Late night bike rides

Usually, on days I close at work, I ride home with a colleague who also lives in Middelburg. He's a nice guy and we have fun conversations, sometimes random but usually just talk about our (extremely different) backgrounds and varying interests (he's the outdoorsy type, while I'm the bookish type). Tonight I talked about how Americans embarrass me.

They come into the workplace from time to time, or I run into them somewhere, and while ocassionally it is nice to hear an American accent, most of the time it is unexciting or even annoying.

And it is such a hypocritical sentiment! Their accents sound twangy.... so I guess mine does, too. They talk to so loud. But then, so do I. What is it that makes me sometimes feel so, well... superior?

Maybe it's my decent knowledge of world - not to mention U.S. - geography. I'm happy to break the stereotype that Americans don't know geography, but unfortunately, that stereotype is there for a reason.

Totally different direction here: I'm learning Dutch. Every once in a while, something reminds me; tonight, it was a conversation some of my colleagues had as we were chatting over wine and other drinks after closing. They were talking about the good wine at this pub and the bad service at that one, and towards the end I realized that, yeah, I actually understood the majority of what they were saying.

And another, really different direction: I've been reading the Petite Anglaise blog, the topic of my thesis (as I will refer to it here; it is just so much more universally understood than "IRP"), and it's really very well written. I can actually see why she got a book deal.

Which is quite a relief, since I have to read 3-4 years' worth of daily blog entries, as well as a book that is based on/taken from/inspired by the blog itself. I printed out the first three months and read them on paper, and now I really understand just how interactive blogs are by the amount that I couldn't do when reading one on paper. All of the links - even the link that exposes the comments is disabled on a printout!

I'm excited to get the book and see what carries over from the blog to the book and what is totally missing.