Back on the blogging saddle

I have been staying away from blogging for quite some time, I know; but it was for a good reason.

Last year my chronic migraines became more frequent than ever before and unfortunately, sitting in front of a bright computer screen was one of the things that made the headaches worse. This meant I had to reduce the amount of time I spent in front of the pc and ergo, the time I spent blogging and reading my favourite blogs.

The good news is that I have finally found the medication that really helps with the pain and even if I still have migraines, they are less strong and they last only until the medication kicks in -usually 30-45 minutes- so I am hoping that from now on I will at least be able to do some blogging and sharing sights and news from this small part of the world. I also have to catch up with the blogs I used to follow and which I loved reading; I hope my blogger friends will understand why I have been staying away for so long.

I will soon make ten years since I moved to the Netherlands. In all these years I have accumulated an enormous amount of photographic material that in a way chronicles my life in this country. The main idea when I started this blog was to share this material with you here in the blog, so I am now hoping that I will be able to keep it up, migraine-free, if possible.

Here I am then, back in the blogging saddle.


A book recommendation

Homesick for the Netherlands - Martin Bril asks, what do you think, when you think of the Netherlands?

 
I am currently reading a book that I initially bought to take with me to Argentina last year, for those times when I miss being here in the Netherlands: Heimwee naar Nederland or Homesick for the NL, by Martin Bril. In the end, I did not take the book with me (too bulky) and I only got round to start reading it now. I love it!

 In this book Bril describes the country that he knew all his life and keeps asking, "what do I think of when I think of the Netherlands?" I am happy to say that many, many of the places and things he describes, I've seen, experiencedor can relate to; they are the same things that make me nostalgic of this country when I am away.

Martin Bril was a well-known columnist who wrote for important Dutch newspapers, like Het Parool and De Volkskrant and he is considered the ultimate chronicler of the modern-day Netherlands. Unfortunately, he died of cancer in 2009 but many of his stories and his work has been collected in a number of books, such as Dertig graden in de schaduw  (in English, Thirty Degrees in the Shadow),  Au Revoir, (Goodbye), or De Donkere Dagen (The Dark Days). In Heimwee naar Nederland you will find some of the best pieces he wrote about this country and I seriously recommend it if you can read Dutch (I don't think he has been translated into English, unfortunately). 

So, what do you think of, when you think of the Netherlands?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic...

 (Lee este post en español aquí)

Three months have gone by since the last time I wrote here on my blog. In the meantime, I have been travelling, working and enjoying the company of  friends and family and I cannot think of a better way to spend my days. 

This year I have been very lucky - I have been on short holidays three times: to beautiful Andalusia in Spain, to the Ardennes in neighbouring Belgium and to the Argo Saronic Islands in Greece. I fell in love with all of these places and I feel it would be a dream come true to go back to each one of them some time in the future.
In late August, my parents came all the way from Argentina to spend two months with me in The Netherlands.  It was the first time my father visited Holland, so we made sure that he got to see as much as possible and we also spent two weekends abroad in Germany and in Belgium. 

My parents during our visit at the Southern Sea Museum in the NL.

Finally, the time came to pay our annual visit to my home country, Argentina. Right when a quite unusually beautiful autumn was beginning to set in in Holland, the four of us -my parents, my husband and I-  flew together across half of Europe and over the Atlantic to land here in the southern hemisphere some 25 hours after leaving home. Here in the south Nature´s cycle is just beginning and trees are not losing their leaves but rather filling up. The usual brown and earthy colours that are so common in Córdoba, are slowly changing into green again and it is warm and sunny most of the time.


I usually feel sorry to miss the beauty of the autumn in The Netherlands, especially this year when it has been such an unusually fantastic season, judging by what I´ve seen in my friend Alison´s blog -A Flamingo in Utrecht- lately. Here are some of the shots she took around the city of Utrecht:

Autumn along the Oudegracht. ©Alison Netsel

Mist in a street in Utrecht. ©Alison Netsel.

 

Autumn Domtoren (Church bell tower) ©Alison Netsel

But the beauty of the spring in Argentina makes up for all that I am missing in the northern hemisphere. It is during this time of the year when the beautiful jacarandá, a typical tree of these lands, get covered in gorgeous purple flowers. I recently admired them in the photos my friend Diego -from the blog in Spanish, Contacto con lo Divino- took in Buenos Aires. Here are some of his pictures:

Jacarandas in bloom in Buenos Aires. ©Diego Bianchi

Beautiful light trhough the jacarandas. ©Diego Bianchi

View of 9 de Julio Av. in Buenos Aires. ©Diego Bianchi

I still have three more weeks to enjoy my holiday here in Argentina, during which I hope to see more of my friends and family and enjoy visiting all the familiar places that mean so much to me ...

Hasta la próxima...!

Spotted in the Netherlands:

It's a small world,  isn't it?

Just about a month ago I spent a day in Almere with Blogger pal Sandra, author of Presépio com Vista para o Canal. We had a fantastic time visiting a special photo exhibition and enjoying lunch together in the city centre which served to prove once more that Sandra is a fantastic host. I will soon post about this particular day in Almere more in detail, but today I wanted to share something that happened to me on my way back home.

After parting with Sandra I had just about enough time to catch my train to Amersfoort where I would take my second train back to my city - Zwolle. I took a bus in one of the new neighbourhoods just outside the Almere centrum hoping that I would make it in time to Almere Centrum, the train station.

Unfortunately, my haste made me get off one stop too soon and I had to run the remainder of the way to the train station. Totally out of breath, I climbed down the stairs to the platforms, looked for the right one, saw the train, double-checked that it was going in the right direction and happy but exhausted from the run, I jumped onto it - and just barely seconds before the conductor whistled and the train started to move.

The car I chose was almost empty so I began to relish the moment I would be able to sit down, cool down a bit and finally take out my book to read and enjoy the rest of the ride to my next destination. I chose a seat on the right-hand side but then I decided that the sun would be bothering me and I changed to the other side. Finally! I was sitting, I was opening my bag, I was taking out my book .... when something that was written on the window caught my eye. My hand froze halfway into my bag, still holding the book and my heart almost skipped a beat when I read the word: ARGENTINA!

All I could think right then was: "what are the odds?!" I took out the book, yes, but not so much to read it anymore as to create the perfect scenario for a photo - I had to share this moment! I took my camera too,  and started clicking away while the train was leaving Almere behind and traversing the polder. I took a few shots of the highway we were just passing, the fields.... until I finally saw the right kind of landscape approaching fast: Argentina (the grafitti) and the Netherlands (the mill in the distance) in one single shot.

 
After the photo session was over, I kept thinking about this other Argentinean person: what had brought him/her here to the Netherlands: love, a holiday, a business trip? I somehow could not picture a serious businessman writing a grafitti on a train window ... so he or she had probably been a student at one of the Dutch universities...? How long ago had this person sat on this very same spot, on this same train?

Anyway, even if I don't condone this kind of creative writing on public transport, finding this grafitti served to keep me musing about being far from home, about being an expat in the Netherlands. When you are living the life of an expat you adapt, you change, you become one of them in many ways, without noticing it.You go through the motions of your new life day in, day out, until things like this silly grafitti makes you stop for a moment and ask yourself, "How did I end up here?", and also realise all of a sudden, "boy, am I far from home!"

If you are an expat too, have you ever had such moments? Or if you have moved from your original city to a new one in your country: do you ever stop to think how you never imagined you would be living in a totally different place at some point in your life? How does it feel for you?