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So, what have I been up to? Not much, to tell you the truth. I graduated and now I'm just sitting at home all day, whining about my boyfriend breaking up with me back in May, and stressing out about going to my first year of college in September. I decided to go study computer science and now I'm afraid I'll turn out to be a complete failure at programming. On top of that, I don't know ANYONE. I'm so nervous.

On the bright side, I just spent two weeks over at the house of my lovely online friend Caroline. She lives in the Netherlands, which is a 4-hour train ride away from me. You'd think spending 4 hours on a train would be extremely boring, but fortunately I was accompanied by a random drunk stranger with a silly hat:

I don't know why I keep attracting people like this. He actually followed me all across the Netherlands, even though that wasn't where he was supposed to go to. I liked him, though, he really brightened my journey with his singing talents.

Anyway, I had a very fun time over at Caroline's place. We went to an amusement park that was open till MIDNIGHT. Seriously, rollercoasters are SO much more fun in the dark.

There was this whole "New Years Eve" theme going on, with fireworks at midnight, the whole deal. And before that, there was a "Christmas show" we saw. There was fake snow and everything! I loved it. We walked around the entire park with Santa Claus hats on:

I'm such a spaz. And here's Caroline and me in the park:

I have NO idea where my left hand went o_O Oh, we also got caught in the rain in the middle of a rollercoaster ride at one point! We JUST got into that thing and it started raining like mad, we came out completely soaked, hahaha.

The rest of the two weeks were spent doing scrapbooking, watching a lot of movies, stealing each other's music collection, fun things like that. We also went shopping a lot, pictures will follow in the next blog! And there were coffee shops EVERYWHERE. And people smoking weed on the streets, it's completely insane. That's the Netherlands for you!

The train ride home was hell, though - my bags had doubled in weight because of all the shopping we had done. And there were no drunk guys to carry my bags this time. :(

Enough for now! I'll wrap it up with the cutest picture evar of Caroline's rabbit eating a carrot:

SO FREAKING ADORABLE. I seriously considered stealing it. Okay, see you next week! I hope.]]> 1220530844 Thu, 04 Sep 2008 09:20:44 -0300 http://inthesound.org/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1207224737&archive=
Enough talk about pictures - Italy! I'll start with giving you a map of how far I'd been before going to Italy:

An on a world map:

Pathetic, isn't it? Note how I almost tripled that distance by going to Italy!

Day one: Ghent > Milan
We travelled in a bus 600 miles from Ghent, Belgium to Milan, Italy. That means I actually went through 6 countries in one day: Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, France, Switzerland and Italy. Pretty cool, huh?

The bus ride was long and boring. We watched a few movies first (Pulp Fiction and Ratatouille) and then played Truth & Dare. Considering there isn't much room for dares in a bus, most of it was truth - meaning we basically exposed our entire sex life when we were sitting two seats behind the teachers. Joy.

The drive through Switzerland was exciting, though! I'd never seen mountains before in my life. I tried to take some pictures, but most of the quality sucks because of being in a moving bus and all that. :P Here are the best ones:

We arrived at about 8pm in our hotel in Milan. The hotel was... interesting, to say the least. Let me put it this way: If one of you ever feels like enjoying the services of a call-girl and doesn't know which hotel to go to, just give me a call, 'cause I have the perfect address. The room my friend and I slept in was covered in mirrors, the most noticeable being a huge, round mirror on the ceiling above the bed. We also had a jacuzzi in the bathroom! Turns out we got the fancy room - another friend of mine had a pole. Yes, an actual *pole*. At first when I heard it, I figured it had to be some sort of architectural thing, but it happened to be on a stage in a corner. Plus, the only light in his room consisted of a disco ball. And other people got, wait for it, chains (!) attached to the corners of their bed.

Seriously, I'm not even kidding. I haven't got pictures of the pole or the chains, so you're gonna have to take my word for that, but this was our room:

Needless to say, we spent our evening pole dancing, bathing in the jacuzzi and playing strip poker. Fun times.

Day two: Milan > Rome
Another day spent in a bus. We watched movies... again. We played Truth & Dare... again. We did make a short stop at a cute little city called Orvieto. It was on top of a hill, so you had to reach it by this totally awesome rollercoaster-like thing!

The view from the city itself was pretty amazing, too.

There was a church and a bunch of cute small streets:

One strange thing about Italy was that you'd see signs showing the direction towards Rome, EVERYWHERE. We actually saw one in one of those little streets - just a totally random tiny street where cars weren't even allowed, and it had a sign saying "Roma, 128km". It was hilarious.

We arrived in our hotel in Rome that evening. The food sucked. The service sucked even more. There were about 3 people to serve 150 hungry teens - and those 3 people apparently weren't in a hurry at all. I swear I'd never seen anyone walk that slow before. It generally took us about 2 hours for us to eat.

Day three: Rome Rain
We were *supposed* to see the Ancient Rome. What we saw was a bunch of mud. I always thought the weather in Italy was supposed to be sunny, but apparently I was wrong.

We saw the Colosseum first, and around that time it was only raining a little bit...

When we got out, though, it was already raining enough for me to go and buy an umbrella. One hour later, Rome was transformed into a swimming pool. I didn't feel like drowning my camera, so I don't have any pictures of that, but it just happened to be Easter - so there were tons of people gathering around the other side of the city to see the Pope give his blessing, or something... and I found a picture of that:

Notice the enormous amount of umbrellas. Belgium is pretty much famous for its rain, but this just beat everything. We saw the Forum Romanum, but all I could think was "Shut up and give me a pizza!" while I tried not to step in a puddle - though sometimes it was simply unavoidable. And then after seeing the Forum Romanum, me, my boyfriend and another friend lost our group. So there we were in the pouring rain, trying to find our way in city we'd never been in before. It was like Hell, only wetter.

By noon, though, our teachers had actually gathered some common sense and decided to let us go on the bus again for a tour around Rome. Which I'm sure would have been fun if I hadn't been soaked down to my underwear and was trembling for three hours straight... I've never enjoyed a shower more than that evening in the hotel.

Well... this blog is getting fairly long already, so I'm going to wrap it up now. More later, of course! On a side note, I'm adding all of you people who asked for link exchanges, and thanks everyone for all the lovely comments!]]> 1207224737 Thu, 03 Apr 2008 09:12:17 -0300 http://inthesound.org/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1205685788&archive=
My life is pretty stressy right now. My mom is in Cyprus with her boyfriend, so I have to do everything around the house myself. I still have my sister, but all she seems to do is study and complain, really...

Good news though - I am leaving for Italy this Friday! It's our senior trip, and it's gonna be awesome. We're visiting Rome, Venice, Florence, Verona... I'll be sure to take lots of pictures and post them when I get back. I am so excited, can you believe I've never been out of Western Europe so far? I feel so secluded.

Well, that's it for now (long blogs get on my nerves, to be honest). Comments will be returned :)]]> 1205685788 Sun, 16 Mar 2008 13:43:08 -0300 http://inthesound.org/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1205101599&archive= 1205101599 Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:26:39 -0300