Birthdays here have a habit on going on for ages. I usually start the celebrations the day before (as technically I was born the day before my real birthday in this time zone), and then by the time you have a party and take some pie to work, it’s a good month later. Today was the pie occasion, so finally it’s over for another year. My partner is also here at the moment, so he got to experience the joy that is bringing-pie-to-work. Verdict? I don’t think he was entirely impressed.
This year I managed to travel ~1300 kms on my birthday, so that made it a strange day. I had decided to spend a long weekend in Norway this year as part of my summer holiday, as I couldn’t quite face going south with all the Dutchies. As it turned out, a lot of them had headed north. (“Mama, mama, kijk maar! Kijk!” is not what you want to hear waiting for a ferry in Oslo. It’s annoying enough in the Netherlands.) I thought I’d go somewhere new but familiar, so Scandinavia it was. At least I could make menus and signs out, although spoken Norwegian is so different from spoken Swedish that I didn’t dare try to speak Norwegian as it would have come out very Swedishy. So on my birthday, I was on a night train from Bergen to Oslo, then a plane from Oslo to Amsterdam, and finally a train to Eindhoven.
We seem to get a lot of holiday bonuses here, so this trip very easily made use of my summer bonus. $40 for a pizza and a coke? $5 for a bottle of water from 7/11? It makes eating out in the Netherlands look affordable. But the scenery was wonderful. They have hills. It’s been so long since I’ve seen a hill. It’s great to be able to jump on a cheap 2-hour flight (especially when it’s delayed and you arrive in a strange city at midnight … great fun … not) and visit a completely different country.
