First night home in a long time

After having spent the whole weekend at my boyfriend's place I returned to the apartment this morning to check out the status of the fly-invasion. There were plenty of dead ones, but no alive, so I took that as a good sign and decided to stay. Tomorrow I have an exam on Cross-cultural Management, and I actually just started studying today. Now I just hope for the best I guess.

I'm so extremely sick of studying already, but I can't relax until after the 8th of November when we have the final presentation of the project. Not that I have a holiday then or anything, but at least a new term starts and I can forget everything about snoring and marketing communications.

Invasion of wing-less flies

This morning I went back home to study. What I saw when I opened the door was simply revolting. There were dead flies everywhere in the apartment, and about 10 alive ones that kept flying around our heads. Me and my roomie panicked a bit, naturally, and started spraying them all. After about 5 minutes they were all dead and we swept them up and threw them out of the window, and then sat down on the sofa to calm down a bit. About 15 minutes later there were about 10 new flies (and I'm talking about the big, BIG kind) in the livingroom. We also noticed that there are maggots falling down from a crack in the wall whenever we open the door to the toilet. Oh, and a lot of the flies are deformed and lack wings or legs, so there is basically a freakshow going on in our home. Needless to say, we just can't stay there.

So, we called the landlord and he's going to call an exterminator on Monday, and in the meantime I'm staying at my boyfriend's place and my roomie at her boyfriend's. I just hate it that my home, which is supposed to be a safe place, has turned into a showroom for deformed gigantic flies.

Swedish cooking

Yesterday my roomie came home to a completely panicked Alice. We suddenly had flies everywhere in the apartment and, well, I lost it a bit. We sprayed them all but I was so disgusted by the apartment afterwards (and so was she) that I went home to my boyfriend's place instead. So today I've been here all day, studying, while he's at work.

The plan was that I would come over today anyway, to cook Swedish food for his family. I'm going to make something called kalops which is normally served with either red beets or lingonberry jam. Since I'm not a big fan of beets and it's not particularly Swedish, we're going to eat it with the latter. Therefore, last night we went to Ikea in Delft to buy it at the Swedish food market, and my boyfriend almost had to drag me out of there because I was getting so nostalgic about all the Swedish Christmas food they have now. I ended up getting only the lingonberry jam, and comforted myself with the fact that we're going to Sweden at the end of November. I can't wait.

Working 9 to 5

This week I've worked full days at GDCC, which is very exhausting and a bit stressful actually, because I have exams next week. Today I ran out of numbers so I had to cut flyers (recruiting material for the company) for two hours. That was a bit boring, to say the least.

After that, I started calling on a hospital project. I actually hadn't had an interview with that yet, but today I got two. The annoying thing is that they were just after each other so I sat for about 2 ½ hours straight, interviewing. I told the respondent that the interview would take about 30 minutes because that's what they'd told me on the briefing, but it actually took about 65 minutes to complete it. I felt pretty bad for the poor IT managers who had to listen to me going on and on about "how well implemented would you say your IT system is on a scale of one to 5 regarding...?". My voice was totally ruined after talking constantly like that, and now I'm really tired. 

Anyway, tomorrow I'm free so that means staying at home and study. I'm going to have coffee with one of the Swedish exchange students though, that'll be a nice break. 

Update: Brussels and work

Hi, my name is Alice and I am calling on behalf of the European Commission. Hi, my name is Alice and I am calling on behalf of the European Commission. Hi, my name is Alice and I am calling on behalf of the European Commission... I feel like they're the only words I know. Oh well...

I haven't actually been home since Thursday, which is one of the reasons why I haven't written in my blog since then. I think George is probably missing me, especially seeing as I still haven't rescued him from upstairs.

I had a great weekend which involved eating chocolate and waffles, the Belgian kind. I spontaneously went to Brussels with my boyfriend. The city is so beautiful and when I came back to my street in The Hague it was like a slap in the face. But since then I've been mostly at work in Rotterdam or at my boyfriend's place in Delft -a  lot nicer than my place. The hotel we stayed at in Brussels was really classy and only a couple of hundred meters from the European Commission. Although, I didn't need to be reminded of that.

Next week is exam week and I'm a little stressed about it but luckily I only have to work tomorrow and then I can concentrate on preparing for the exams. Tonight I could go home early from work but instead of studying as I probably should have, I cleaned the whole apartment and cooked dinner for my boyfriend who had to work until six. The only reason why I could go earlier was because I was out of numbers to call. 

The Greek

Today I worked the morning shift again. It was kind of hard, becase I was working on the hospital project again, and honestly, who wants to do a 50 minute interview about IT? Also it wasn't very nice because I was completely starving and trying to survive on coffee the whole morning. Thankfully I had some very good company sitting next to me.

So, I finished the draft version of my Expert Analysis report today, and in about 10 minutes I'm going to meet up with three friends at our favourite Greek restaurant here in the Hague, Rhodos. It's going to be so nice, and it's actually become a bit of a tradition among us, to have dinner about once a month to catch up about things. It's so easy to just get lost in the stress at school and not really talk a lot to each other, so I love when we have these nights together.

Wednesday

What a day. Went up way too early this morning because I had to work the morning shift. At work I got briefed on a project, called an hour or so on another project, and then translated questionnaires from English to Swedish the rest of the day. After work I went straight to uni to have a group meeting with the project group. We made a powerpoint and discussed some possible insights to base the marketing strategy on, and then we went to the Project Coaching Session.

That was by far the worst part of this day. It went on for 2 hours, discussing and presenting ideas related to the project. I also didn't eat anything else than a tiny cheese sandwich in the whole day, so I was almost fainting when we had to stand up and present. When the class finally was over, me and my roomie went straight home and sat like zombies on the tram.

So, tonight I'm going to write on my Expert Analysis report which is about corporate blogging, but first I'm going to take a break and relax a bit. My brain is simply not functioning anymore.