Pretty Things: Welcome to Europe!

I moved to a small city in The Netherlands for my honey's internship.

While its exciting to be actually living in a different country, it's been a bit rough of a start for me.

I was really excited to move somewhere new, and it's nice that Dutch people can speak English (very) well. But I feel like a total jerk for not knowing their language, and I'm not my usual outgoing, talk-to-everyone self. It would certainly be different if I had a job or school here, but that's not the case.

I realized how truly isolated I have felt when I was on the street one day and, to my shock, a woman asked me a question! Sadly, it was in Dutch. So all I could do was shake my head, and say, "Sorry..."

It's like I have put an invisibility cloak on the people around me here. I automatically assume people aren't talking to me (because usually they aren't), which can be embarrassing when shopkeepers try to greet me and I realize it very late.

Things are getting better since I joined an expat group, and thanks to some of R's nice co-workers.

But I do still miss the dogs. They seem to be having a ball at my parent's house back in Seattle. My mom and I Skype almost every day - 3:30pm my time is 6:30am her time, so we chat over coffee before she gets ready for work. She always holds up the dogs or turns the camera on them so that I can see them.

There's generally a new story of what they rolled in the other day - dead bunnies or dead birds on a boom day. But dead worms or bugs are usually are the dead-thing du jour. If there is a big, dead black beetle in the yard, Paris will find it and roll in it, guaranteed.

I finally got around to posting pictures on facebook - some from our brief time in Seattle, and a lot from the European travels of the past month. This set of pictures cracked me up. I was trying to capture the tender moment of my nephew "helping" my mom, "Gan Gancine," to water her garden. I was lucky (?) enough to also capture this little dog story line as well: