Cindyrella and her rubber slipper

Carol (Kwek) just got the keys to her new home!! Jee!!

Yesterday we were in Tilburg to finalize all the paperwork. We walked around the city for hours, going from the bank to the housing people, to the municipal office and back. At the end of the day, as we were walking towards the train station, I commented to Kwek how happy I was that I had the right shoes on for this endeavor, that even after all this walking, my feet did not hurt.


When we got engaged, the first things I bought were this pair of white rubber slippers, with

Swarovski stones. I absolutely fell in love with them and seemed like the only one, everybody else hated them for my wedding shoes. Even though I did not wear them for the ceremony, they were still very dear to me.

After we hugged and said goodbye, Carol left to get her bus and I went to the board to check out the trainschedule. The train in my direction was leaving in 3 minutes, so I went upstairs where I needed to be. As I was on the last step up I heard the whistle for the doors, so I looked up and saw the doors beginning to close. It took me a second the decide wheter I would run left or right as both the doors where just as far from where I was standing. I decided to go right. As I got there, those doors started closing as well, so I thought about jumping through anyway. I hesitated, thought better of it and did not jump completely. The doors closed with my leg in between them. Let's just say, that I slightly panicked. I pressed on the door open knob, but nothing. I banged on the doors and other people standing there started yelling and waving to the people inside the train, but nothing. So I pulled and pulled, until I got my leg free, but could not get my slipper out together with my foot. It stayed stuck in between the doors. I hung on it with my full body weight, pulling like crazy, making signs to the people inside the train to help. The train drove of with half my slipper sticking out from the side, as I was standing there on one slipper.

Not my best moment. I could only imagine what it looked like to others. I had to laugh out loud at how ridiculous it all was, waving goodbye to my slipper.(Only later I realized that it could have ended badly, if it were my leg sticking out the doors with the train driving off....)
This really sweet girl coming home from vacation gave me her slippers, so I did not have to go home barefooted.

I approached several employees of the NS, to get help, but no one wanted to do anything about a slipper. Just before the next train that could take me home arrived, this new guy with the classic red NS hat came to help a wheelchair on a train and I thought: doesn't hurt to ask. So I explained to him that my slipper went for a ride and gave him a businesscard, as my train was leaving.

Can you imagine that within the hour Sjon from station Tilburg called me and told me he had my slipper? I went back immediately, with a big bag of drop and took my slipper home.

I still get tears in my eyes from laughing when I think about it....the slipper was sticking out for 15 cm, driving of to Eindhoven...

Just a note...

In Feb of 2008, I surprised Joris with a belated birthday present. I had borrowed the keys to Hulu Beach and packed everything I could think of to have a 5 star experience on a deserted beach: tent, lounge chairs, table, a 3 course bbq meal and a big jug full of snacks and bubbly drinks.

I woke him up at 6 in the morning and as we drove to Bandabou in the dark with some good music on the radio, a even-bigger-eyed-than-usual Joris kept asking: where are we going? Hm? Hm?


As reading material I brought the only thing I could find at the moment, which was a stack of ancient National Geographic Magazines. As we were lying and reading, we kept sighing and saying things like: I wanna go there. All of a sudden we both turned to each other and said: So why don't we? Let's do it!

We had found our travel buddy for this lingering dream we both had. And for the rest of our lives.

In the course of getting to this goal we had several of these moments. Moments in which we would we thinking of something, each on his or her own, and the one just had to start the sentence and the other would laugh and say: I was just thinking that. Usually this entailed big decisions, like moving in together, marriage, going back to school and moving to Holland after travelling. It became the standard to which we would hold our decisions, to see if it was a good one. Joris started writing things down and hiding them, so he could show me the moment when he started thinking something.

Another one of those moments came along. Please read this sitting down.

Monday morning, Aug 9th, I woke up really early, with a strange uneasy feeling. Thoughts were going through my head at 200 mph and my stomach was hurting, so I got out of bed and went downstairs, to clear my head. As I was sitting there, there was this one thought that kept pushing through, and after a few hours I woke Joris up to talk about it.

