Europe-trotting

Well ... 3 countries in five days (see the arrows)! I sound like an American tourist doing Europe in 7 days ... Since last Friday I have traveled from Lisbon, Portugal to Roosendaal and Amsterdam, The Netherlands, to Ljubljana, Slovenia via Pula and Zagreb, Croatia, and then back to Portugal.

Back in Lisbon

Niki stayed in Lisbon. One of her jobs is being a Cambridge examiner and team leader - she 'does' English tests with people who want to sit the Cambridge PET, KET, CAE, FCE and other exams. She has to travel to a British Council exam centre, sometimes in Lisbon but also in other cities in Portugal and make sure all the candidates get to sit (and hopefully pass!) their exams. Unfortunately these exams are always on weekends or public holidays ...

Visiting Oma and going walkies

In Roosendaal I visted Oma Centa and met up with Anjes, who came up on Sunday morning. We did lots of sitting around and talking and Anjes and I walked many a mile on Sunday to town, to Oma's, to the cinema (to find out there were no movies) and back and forth. At some stage we even 'took a stroll' from Oma's house to The Dentist ... Yes, unfortunately and, as always, on the weekend dental problems forced me to go see a Very Grumpy Dentist who had his practice in the street of (what I remember as) my first dentist who gave me a life-long Trauma Of Things Dental and Dentists ...

The nice thing was that the walk took Anjes and I through the old neighborhoods in Roosendaal where I grew up and used to live; past some of the schools I attended; past a church where Opa Centa had frequently performed with his choir, past places and spaces where I spent many an hour playing and straying... The sun was shining which made The Trek quite enjoyable, despite me leading us to the Wrong Side of Town :). We got there and, yes, the dentist was as grumpy as he had sounded on the phone (well, serves me well for disturbing his no doubt well-deserved Sunday Peace) but at least he sorted the problem.

The Duke's Forrest

From Roosendaal this short sojourn into Europe took me to the beautiful town of Den Bosch for a two-day meeting with a team of about 15-20 people, writers and publishers, who will all be involved in a new project called Realtime. This project will keep me busy for the next 3 years or so (well, part of the time) while we build a completely new English course for high school learners in Holland. On Monday night the whole team went on a Cooking Event (see keizerculinair.nl) where we cooked the most wonderful finger food for each other, in pairs and teams and got to know each other really well.

Ljubljana

After the two-day workshop, I had to hurry back to Schiphol to catch a flight to Slovenia. Slovenia? Yes, Slovenia - a country of green hills and friendly people, next to Croatia, close to Italy, where I met at 7.30 in the morning with a friendly editor and a publisher in the pretty capital Ljubljana (can you say it?)

I will be writing a three-part series of course books for them , that will be published in Slovenia and will then be made available for the whole Eastern European region, including countries like Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary and Greece. Very exciting and fun!