(Un)fortunately no....

....white christmas this year! unless the weather suddenly changes drastically. its been windy and today especially very rainy. beeeehhhhh.... 

3 years ago, december 2010, we were back in the netherlands after having moved to boston that april. while there wasnt any snow in boston yet (i was anxiously waiting to get to see some real snow, as i had never seen in my life), we did get snow when we were back in the netherlands during christmas! actually, the snow had fallen before we came, but it remained so cold for the 10 or so days that the fallen snow stayed on the ground... we saw it turn into ice (there were quite some problems removing it), creating dangerous, slippery roads. but look how pretty it is! outside the city, a white farm, of course the tree lined raod again.... frozen ditches....

today is the longest night!! meaning from tomorrow on the days get longer again. yaaaayyy!!

Hoop rolling!!

sorry for my absence.... this time i had a good reason... it was my birthday and we went exploring the netherlands a little bit! (we got a car! i do have to say; having a car in the netherlands is something completely different than having one in the usa. paying for parking literally EVERYWHERE is something we kind of hadnt taken into account). 

first stop was castle loevestein, above, which was built between 1357 and 1397. especially after having lived in the US, seeing that buildings can be THAT old is really impressive to me... unfortunately, it turned out to be closed from october onwards (then only open during weekends. grrr). at least the hoops were still there, so i tried to play the game; not easy at all! (wikipedia tells me the ancient greeks already played this game....).