When we started thinking about travelling, we had the plan to travel for at least a year, maybe more if possible. Volunteering and working with large animals was high on our list and we had certain places we really wanted to visit for a longer period of time. As we started doing research it was moved back to 8 months, later 6 and now at the end it became 4 months. There are so many things we want to do and see, here in Holland. Joris jobhunting is going exceptionally well, he could start working tomorrow if he so chooses to and it is a big joy to see Kwek starting up here. We have been living on a budget for 3 years now, saving up for the wedding and for the trip. Our savings are there, but it feels like nothing else is in place. Sounds spacey, but it just did not feel right.

We saw our beautiful plan melt into a reduction of a reduction of a pale comparison to the original idea.

When I started rambling on that Monday morning, Joris jumped up and ran to the wastebin and started digging through the trash. He found this note he wrote:

Laten we de wereldreis minstens 1 jaar of misschien tot na je bachelor opschuiven...dated July 30th at 14:40.
We both felt it inside, but could not bring ourselves to say it out loud, but we could not ignore it any longer. We are postponing our dream trip, in order to give it the room it needs to grow back into what we intended in the first place. In 3 years we will be better prepared, financially and in any other way, Joris will have made his mark in the Dutch work environment, I will have my studies (almost) done and in the meantime we could really relax and enjoy the live we are living right now a little bit more.
We are still crying silently about it when nobody is looking, but Joris is looking forward to start working (hopefully in October) and my school starts Aug 23rd. Never a dull moment here....

Breaking radio silence

It has been a while, but that is no excuse. We have had some stress in our first few weeks here. Thankfully enough we have a wonderful family here, where not just ourselves, but also Kwek could crash and in between all that needed to be arranged, we had good food, nice wine and great company. The weather has been excellent and it's good to be in Holland in the summer.

Moving always brings turmoil and moving to Holland is no different. While we have been enjoying a semi-holiday feeling, we have been standing in even more lines than we did in Curacao, bizar but true. It seems that Kranshi is really good at what they do. No, seriously. But here, in gemeente St. Michielsgestel, which by the way is the safest in Holland, they still have some trouble with a couple trying to register from the Netherlands Antilles. We have been going back twice a week for a while now and the amount of misinformation given to us is staggering.

The first time, on the Monday morning after we arrived, we were full of good expectations and smiled all the way to the counter, thinking: this is Holland, we will be in and out in no time. Little did we know that the ladies behind the counter all work partime or not in this department and every single question we had was answered with a blank stare, a few blinks and: eeuh...I'll have to ask my collegue. Why that collegue did not come help us, we did not understand. Maybe there is a correlation between the size of the bum and the amount of information a public officer can retain....
When we left that first day, we were still 'landenloos', we had no id's except for our passports (don't want to lose that!), no driving licenses and even more: it was impossible to register our marriage.
Let's just keep the story short and say that after the fourth time, I was still ms. Eman, and I'm pretty sure that all official documents we receive will state the same. And I am so proud of my married name....

What we surely did not expect was that the day we arrived in Holland, de KPN (telecom company) made a mistake and shut down the wrong line at home and we were without internetconnection until the 8th of Aug. Which makes it pretty much impossible to keep contact like you would want to with all that you left behind on the other side of the world. Or work remotely like Joris was aiming for. You only realize how much you depend on internet when you don't have it anymore. We had to make arrangement everytime we needed internet, that kinda sucked.

In the second week that we were here, we went to pick up Kwek's keys. She had found the room through internet and had rented it starting in July, without any of us seeing it. The room was great, the roommates not so much! She would have been the only female person and the only person under 30 in the house. So we had to start looking for new housing like crazy. Our stuff that was shipped on June 21th is still on its way, even though it would take max. 6 weeks. The new date we got now is Sept 1st.

We miss our family and friends in Curacao, we miss having our own home and the pickup, but things are looking up. We will keep you all updated!