Oops, already a month since my last post, can´t believe that!! Well there was a lot happening since then…. Before Christmas I was of course busy with preparing for my holiday in the Czech Republic and buying Christmas presents 
Me and Nardo finally managed to finish our long-term project which was completing the album from our stays in Finland and Sweden. We really love this “tradition” of selecting the best pictures from our travels, printing them and then creating a paper album with our comments accompanying the pictures. There is a lot of scissor cutting involved as well as we like to be creative with our pictures 
We also had a brief peek into the Ijzicht café at Nieuwendammerdijk, because we were curious to see it for once (we always go to our favourite ´t Sluisje café, so this one was neglected by us for months) and it had such pretty Christmas decorations behind the windows which were luring me each time I was passing by on my bike. Well, the place itself is not bad, but there was thick smoke inside (this is not a non-smoker café…) and a bit “rough” people, many of them drunk or playing on gambling machines :-p Also very poor selection of beers…Ok, this was not the place to spend a nice evening, so we just finished our beers and left Funny to experience a real Dutch pub for the working class though
Shortly before Christmas our Slovenian language book arrived by mail so we started studying together, it´s going really slow though and I realized we started quite late 
Which is bad cause knowing Slovene will obviously be a necessity once we´re in Slovenia looking for a job…For me it is luckily quite an easy language to learn, but poor Nardo! :-p He´s lucky he has me I suppose, hehe! I think we can´t avoid attending some language courses in Ljubljana anyway…
That´s actually our big news: we already bought our tickets to Slovenia! First we are going there in the second half of February to check out flats (I decided to spend a full week on looking for flats, we just gotta manage in that time!), then we´re going back to Amsterdam to get all our stuff packed and ready, do all the annoying paperwork, meet our local friends for the “last time” and on 7th March our belongings will be moved by a (Czech) moving company and we have to be in Ljubljana to pick them up already the next day! Since we figured out we don´t have much time at all, both the first and the second time we will be travelling, we decided to not go through Prague as we initially planned, as the connections Holland-Czech Republic-Slovenia take too long and most of all it is not possible to do this trip in one go. I am sure I will go to Prague in spring though, as soon as we´re a bit settled…
I enjoyed my Christmas vacation in the Czech Republic greatly, so good to see friends and family again! And of course just being in my home country feels kind of comforting, being surrounded by all the familiar places and things and language and culture…While I have a lot of problems with certain aspects of my native land´s society, there is also a soft spot in my heart for a lot of the features, which I cannot deny. And, I really love the Prague farmer´s market with all the local cheap (!!) vegetables I spent Christmas eve with my mom and granny at my grandma´s place in Písek in the south of the country (having a fully macrobiotic Christmas dinner for the first time, though also introducing back the carp after many years :-p) and then I celebrated Christmas once more with the Prague branch of my family. My little sister is already 10 years old and attends 4th grade, incredible!!
I met many of my friends (though sadly did not manage to see all the people I hoped to see, the time was not sufficient in the end) – I cooked macro dinner for my two university classmates, for my friend Simona from the dog shelter walks(her baby is one year old, also incredible!! :-p), for Hana from one amazing summer camp that took place years ago, and for my Blanka and Ondřej from the Tolkien club (fancy sushi, yay!). With some I had tea in a teahouse (my friend from pagan times, Lorraine, and her boyfriend Ric) or lunch/dinner at some vegan or asian restaurant (my ex-bf Pavel and my friend from a summer job at a folk museum, Pavla). I met up with a bunch of Czech macrobiotics, who I previously knew just through an online forum, we went to my favourite teahouse, and it was fun to see how macrobiotics is “done” in my home country (strangely, I mostly see the macrobiotic movement from a more international perspective thanks to my studies at the Institute). While having lunch with Pavla, I also ran into Ruben, a young Aruban guy who used to volunteer in the Kushi Institute kitchen and who came to the Czech Republic to wwoof at some farms, that was really unbelievable, to accidentally meet him in a restaurant in Prague without planning anything beforehand! :-p
I was still in the Czech Republic during the New Year´s Eve, which at first made me nervous for a long time, since I had no clue where I am going to spend the evening and I reeeally didn´t want to sit at home with my laptop…But my Tolkien club friends Blanka and Ondřej (the couple that I was doing a marriage ceremony for in summer ) invited me over, together with Ondřej´s brother and his girlfriend. We had a quiet but fun evening, watching one of my favourite childhood comedies (Three Amigos for those interested ), playing a drawing-and-guessing game (which is normally just a part of the game called Activities), playing Dance Revolution (dancing on a special “smart” mat on the floor while following a computer programme with songs and prescribed dance schemes), watching fireworks from the balcony and eating ( a LOT :-p). After midnight we even made a little trip across the fields and forests behind Neratovice (a little town where my friends live) to a lake created by rock mining. We had a paper flower-lantern with a candle and our wishes written on the “petals” which we sent to float on the water. Too bad the wind was blowing in the wrong direction and our little lantern ship sunk very quickly
After coming back to Amsterdam I got a wonderful belated Christmas present – our housemate Alessio finally moved out!! It took a couple days longer than planned but in the end it happened! So good not to have to endure all the loud shouting/slamming doors and other things plus the overwhelming smoke and his general behaviour :-p We had a few people coming with our landlord to see the room and at the moment our new South Korean housemate Kim is moving in, transforming the room into a very neat clean place. Today the historical piano arrived (which she plays profesionally) so we are getting free concerts for a couple of hours a day She looks like an easygoing girl so let´s hope it goes fine…
With my job it´s not going well at the moment sadly…Henry´s owners mailed me they found somebody who could walk the dog “permanently” (I did tell them I was leaving for Slovenia, right at the beginning). I also didn´t yet walk Julia´s lovely shepherds this year, still waiting to be called back “to duty”.
