sinaasappelsap: my heart is simply bursting with holiday spirit.

i am a maker of good decisions. professionally. [not really.] i have decided this because, this morning i exercised my ability to make good decisions so effectively that it just might have saved my life! or at least my extremities.
i woke up this morning, and it was not one of those "good morning sunshine, the earth says hello!" mornings. it was more of a "why am i even alive." morning. but anyway, i got outta bed and had to decide what to wear. usually, i just wear a pair of pants and a sweater, cos that's warm enough sometimes. but today, for some reason of divine enlightment in my subconscious, i thought to myself, "NOPE. today, i think i am going to wear a pair of leggings, pants, sweatpants, a long sleeve sweater, a zip-up hoodie, my german army jacket, a scarf, a hat, unox glovemittens, and my earmuffs." and my coat, of course.
i don't know what possessed me to wear approximately 5 more layers than i usually do, but it was a shining moment in my life. once i got to school, around second period, it started to snow. not like "teehee little fairy sprinkles in the skyyy~ @w@", more like "ow that snowflake just pegged me in the eye wtf".
they were giant mutant snowflakes, out for blood. and i biked home in them, with about half an eyeball of visibility, because my hair and the snowflakes combined in front of my face to form a frozen pink shield.
BUT THE THING IS, except for my face, i was completely toasty warm. do you know why? yes. because i have no shame, and proudly walk around looking like an assbutt in my bazillion puffy layers and earmuffs. i'm like an onion, each layer more socially unacceptable than the last.
laugh all you want, my fellow classmates. your shiny italy sportscoat isn't going to deter the hypothermia like my sweatpants and panda earmuffs.

i mean i really hope it's warm enough, for your sake.

besides the fact that i have to actually be outside with the snow, the snow itself is really pretty. it's getting me quite in the holiday spirit. i got home today and looked up the christmas song on youtube and totally got my jam on.
which reminds me, okay. every day i spend learning more about sinterklaas, the more utterly baffling the holiday becomes. at first it was just like "oh so it's like santa but not santa." but it is SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING THAN THAT.
so we do presents, but we have to wrap them up in a "suprise" for the other person. like hiding them, or putting them in a paper mache model kayak, for example. this is something that i do not even begin to "snap" but i'm gonna try my hardest. other people sometimes do poems too, to give to the person with their gift. but i'm pretty sure that is beyond my skill in every sense.
also, sinterklaas himself is just a neverending fountain of WHAT. he rides around on a stoomboot with his black slave-elves, and he comes from spain but he's actually turkish, and he leaves presents in your shoes. [as i have come to understand]. thats like 1000 times more creative than a guy from the north pole with flying reindeer. good job, holland!

oh, the merriment.

at the afs party on sunday [at which i won a christmas tree and dutch porcelain ornament from blokker :D] we were just sitting around, chillin, completely unawares, when we all hear accordian. i was mildly intrigued, since y'know. accordian is not something that enters your daily life very often.
and then, into the livingroom danced 4 zwart piet and sinterklaas, fully costumed and singing spiritedly. forcefully spreading their holiday cheer and merriment to several confused exchange students drinking tea. it. was. amazing. everyone else was just kinda like whaaaaat, but for me, this was an experience i could not handle. i proceeded to go into a state of utter, nonfunctioning glee. i'm *fairly* sure i grabbed my knees and rolled into a little ball on the floor, smiling like a giant doof.

an emotion best conveyed by spongebob.

to be fair, WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF SINGING SLAVE-ELVES STORMED YOUR HOUSE? because i feel like i had pretty much the right response.
anyway, that was probably the most surreal experience of my life thus-far. which says a lot, because i am here and every day is a surreal experience.
beyond that amazing experience, this weekend i also went to enschede with alex n eline to go to atak, which was awesome C: and briefly visited nijverdal. which was terrifying. only because the best way to describe nijverdal is "post-apocalyptic work camp". jacque and i had to stop there on our way to raalte because the other half of the traintracks in nijverdal have been demolished, and the main station is heavily under construction. there's just one track leading out towards hengelo. we then had to take a bus past what i'm pretty sure is an abandoned lace factory, and several gratuitously sized gun statues, to reach our destination. which was a sparse dirt-pile filled semi-wasteland. we had to walk through a tunnel made with a gigantic metal pipe through a dirt pile to get to the single set of traintracks where our train was. our final view of nijverdal was a huge, solitary factory building with two large red twisting pipes [basically water slides] attatched to the side. nijverdal made me feel like fallout 3, or a creepy future dystopia full of shelled remnants of yesteryear.