The end of summer

Some months ago I told you that I was leaving for Argentina and that I was really excited about it. I've been back for a while now, but it's been pretty busy eversince. My parents moved, I moved out, went on a crafty vacation with one of my best friends and went on a canoeing trip in Sweden with another. After that came the introduction periods of the university where I started studying last week. The last couple of months have been crazy and hectic, but I met a lot of amazing people, and I have just really been enjoying my summer and the end of my gap year.

In the coming weeks you will probably see some posts about the places that I've been to and the amazing things that I got to do there. I hope you all, too, had an amazing summer!

The last couple of weeks it has been pretty silent here. Mostly because I was writing a lot, but I was also arranging things for my upcoming trip to Argentina! I'll be leaving coming sunday and I will be gone for seven weeks, so it's going to be really quiet here for a while.

Finished painting

Today I finished another painting. This one is really the first one that hasn't been standing against my wall for months before I knew how to continue. It's not perfect, but I feel like I'm getting a little better at painting noses and mouths.

Out and about

Today my friend Sophie and I went hiking and once again I took a lot of photos. It was pretty cold outside, but the light was so pretty!

 

 

Going for a hike

Last sunday Suzan and I went hiking in a woodland and moorland. The weather was beautiful and, eventhough it is only January, it made me feel like spring was almost upon us. I took my new camera with me and made a lot of photos.

Trip to Delft & The Hague

Last weekend I visited my brother in Delft and together we went to The Hague.

First we visited a permanent exhibition of M.C. Escher's work in the former palace of Queen Emma in The Hague. Escher was a Dutch artist who made woodcuts, lithographs and mezzotints and used a lot of mathematical pricipals in his work. He is best known for his impossible constructions and tessellations.

We wandered around in The Hague for the rest of the day and in the evening we ate at an Indonesian restaurant.

 The next day we went to the city centre of Delft and I also took a couple of pictures there. 

We also visited the Johannes Vermeer centre and in the afternoon we went to a concert of Eefje de Visser. Johannes Vermeer was a painter from the 17th century who lived in Delft.

Day Zero Project

101 Things in 1001 DaysJan 04, 2014 - Oct 01, 2016

I wish you all a happy new year! This year I'm not really doing any new year's resolutions, but I decided to make a new Day Zero list. Basically the idea behind this project is that you make a list of 101 goals that you are going to try to achieve within 1001 days. I made a list like this before and in the begining it really helped me to achieve my goals, but after a while it didn't anymore because a lot of my goals were school or horse related and I finished high school and I don't ride horses anymore. I have been thinking about making a new list for a while now and I finally got around to it. Eventhough I might not even complete all of these within the given time, making a list like this really stimulates me to try. Here are my goals:

