My life is changing rapidly. In just 12 days we will be flying to Sweden, with an one-way ticket to Stockholm, my love and I with all our stuff packed in bags and boxes off to the North…

I handed in my thesis just before Christmas. With some luck my teachers will approve it soon and then it is my turn to defend it and finally graduate. What an exciting year 2012 is going to be! I hope you’ve all had a wonderful holiday and a splendid New Year’s. A few words that capture my evening: champagne, good food, wonderful old and new friends, fireworks at the Chinese restaurant across the street and a lot of Hertog Jan beer. Christmas was: every night a dressed up dinner at friends and/or family, a lot of eating (I gained all my lost pounds), drinking, laughing, crying, hugging and love.

In between the celebrations there was room for a few days of love in foggy, cold and romantic Paris

Notre Dame by night

A foggy view from Centre Pompidou

Me at Sorbonne

Tuesday, the 13th. Is this the ‘final day’ of writing my thesis? We will see if it is tonight! With a small christmas tree decorated in white and silver, a great start with mjummie breakfast with yoghurt, blueberries and linseed, a pot of coffee in the making, a lazy big cat on the table, CNN on the background and my mind focused, it has to work. Let’s do this.

Have a nice day!

These couple of weeks are hopefully totally unrepresentative for the rest of my life. At least I hope my surroundings are, because personally I feel happy!

I am moving, living out of and in between boxes, trying to finish my thesis at my boyfriend’s mother’s kitchen table, planning our adventure in Sweden from the matress on the floor in my boyfriend’s old room surrounded by things packed, celebrating Sinterklaas and Christmas fleeing our own chaos, dreaming of order and our new home, meeting friends and slowly realizing I’ll won’t see them in a long time, laughing, crying and especially a lot of sleeping. In a little more than five weeks our plane to Stockholm departs. Exciting, scary and a dream coming true…

Here is the result of the assignment I talked about a couple of weeks ago. The idea was to introduce your subject to an audience. This is a personal account of my grandfather, with a picture of him as a young man, with on the background the places where he has lived, where he met my grandmother and objects portraying his interests.