The Winter is Coming

I look outside my window today and it looks like an absolutely gorgeous day. Nary a cloud, and the sky is blue.
Looks can be deceiving, however, because I know that it's fucking freezing outside. I got the brunt of the mummy's wrath when biking home from my girlfriend's house earlier today.
I snipped this from the BBC online weather service (if you're from the BBC and you don't like this, just tell me).
As you can see in the "Summary" column, we're in for some nice weather. What's deceptive about this is the ghastly nighttime temperatures. As you can see, circled at the bottom right, is the -3 degrees C we will have on Monday night.
Last winter I experienced a grand total of 2 or 3 days with temperatures below 0 here in Enschede, and none of them were in the middle of October. I've got a bad feeling about this. The dutch say that this summer has sucked, so I can only assume that means that we're in for a shitty winter too.
Why ohh why can't I just live in a beach hut somewhere?...

Wednesday Madness

Our school year here is split into four quarters. This is the last quarter in the school year, and as luck would have it, I have Tuesdays and Wednesdays off. Today is Wednesday. I thought to myself: "This will be a good day to go downtown to do some shopping and check some stuff out". Imagine my surprise when I found all of Enschede downtown at the same time. It wasn't just at lunch time either, it was before and after. People were swarming. All the cafés were full, as were all the stores. What were these people doing there? Didn't they have jobs to go to? Didn't they have school?
You'd think that lunch time in the middle of the week would be a good time for people to not be out and about on the town. Weird.

In other news, I finally replaced my old backpack. It wasn't getting old, but it was so rugged and abrasive that it was tearing up the backs of all my shirts. This time I bought a nice one with some kind of contraption at the back that always keeps the bag off my back by a couple of centimeters, letting the air flow nicely. Another good thing about this contraption is that no matter how much I stuff in to the bag, the feeling against my back is always the same. Perfect.

Today I also got my tickets to Mayday. This party has been happening for a long time (from 1991 in fact, according to wikipedia), and it's about time I went. Now that I live so close by.

World War II

If it wasn't for the lack of small arms fire, I'd think that Ze Germans were coming across the borders once again. Firecrackers have been outlawed in Sweden for a couple of years now. Fireworks are still legal, on two days of the year, one of which being the 31st of December.
Apparently, here, they haven't learned their lesson. You'd think that they would be a little more careful after what happened last time. Not a single second goes by without and explosion of some kind. Either far away, or really really close. Some of them sound like entire houses going down.
Being awoken by explosions isn't something new for a lot of people in this world, but it certainly was for me this morning.