We have been very socially active in the first weeks of the new year – we went to a birthday celebration of Nardo´s friend Scott, which was great, because it started with a long stroll through the Amsterdamse bos (the biggest forest/park nearby where we used to often go while living in Amstelveen 3 years ago), visiting shortly the goat farm (too many people, especially kids! :-p) and walking towards the lovely sunset…We had a little snack and drink at the park café and then headed by bike together with the other party attendants to an awesome stylish Ethiopian restaurant. It was fun because you get an enormous metal plate for the whole table with individual portions along the edge of the plate and a big serving of salty pancakes which you use instead of cutlery :-p Well, I had to have rice with my food, as I couldn´t eat the pancake, but all the rest of the people was eating with their hands. It was really yummy and we even tried Ethiopian beer (pretty decent).
It was quite a restaurant spree lately, as we also checked out the Nepalese restaurant just a few minutes biking from our house (nice food but sadly not comparable to the divine Nepalese food in Lisbon!) and with Nardo´s dad we went to an Indonesian restaurant in town where the food was really really tasty – I had a vegetarian rames (which means you get to taste several different little dishes, yay!) and sampled a very good Mexican beer Corona (while Nardo´s dad had Indonesian beer and Nardo had Japanese beer – quite a selection! ).We thought we would also go out for mine and Nardo´s anniversary (4 years, wow!!), but it was nicer to stay at home and just take it easy – we made pizza in our awesome new oven, too bad I totally screwed mine up this time, hehe!
Last weekend we made a trip to Rotterdam to meet my facebook friend and fellow macrobiotic from Slovenia called Gašper who gave us a lot of advice about living and working in Slovenia, especially in connection with health foods and macrobiotics in particular. It seems that there is a big interest in nutrition in Slovenia but the macrobiotic scene is very, ummm, dead :-p Well, doesn´t that need a change?!? We had lunch with Gašper in a wonderful “health heaven” called Groene Passage which is a huge centre including a vegetarian restaurant, an enormous health shop (I could spend HOURS there!), all kinds of classes (not just cooking but also all kinds of alternative health approaches, exercises, martial arts etc.), massages, a bookshop, a fairtrade gift shop and probably much more which I didn´t have time to notice…Too bad we had so little time to explore this amazing gem! I´d really love to work at such a place…We also wanted to see a bit of the city though before it got dark, so we quickly went to see some of the highlights recommended by my tour guide – the famous cube houses, the pencil-shaped house, the tiny old harbour, a few of the houses that survived the bombing of 1940, a statue commemorating this event, the big church (totally reconstructed after war and they did a really good job, you can´t tell it´s not an old church!). The modern architecture in Rotterdam is definitely worth one´s attention and there´s probably lots of cool events going on in the city, but of course for us, lovers of the old and narrow Amsterdam streets, the city just doesn´t have the spirit we are attracted to… :-p Check out my gallery for pictures though!
Yesterday me and Nar started a 10-day macrobiotic brown rice fast (Nar will probably join just for the first few days) so there´s not much cooking going on, besides the daily huge portion of rice cooked in my pressure cooker It´s supposed to be a very efficient cleanse and I was very much looking forward to it, not a bad idea to start the year with a good detox to purge all the old! You can follow me how I´m doing with the fast on my macrobiotic blog (see links) 
Whew, that was a lot of news, I bet you´re just as tired as me right now!! Hopefully I will manage to write a bit more regularly now, at least until my last macro classes start in February
