The sweet hello, the sad goodbye and…pancakes!

Last week was quite a week, and that’s an understatement, so it deserves a good & long story :D

First Stina arrived at schiphol Tuesday afternoon, people around us must have thought we hadn’t seen each other in years as we hugged BIG time!
We got to my place late in the afternoon, did grocery shopping and I prepared Stina’s favourite ‘Dutch’ dinner nasi goreng ;) After that we hurried to town, to catch ‘The Devil Wears Prada’, really good even when you’ve read the book like I did. From the cinema it was only a short way to Elise’s place, where we had some beers and a lot of talking before E. kicked us out again some time at night. Walked to the station to pick up my bike and even managed to bike home from there, Stina’s bum was sore but we were so much faster haha!

Wednesday was shopping day! We were lazy in the morning, having a nice breakfast and prepring ourselves for the day. Once in town we wanted to get an appointment at the tattoo-shop for later in the afternoon…but it was closed! The other tattoo-shop didn’t have any time, so we took that as a sign...better luck next time.

After all this we were pretty hungry already, so we had lunch here, nice! The rest of the day was filled with shopping, until we had bags full! Funny enough we hadn’t even really bought clothes this time, but mostly other things.

Back to my place we prepared for a quiet evening in front of the TV. We had a healthy salad for dinner, then changed into our relaxy-panties and installed ourselves on my couch…well, not before we got a big bucket of ice-cream though! Stina had brought the new Roxette Unplugged DVD…so cool to see all this in good quality finally and the bonus tracks are just…. G-R-E-A-T!
My parents came by shortly during the evening, to bring me some stuff I still wanted from my granny’s place, her old bike for example (I seriously have 4 bikes in my possession right now haha!) and also the ugly painting that is so ugly it’s actually nice. Am planning to hang that in my bedroom, will for sure post a pic when it’s up there!
















Thursday promised to be a busy day and it was. First we had to run to catch the bus to the station, luckily the friendly bus driver saw us & actually stopped for us like 100 metres before the bus stop which saved us some running with all our luggage!
Once in Amsterdam we put our luggage in a locker, got my bike and managed to bike to my faculty building (Stina’s bum was getting sore again though). There I had an appointment with my professor to talk about my thesis. Didn’t make as much progress as I wanted to lately, but we had a good talk about it and made some appointments for the near future. My thesis will definitely be ready before Christmas, yay! Stina also met my professor shortly, which was fun as he’s a professor in Danish Literature and they ended up talking in Danish with me not really getting all of it. After this we visited my old job shortly which was nice!

Then it was time to meet Suz! She’d been in Amsterdam with her college mates for some days already, visiting museum after museum. So outside the van Gogh museum was a good place to meet! We ended up having pancakes for lunch near Leidseplein, which was nice. It got funny though when Eugene sent me a text saying ‘we’re having pancakes for dinner tonight!’…
We walked a little in the city before Stina & me had to go back to the station to catch our train to Gouda…so unfortunately we had to say goodbye to Suz again :(
After some stress we made it for our train just in time…had some more stress in the train, but won’t go into that haha!

So we finally arrived in Gouda later that afternoon where Eugene and Minko picked us up. We walked back to their place, while singing children songs and picking up beautiful leaves from the trees for the ‘autumn table’ :)
Once at their place Evy soon discovered that Stina can draw *lol*. We’d brought some nice sunflowers for Marielle, and present for the ‘kids’, which they were all very happy with! We indeed had pancakes for dinner, bacon pancakes with syrup *mjam mjam*

After dinner and making our bed on the attic, which finally convinced Minko we were really spending the night at their place, Marielle, Stina & me went to town, to do some shopping and see a bit of Gouda. We ended on one of the terraces on Gouda’s main square, where we had a tea (with rum!). After that Marielle left us there, went home and sent Eugene our way…with whom we ended up in the bar drinking beer. We came home late, trying to be as soft as we could to not wake up anyone. Cat Max had already warmed our bed and actually stayed with us the whole night, so sweet!
