1. Learn 10 phrases in Manderin Chinese
2. Read 5 non fiction books
3. Go hiking or make a biking trip without without pre-set destination
4. Complete a coursera course
5. Learn to play a song on the guitar
6. Make myself a dress
7. Go camping
8. Learn to fold 10 more origami creations
9. Make a webseries
10. Finish the Web Fundamentals course at codecademy
11. Learn a card game
12. Repeat my swedish course
13. Learn a song on the violin
14. Run a 5K race
15. Finish a crossword puzzle
16. Make an idea book
17. Learn about runes
18. Read a book in German
19. Decide what I want to study
20. Learn to play Nuvole Bianche on the piano
21. Write a book
22. Send a message in a bottle
23. Complete NaNoWriMo
24. Enter a writing contest
25. Make a short jacket
26. Reread the Hobbit and finally finish the Lord of the Rings
27. Participate in BookCrossing
28. Ride a horse again
29. Cook a three course meal
30. Read a book about physics
31. Finish a painting
32. Learn the alphabet in sign language
33. Read a book about mythology
34. Organize a themed party
35. Make a dreamcatcher
36. Learn first aid again
37. Get up at 8 a.m. for a week
38. Make 10 things from my pinterest DIY board
39. Succesfully bake bread
40. Read a Jane Austen novel
41. Finish my quiver
42. Bind a book
43. Make a backpack
44. Copy our movie 'Miesje' for Sophie
45. Crochet a blanket
46. Read a French book
47. Spend one weekend with only my music, art and books. "Unplug"
48. Make a short film
49. Do yoga every day for a week
50. Spend a day at the beach
51. Write every day for a week
52. Learn 10 phrases in Russian
53. Bake 5 cakes
54. Go on a multi-day biking trip
55. Do some volunteer work
56. Learn 10 phrases in Spanish
57. Send 10 Postcards via PostCrossing
58. Get photos printed
59. Do archery again
60. Compose a piece of music
61. Go ice skating
62. Learn to identify all the countries on a map
63. Make a hat
64. Read 10 classic books
65. Do something to become more self sufficient
66. Learn to say hello in 10 languages
67. Learn a card trick
68. Blog for 7 days in a row
69. Go kayaking or canoeing
70. Be able to identify 5 constellations
71. Read the Narnia series
72. Write a poem
73. Learn to find 10 edible wild plants
74. Make a smoothie
75. Bake pizza
76. Send a handwritten letter
77. Have a Lord of the Rings movie marathon
78. Buy something from Etsy
79. Knit a scarf
80. Bake Christmas cookies
81. Make shorts
82. Bury a treasure
83. Swim in the ocean, a river or a lake
84. Go to a climbing forest
85. Learn to play 2 more songs on the piano
86. Go on a picnic
87. Take my painting supplies and go paint outdoors
88. Visit a cave
89. Spend an entire day outside
90. Write 50 more blogposts
91. Get my driver's license
92. Buy camping gear
93. Go to an amusement park
94. Make a new friend
95. Do something completely out of my comfort zone
96. Visit Teyler's museum in Haarlem
97. See an IMAX film
98. Go to a concert
99. Enter a photography contest
100. Go abroad by myself
101. Read a book in a day

Discovering my own city

Suzan and I are working on a webseries about Zutphen, the city I live in. On monday we already filmed quite a lot and I also took some pictures. It's funny how working on this project I see my city in a different light. To me it always seemed like a pretty boring place, but I found out that it does have a rich history and there are lots of stories to tell about the place. It will probably take a little while before our first episode will be posted on youtube, but for now you can check out some photos I made.

Why I haven't been posting anything the last week...

... I think my nanowrimo chart tells it all. I've been wrinting like crazy for the past few days. I think I'm starting to see a pattern here. Look at my campnano chart from juli for example:

See any resemblance? It looks like I can sort of keep up in the beginning, then I fall a little more behind. Somewhere in the middle I want to keep up again and start to write a little more per day. Then after a few days I lose hope again and pretty much nothing is being written for the next days. In the end I am really behind and start writing like crazy to reach the 50.000 words. It was just like last time, in the beginning writing 1.667 word pers day seems like an awful lot, but in the end I'm perfectly able to write 5.000/6.000 words per day.

The mysterie of the missing plot

Eventhough I did reach 50.000 words my story is far from complete. In the end I just didn't know what to write anymore so I mainly wrote backstories for my characters and subplots. At the beginning I thought there was a plot, but somewhere along the way I realised that somehow there wasn't really any. Hence the mysterie of the missing plot. I'm not sure what happened here, but I'm going to try to plan everything a little better next year, haha.

Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm

While I was in Stockholm I visited many museums. The museum of Ethnography was my favorite by far. They had so many beautiful objects from places all around the world. It really made me want to see more of the world and I realised that there still are so much places I want to visit. Here are some of the photos I took. They're not great quality, but they will give you an impression.

 

 

My favorite part of the museum was The storage. It was just amazing to look at all those showcases that were chock full with foreign items. 

Source: http://www.varldskulturmuseerna.se/en/etnografiskamuseet

The Storage
an Ethnographic Treasury

It is easy to get lost amongst tinder pouches, monkey traps and poison arrows. There are 6,000 objects here, from all four corners of the world. By opening up the Storage, we cath a glimpse of the diversity and magic of our collections - a treasure-trove for the curious. Thousands of artefacts, stories from bygone eras and infinite inspiration for the future.

If you are ever in Stockholm, it is definitely worth the visit!