Setting the scene - Almost 2 weeks here.

Well I stuffed up the days on the last post I made so I will set it straight. Today is Saturday, yesterday was Friday and the day before that was Thursday. And that is where I will begin, we were heading up to Nijmegen, apparently the town that claims to be the oldest town in teh Netherlands (just without any proof, maybe they can take a leaf out of America's book and just take the title anyway...) so we went up there to find a laundromat, not that we knew where they were, so we started out driving to the tourist information center, which once we stopped off and had our first dutch McDonalds experience found to be in another place... So after we asked about 5 people, we chose to split up, Mark went to find it, and me and Funky went to get the car. We moved the car, and then found mark who had 2 addresses, so we found them and they turned out to be either dry cleaning places or they couldn't finish it in time for us, so we then looked for a bike, found a bike for 45 euro, put it in the back of the car (with some difficultly, as European cars are so so much smaller then ours) and back to boxmeer for our laundry, which stung us a nice 37 euro...... Pretty lazy day all around...

The next day (Friday) I woke up after a terrible night sleep, not good at all. But i got up early and researched some places that we could visit. I ended up finding a gem of a place (the war museum, which is in and around the town of overloon)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overloon
It was a huge museum which detailed the history of the war from the early 1900's through to the start of the cold war but mainly the info was about WW2. The information regarding how the dutch people suffered and were treated was just sad. I'm not talking about the brutal murders, as shocking as they were, I'm talking about the way that they had to continue their lives, but with all their privileges taken away. Huge tanks, weapons,artillery, etc was at this museum. We had lunch (2:30) there and headed back to pick up our laundry and do a little bit of shopping.
That night hockey training was on (Friday.... strange, wednesday night and friday night with a game on sunday) so we warmed up ok, my leg hurts still, but it should be fine *cough* for the game tomorrow. So in a small game my night took a sharp right turn, almost like the ball that struck me just above the left eye, so as I was holding my eye, waiting for the pain to die down, I felt the dreaded trickle of a fluid down my cheek..... shit.... the ball had split my eyebrow... So, with blood streaming down my face I made my way to the change rooms, cleaned up and got a ride to the hospital. I was accompanied by Bas's father, who made it alot easier to talk to the dutch receptionists considering they didn't or wouldn't speak English. So I was standing there with a sore head, blood everywhere trying to confirm my damn address... Geez, if it was worse I would have got angry, but it was ok. We waiting for maybe 20 minutes and i got glued back together by a nice doctor. the bill 80 euro... wow. Insurance time... So i have a cut head, I hope it doesn't open up tomorrow when I play.

Our first game is tomorrow, but I will talk about today. We were going car hunting with Peter(our coach) we took the train to caijk, couldn't figure out how to buy a ticket, but we just caught the train so we didn't have time anyway, and he took us around to see some cars. We found a few bomb cars, with rusted engines and a van which was almost perfect, bit expensive (2100) but the tax was quite high (140 euro a month!!!) we went to another town and found our car (it was a ford mondeo wagon 1999) we hope he doesn't sell it. We took it for a test drive, it seemed ok, we did all the testing we could. Tyres, brakes, steering, over 100kmph and it seemed good. cost = 950 euro.. 215000kms on the clock. tax = 50 euro a month. So back home, we went up to hockey and said hi to some of the guys who were working there, watched a bit of football, and then came home to write this, an early night is going to be in order, as tomorrow we have our first game of the season, the local paper will be there, they will be videotaping the game, and the pressure is on us as we have 3 of our players out... here is to hoping we actually get on the field...


My dutch is slowly improving, but I am going to make a consistent effort to try and learn some more a little more formally. My indonesian is sufferring, I couldn't remember the word for disaster this morning.... bencana... if anyone was wondering.  Will let you know what happens tomorrow. Hope things are well back in Aus..

Tot Ziens