Before we knew it Friday morning came and it came early! After a quick shower and breakfast Eugene & Minko drove us to the station, time to say goodbye again :(
We took the train to Rotterdam where Daniela was already waiting for us with her lovely red little car! We had to drive through The Hague, another city Stina can add to her list, to get to Nienke’s and also saw our first Ikea of this weekend ;)

We didn’t stay at Nienke’s for long, left lila Mila with her granny, put all our luggage in Nienke’s car (already named Mr. Green by Stina) and got on the way…to the supermarket, to do some grocery shopping for our weekend. After this we hit the road for real…on our way to Germany!
The girls had our route well prepared, so everything went really smooth actually…once over the border Nienke quickly learned how to drive as a German and when Stina took over the steering wheel she adjusted just fine as well! All in all we found our hotel in Hamburg without too much trouble, well done girls!!!
We installed ourselves in our rooms, changed our clothes so we looked nice again, then went out for dinner…and found a lovely place just around the corner of the hotel :)

We had a little night trip to the airport of Hamburg, which was good because it was a bit problematic to find our way back from there, something we didn’t suffer from the next day haha! Finally, we had a drink in our room before heading to bed













Saturday came…turned out to be a pretty good day! Don’t really want to go into too many details actually, this story’s getting to long already anyway, but we managed to do what we came for to Hamburg: meet Roxette, in other words Per & Marie!
We finally met them at the hotel they were staying and doing interviews that day…how we did that? Well...let's just say; in a very direct but polite way! In the end we met Per first and gave him the bottle of jenever we had brought, (had been walking around with it all day so was very happy to hand it over to him haha) which he was very content with. He ran away to give it to his wife immediately, she was standing somewhere down the hall way, so she could take it to their room haha! Then he came back and we all posed for pictures with him which was no problem for him as ‘I’m looking good today because I’m already wearing make-up for photos’…oh…ok!
After this we had to wait a bit until Marie came down and up to us to meet us, surrounded by their manager and several other (security) people. It was weird meeting her as she really isn’t the same person anymore as she was before she had the brain tumour, while at the same time she IS the same of course. Stina gave her the roses we’d brought and when she came to Nienke and Daniela it was just heart-warming to see the smile on her face when she recognised those two, for sure there’s nothing wrong with her long-term memory! We only had time for a quick chat and nothing more than that, everybody around her was really protective towards Marie and therefore our meeting couldn’t last for too long…which is good of course. Also they actually had to leave at that time, to go to the Bravo 50-years show thing they were in Hamburg for. We left the hotel a bit overwhelmed…it took some time to sink in what had just happened.




















We did some shopping, well we didn’t really buy anything so it was more like window shopping, until we were so hungry we finally settled for the first restaurant we saw, which turned out to be a good choice!
Later that night we watched the Bravo Show on our telly in our room, we had tickets to go to the show before but had sent them back when it looked like Roxette wouldn’t actually be there ‘live’. Now they were there after all and we didn’t have tickets anymore. That afternoon Per had actually tried to get us some tickets when he heard this but he couldn’t give us any because the show was sold out. When watching the show we were actually happy he didn’t succeed in getting us the tickets…it was too much talking, and when there finally was someone performing they filmed it so bad you could hardly see anything properly. So watching it on TV was a very good alternative!

Sunday came…time to say goodbye…to Stina, which was really a sad goodbye…she had to go to the train station to get her train back to Copenhagen from there :(
The three of us decided to be crazy fans for one last time; we went to the airport to see if we could catch a glimpse of our duo when they were leaving for Stockholm again. Just to wave goodbye.

Turned out we got more than a glimpse and we actually managed to have a little chat with Marie before they left for the VIP-lounge. She recognised me from the day before and was actually holding my hands before I knew it…could tell her it she did a good performance the day before and she seemed glad to her that, big smile again! Just as we stood to wave them goodbye, Nienke got a tap on her shoulder from drummer Pelle and at the same time producer/keyboard-player Clarence passed me as well saying ‘Hej!’ to me, nice guys! We talked a bit with some other fans who were there and then left for real, left the airport, left Hamburg, left Germany…taking nothing but good memories home!

Some numbers:
- 8 Ikeas we’ve seen along the road (or was it 9?)
- 6 digits was the code to our hotel room door (long live Etap haha!)
- 5 cups of tea I’ve had in Hamburg (3 of them were really good, 2 were really bad)
- 5 boats we’ve seen along the road & in Hamburg (maybe it was more…lost count)
- 4 happy girls were in the car
- 2 bags of candies were emptied during our road trip