It always seems to be the case that I go along without doing much for ages, then everything happens in one week. This weekend I’m in Malmö for a European Greens meeting, then all next week I have exams and a parental visit. Still, I can’t complain, Sweden is lovely, and I’m pretty confident about the exams.

Well I’m not getting anything out of this economics lecture, so I may as well break my blog silence. Since my last post left off with the line, “…tomorrow I’m emigrating”, I have indeed done just that, so here’s a post in a similar grain to my I Live In Manchester! post from 2006. I now live in the beautiful Dutch city of Leiden, with a masters course on European Union studies at the oldest university in the Netherlands to keep me occupied.

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I suppose it is obligatory to write a post about my holiday if I’m going to retain any pretence of having a proper personal blog. I headed down to London for a few days before moving on to Cornwall. In the interests of curiosity, I decided that I’d go by sleeper. In fact I can now say that I’ve used all the sleeper train routes in the UK; there only being two of them, that wasn’t too hard. It’s quite an experience to use them though. (more…)

I’m getting quite excited about my two little holidays that are coming up. After graduation on Wednesday (how fast the past three years have gone by), I’ll be getting ready to board the train to Brussels. I’ve visited the city quite a number of times, but never really spent time as a tourist, so I’m looking forward to visiting the Atomium, and making use of the air-conditioning in a couple of museums and galleries.

Once I get back from that trip, I’ll be preparing to visit the UK’s number one tourist city: London. A couple of days sightseeing with the other hordes, and I’ll be ready for the Night Riviera to Cornwall to relax in a favourite hostel of mine near Fowey.

I never really believed people when they said that moving house is one of the most stressful things that one can do but—having just had to condense the contents of my flat into an already full house—I’m starting to change my views on that. The simple fact is that I have too much stuff, and it’s mostly in the form of newspapers and scrawled lecture notes, so I’ve decided to sell what I can on eBay, and unfortunately bin as much of the rest as possible.

Anyway, aside from shifting the contents of my flat to Edinburgh (a feat that required three Edinburgh to Manchester round trips in a row), I’ve been trying to decide what to do with the limited amount of my summer holiday that I have left. Annoyingly, my EU Studies masters course at Universiteit Leiden starts in mid-August, so I’ll miss the Edinburgh festival, but I’ve planned a few days in Brussels to see friends, and about a week later I’ve booked a trip to London then Cornwall by sleeper train. It isn’t as exotic as the trip to Barcelona that I had to give up on due to limited time, but I can’t wait to see what UK sleeper trains are like. I somehow doubt that I’ll be woken in the middle of the night by a police officer with a gun, dismantling my cabin to search for drugs, as happened on one of the last sleeper services I used in Serbia; having never used the Caledonian Sleeper or Night Riviera before though, who knows what could happen?