Nous allons

In a couple of hours I am leaving for Paris, where the annual ILGA-Europe conference will be hold. Maybe it is through the rain and the autumn, but I can not say that I'm looking very much forword to going. Even though I am looking forward to see a lot of my friends again... think it's just the conference politics which I dislike... Conferences liket his feel so unlike truth activism, I realise it's an important annual gathering but just have the feeling that on these conference too much energy is spend on useless politics... Well, I'll take another deep breathe and get myself into the train.

Amersfoort

Today I was in Amersfoort, the city where I was born. In the train on my way to Amersfoort people were complaining as usual because there were some delays with the train. If I count the times I heard the sentence: "I never travel with the train but if I do so it is delayed, will never do it again!" Don't know whether it's Dutch... and I wonder whether people realise that they're not only spoiling their own mood with so much complaining, but also the people that are sitting around them.

Visited my sweet grand mother and then I walked from my grand mother's house to my parents' house.
We went out for dinner with my sister tonight, which was very nice as I don't see them often lately.

Amersfoort is a beautiful city and I can sometimes really enjoy the silence...

Ladybirds' winter sleep

Spending a couple days at home I suddenly discover things I would never see in the normal rhytm of live... I just discovered lots, lots and lots of ladybirds hanging on my ceiling, preparing for a nice wintersleep.... Don't know whether this is normal, but in different corners of my appartment there are sitting hundreds of them!!! Decided that I am going to use the vacuum cleaner to take the little darlings away...
Also I had a short winter sleep last night.. it was great! Now I need to start working on mine and IGLYO's administration :(

Autumn

Slowly the autumn is starting in Amsterdam. Even though we had quite some sunshine during the past week I noticed the first green leaves turning into yellow and brown, and falling of the threes in front of my flat. I have started to plan the last months of the year, in which I will not be home a lot. All the weeks seem to be so packed already, that you can not imagine how much I try to enjoy being at home for this weekend... I slept until noon and spend early afternoon on cleaning up... Now I will go to pick up some papers from the office, which I don't mind doing since it's perfect weather for a bike ride. Yesterday I realised how nice it is to have the oppertunity to travel by bike in this beautiful city... which I don't do enough and there's still so many pieces of the city I don't know.

No blog

Today I was kindly reminded of my lack of blogging lately, so here we go again. I was travelling to Croatia and Slovenia. Visited a Transgessing Gender conference (the first academic thing in my life to attend), and visit organisations in Slovenia.

Zagreb was an interesting visit. It is funny to see how academics are discussing and promoting their own theories. I have never in my life heard that many words I had never heard of before.... Even though the subjects where very, very interesting (such as: deconstructing gender, biologics of gender), I did fall asleep during a couple of presentations. Think that academics deserve to get presentation skills at their University as well! Overall I am very happy that I attented the conference, which was important for the region.

Ljubljana was short, too short. It was full with Scottisch men in Skirts... Almost unreal how many there were... It also meant that there was no single hotel room available, happily Jasna and here family were hospital as always and hosted me. I met shortly with all of the organisations and then I already had to go. Poor Jasna smacked with her face on the ground before she dropped me off at the bus station.... Now she has a ugly scratch on her face and a lot of pain...

Good Morning Netherlands

It is terrible early in the morning and I'm awake. First of all because I need to finish my readings for the course I'm currently following. Secondly because in an hour I'm off to a training for my work. This will be about 'Organisational Development and Institutional Learning', doesn't that sound exciting!

The past week has flown by, it seems to me. IGLYO is going crazy inside; so many things have to happen at the moment... and then of course nothing works the way it is supposed to work. Our website is out the air, which is frustrating as we can not do anything against it!! Black magic is working against us. But soon we'll be back with a much nicer website, that's the good news.

Friday I am going to a 'Transgessing Gender' conference http://www.tgenderzagreb.com/ in Zagreb, to which I'm really looking forward. It's an area in my work which I don't know much about yet, but which must offer many fascinating theories and even moreover: dedicated activists. After Zagreb I will go to Ljubljana for two days and then back home to finish all the IGLYO work.

P.s. Tori Amos also sings about Teen Spirit, much better than Kurt.