, when its pouring with rain and horrible weather - NOT a 2 hour drive anymore! I left at 4 for a 9pm flight - check in closed at 8.25pm, so I thought I had AGES. I didn't stop the whole time (except for petrol once and a bathroom stop once or twice) and yet it took me over FOUR hours to get there!


I was THE last person to check in for my flight, and I went straight from check in, through security to the boarding gate. Where the flight was delayed. But there was no food. I had maltesers for dinner. Mmm, nutricious.


After arriving in Barcelona (and waiting what seemed like forever for baggage to arrive) I got a hot baguette and met Amanda.


We got to the hostel at 1am and had to fight with the front desk for about an hour before finally going to bed. The idiots wanted us to pay the full 900 euros for the whole stay of all of our group, even though most of them weren't arriving until the next day! Ugh, morons.

I get around

Round round get around, I get around (and this is how).

This is my 2006 Citroen C2. I will be sad to leave this behind!!! It's small, it's zippy, and it plays my music LOUD! Now that Franz has sorted out the back seat it can carry FOUR passengers! Its dirty as hell from being snowed on (and driven all over the place) but that's fine with me! You won't catch me outside cleaning it while its less than 10 degrees outside!

Brugge and the infamous Belgian Coast

On the Sunday I woke up after 8-9 hours sleep feeling like I’d had 4. This is when I start to realize that my cold is still getting worse and not better – very disappointing! We left at 9 for Brugge, about an hour and a half away from Brussels. Our three-car convoy disbanded early in the trip, and we were left with just GPS Bonnie on our side and the vague goal of finding ‘the church in the middle where you can climb up the stairs to the top of the tower’. We did surprisingly well.

Our first impression of Brugge was pretty hilarious though – while walking from our car to the ‘square in the middle’, Kinga and I found out that there are boy racers in Brugge too. But they play a slightly different kind of music to the hip hop or dance music that you hear blasting from the subs in NZ cars. I am absolutely, 100% serious and not telling a lie at all about it when I say that the boy racer was playing excessively loud….. yodel music. I’m not kidding! Honestly! Kinga will back me up on this. It was the most surreal moment of the entire weekend…


By this time Milli and Kilo were already at the square. Eventually the Saffa-van arrived (Cath, Claire, Cat, Gareth and Jen). They were held up because they were too stingy to pay for parking!

We had a great breakfast, with most of us ordering Belgian waffles (some with ice cream – me!) and a couple of bacon and eggs orders. Kinga ordered a ‘large’ ginger ale and ended up with over a litre of it! He barely made a dent in it.

Brugge is as cute as a button. It is so quaint and pretty.

We walked up 366 steps to get to the top of the bell tower in the centre of the square. At the top you can see for miles. There was a bit of fog (or was it smog) so it wasn’t perfect visibility but it was still an amazing sight to see all of Brugge. It is much bigger than I originally thought. All these little orange houses, stretching out for miles.

Some of the others took a horse carriage ride through the streets. Jen, Gareth and I missed out because we were standing in line to get some fries with mayonnaise (oopsie daisy!). And we saw this giant chocolate stuck to a car! Honestly, it was real chocolate. I touched it. So I hope no one actually eats it - imagine how many hands have touched it!!!



Then Milli proposed a trip to the Belgian coast.... evidently lots of people that she has been working with told her that she absolutely had to go there. So we picked a place that looked like it was on the coast and got GPS Bonnie to guide us there. Unfortunately we picked bad, we got to this port town which had a tiny beach but no restaurants and barely any carparks. None of us could get a carpark so we just called it a day and headed back to our respective homes. The Amsterdam crew stopped off in Eindhoven at my favourite restaurant there, Memories (just for old time’s sake). We finally got back to Amsterdam just in time to pick up Cherilyn from the airport, fresh (haha) back from the London Waitangi Day celebrations.

Cologne Carnival (aka Nuns on the Run)

This weekend was the famous/infamous Cologne Carnival in Germany. Click here to see some info on it from the very reliable source of wikipedia.

Newly equipped with our new car (a tiny Citroen C2 with GPS navigation – woohoo!), Kinga and I set off just after 7am on Saturday. The first thing we realized is that our GPS navigation software didn’t include Germany – doh! Just Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Which is good for other weekends, but mostly useless for this one. Luckily we’d printed out directions from the internet, because we only managed about 20 minutes of following the rest of the crew in the Saffa-van (the van that Catherine and Claire, the South Africans, were issued by KPMG). Andrew R was driving, and it was a bit faster than we were really able to do that early in the morning in our little bug-car. It all worked out well though, and we arrived at our hotel without making a single wrong turn (obviously the combination of great driving and exemplary navigation skills, I say).

The key to Carnival is to get together a big group of people and dress them up in similar costumes. Also handy for trying to keep tabs on the rest of your group. The boys (about 8 of them anyway) stormed the costume shop first, and came across some monk outfits. Executive decision was made, and the boys were all wearing these monk outfits with weapons (swords, battleaxes etc) and later on added some bling (like big plastic medallions, gold coloured of course, with dollar signs). The girls decided to keep in theme, and so we became a group of about 7 nuns. It was kind of appropriate, because one of Cologne’s main attractions is the huge Cathedral in the centre of town. Although I did feel a little blasphemous when we saw a real nun by herself at the train station. Do you think she’s offended by it or do they just think its all a bit of fun? The crew from Belgium had already organized their costumes so we were all anticipating a very interesting clash when the two groups combined.

