Aloha people,

I know that I am very lousy with updating my Xanga, and tonight I have a night off so I decided to give Xanga a few minutes of my time and refresh/update my Xanga.

(yeaa finally I know, Soazul!!)

My life since my last blog has been busy and thrilling with many things happening. I ll update you on some things I did...

In november I went to London with 3 M's (Marijn, Martine and Marte) for a friend's 30th B-day bash, had a champ time with those gals you can say that we defintely had a fabulous time ;)

It was really a mini reunion of Gally students at the birthday party (which was an India themed party), so champ to see those people again, in the pictures you can have a peek who I met there ;)

moi, Marte, Andreas, Himel (the b-day guy), Martine and Gilles

moi, Marijn, Martine, Marte, Kathleen, Nadia, Hilde and Andreas

Not included on the pictures are some more people.

One week later on November 25th there was this HUGE party in the Netherlands, called Sencity, it s becoming more bigger every year and we can call that it is actually an European Deaf event where people from other countries will flock to the Netherlands for that party.

I just wanted to show one pic I think that it is great, the light, the background, and even better as it s a natural shot. Martine and me were promoting some events for the Netherlands National Deaf Youth Association. See below for that pic!

And on november 30th I jetted off to South America once again!! I think I am just addicted to South America ha! no, not really, I had a reason to go down to South America again as there was this conference in Florianopolis in Brazil I wanted to attend. It s called Theoretical Issues in Researching Sign Language (TISLR) as I am interested into this field of sign language researching. Before this conference started I flew down to Buenos Aires in Argentina where I spent a long weekend from Friday to Monday. Buenos Aires is defintely one of my favorite cities in world, it s a megapolis (some 13 millions ppl live there) but the quality of life there is GRAND, the steaks, the wine, the shopping, people, clothing, even taxi's (lol) and more. After having a fabulous time in Buenos Aires it was time to jet off to Florianopolis in Brazil, I was basically stuck in airports ALL DAY LONG!!! One BIG lesson learned, NEVER NEVER buy two seperate tickets on the same day, as my three flights got a schedule change which made me to miss the final flight to Florianopolis. I actually spent like 10 hours in airports and the total flying time was just 1 hour and 50 minutes, ppfftt I flew Buenos Aires to Montevideo then to Porto Alegre then finally Florianopolis.

TISLR... What can I say about this conference? It was DEFINTELY an interesting experience for me. The actual reason for coming to Brazil to attend the TISLR congress was to find out if studying lingustics was something for me or not as I am pondering now about which studies to study when I am starting my graduate school this fall. I was doubting between majoring in cultural anthropology or lingustics of sign language. The TISLR conference provided me different lectures on different subjects and learning about different areas of the sign language lingustics and a great opportunity to meet people in this field. But it was really tiringsome as the conference started at 8:30 am every day for 4 days and the lectures did not finish until 7 pm with JUST 2 breaks between! And we always thoughts that the latinos were relaxed????? :p

After 4 days and countless debates with people who attended, it came out that I like the lingustics anthropology the best. That is so perfect as it combines both the cultural aspects and language aspects, so I am starting to look around for schools which offer that graduate program.

Before and after TISLR I got a chance to spend one day on one of many beaches of Santa Catarina, the island where Florianopolis is located at, sometimes I thought I was in Maui, Hawaii, that s how beautiful it is over there. Then it was time for me to fly back to the cold and damp Amsterdam! On way back to Amsterdam I had a layover of 10 hours in DC, so I of course hurried to Gally and met up some old friends there and had a dinner with Dan Veit, Jason Lamberton, Jon Lamberton and Brian Morrison, it s always good to hang out with them, before I knew it was time to fly the last transatlantic leg to Amsterdam.

Jerry Pua, Erin Wilkinson and moi

Brazilians are very vain, why? they take pictures pictures and again pictures, it was like this flash flash flash all the time, it almost caused blindness!

Guys, I only planned to spend a few minutes for this post and it alreday took me 20 minutes ha, time to finish this!!

o yea, one more thing, this is for you, Dawnieo!

Yeaaa, that is the sloth from an earlier post of mine and I still think he actually looks like ET! How he moves his head and neck and how he looks thru his glassy eyes and how he winks!!! :)

For all my readers, Happy New year!!

Signing off  n making a sandwich