HELLO I AM STILL ALIVE. After months of blog neglect, I am going to try to update a bit more regularly for a while. A lot of things happened in Amsterdam but I’m not going to tell you about most of them because I’m a bad blogger. Instead I will mostly be posting conversations and musings that I’ve written/have been writing in my head for months but haven’t gotten around to posting.

However, one thing I’m going to write about in more depth is a trip I took at the very end of my stay in Amsterdam, to a truly amazing art festival in Linz called Ars Electronica. To kick that off I have a guest post (my first guest post! It’s like I have a real blog) from the hilarious and talented Mr. Arjen Vrielink, one of the three people with whom I drove to the festival. He agreed to write for me if I gave him some sort of assignment, so I told him it had to be 500 words long, have at least three pictures, include at least two Dutch idioms (with explanations), and be about what he took away from Ars Electronica. The result totally blew me away. So look for that tomorrow!

And then finally, if I keep up with my blogging ambitions, I will tell you guys a bit about my week in Barcelona after I left Amsterdam, and my new life in MARRAKESH! A lot has changed in a short time. I only hope I can keep up!

Hello faithful friends and followers, I am back! I bet you thought I evaporated somewhere in Italy but you were WRONG. I went home a few weeks early and never provided blog closure because I am lazy. Way better story, no? (No.)

ANYWHOOZLE, I write to you today because I am headed back across the ocean, to restart my adventure — this time in Amsterdam. I will be living with a family friend and working with him, doing some administrative work in his company and helping his kids learn English. I am leaving this Monday (June 11th) and will be there for three months. After that … who knows? Seen any good job offers lately?

I will try to keep this updated regularly with pictures and stories. Thanks for following!

So along with posting random artifacts, right now this blog is about getting myself excited to spend four months in a strange land where I don’t know anyone or speak the language. WOOOO FOR THINGS THAT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME. So look forward to bits and pieces of things that help quell the terror of study abroad looming ahead and make this seem like something that actually might be worthwhile. And along the way, I get to experiment with this crazy new thing they call tumblr.