Cologne being the small town that it is, we ran into the Belgium lot without even meaning to, on a train platform. They were dressed in fluoro colours, the girls with pink and purple sparkly outfits and the boys either in bright pink or orange dress suits, or else in orange inmate style jumpsuits. A few of the boys (actually most of them) had also had a few beers on Thursday night and decided that it was a good idea to shave their heads (or half their heads) in some strange design so were all looking a little worse for wear. When Mike came up to us on the platform at first I didn’t recognize him!

In the afternoon we headed into town to find ourselves a beer tent to call our own. These marquees are just set up around the town. Beer and wine is served inside and they play great german oom-pah-pah music interspersed with regular pop music (though from the 90s). On first arrival, Milli said that she hoped they played Cotton-eye-joe (anyone remember that song?) and then it was about the fourth song after that! Very strange…

Carnival is full of people from almost every corner of the world. I spoke to Germans, Brits, a Greek guy, some French guys dressed like toothpaste and countless other randoms. So many strange outfits, including the chef from the cartoon movie Ratatouille, prisoners, Snow White, superheroes, German villagers, lions, chickens, ballerinas and the scores of men dressed as women (including heaps dressed as nuns!).

About halfway through the night, we were to meet up with the Belgium lot outside the Cathedral and take them to our tent. A few of us went, but first stopped off at a public toilet next to the cathedral (for 50 cents, by the way, pretty much all toilets you have to pay to use and there’s an attendant). While in there, I put down my bag, turned around and it was gone! Camera, all my photos, GONE! Other things, gone too. So upsetting. Luckily no money or credit cards, they were in my back pocket (jeans under a habit, so hot). So we found the Belgium lot then headed back to our tent and proceeded to take a million photos of me with everyone in order to make up for the ones I’d lost!

Eventually as we neared midnight it became apparent that Milli and I weren’t really going to go the distance, and so we snuck off to catch the train home. We stopped off at a kiosk (like a star mart) on the way to buy some water. Unfortunately, we managed to buy sparkling water, not still. Sparkling water is horrible, and German sparkling water was worse than average! So we stopped off at the next kiosk to get some still water, which is where I found out that the change I had been given at the last kiosk was counterfeit!!! Luckily only a five euro but still a big huge pain in the butt.

Milli and I finally made it onto the train with our tails between our legs and were so busy feeling sorry for ourselves that we missed our stop! So we had to get off and get a cab back to our hotel! It was pretty funny when we showed up at the hotel to find Will, Kishan and some of the other boys in the hotel lobby when we had left before them! They were like “Did you walk home?” We probably could have walked in the time it took us to get back, that’s for sure… So I went to my room and hit the pillow and was out cold. When my roommate Cat got back she spent 20 minutes banging on the door trying to wake me so she could get in!

On the Sunday, Kieran and I both wanted to get back to Amsterdam around 3pm-ish, so were going to be leaving a bit earlier than the others. We had a quick look around town (I ate a donut) and then we headed back to the car. We had directions with us and were pretty confident we could do it, because we just had to get back into Holland and then the GPS system would sort the rest out for us. Unfortunately, we got a little engrossed in conversation and missed our exit, which meant that we were on Highway 2 instead of Highway 3, and didn’t realize for roughly 100 kms. When we finally realized we were really low on gas and had no clue where we were. We couldn’t see any petrol stations so we had to pull off into some town and spend 20 minutes driving around looking for one. The one we found had no one who spoke English in it (seriously, Germany are way behind Holland in this respect) and so we had to just fill up and then go on our merry way back in the direction of Cologne! One thing that came out of all of it though is that I accidentally used my fake 5 euro to buy a fridge magnet at the petrol station and he didn’t even look twice at it! So there was definitely a silver lining.

We headed back towards Cologne, now on Highway 1, and ended up coming through some snow and some really gorgeous scenery. Given that my camera had disappeared, unfortunately no photos of that, so you’ll just have to take my word on it. By chance we stumbled across Highway 3 (which we were supposed to be on) and so we got back on it, all the time paying more attention to the directions than before!

All in all, we managed to turn a 2.5 hour trip into a 5 hour trip. We had a bit of a laugh about it on the way though, so it wasn’t too bad. We had to make a few bright side comments along the way, like “Hey, at least we aren’t those people” when we passed some car on the side of the road with a flat tyre.

Working in Eindhoven

We had to leave early, so that we could get there on time (and everytime we go somewhere we're going to have to estimate the length of time it'll take and then add an hour of getting lost time)






And so, of course, we got lost. We were roughly an hour late to Eindhoven, but the incharge wasn’t too worried about it. Her name is Jen, she’s Australian, and she’s been working in Amstelveen for over a year. She told us that the first time she drove to Eindhoven from Amstelveen she got horribly, terribly lost and drove straight past Eindhoven and ended up in Maastricht, which is way further south.

We are working here in Eindhoven on a Philips Electronics special project, and staying in a hotel. When we arrived, it still had all its Christmas decorations on.