The WES cycle

Most of this blog so far has been about holidays, travel, food and friends. So I thought it appropriate to write a post about the more mundane aspects of our life, which quite frankly, accounts for most of the periods in between blogposts. In general, it's what I call the WES cycle. I've made that up, but essentially WES stands for Work - Eat - Sleep, and that sums up a lot of our days. As some of you may know, Paul works near the Dutch-German border and commutes 97km each way to and from work. I work in Amsterdam and that's 90km each way. So, between us, we travel 374 kilometres every day. Actually, that's the first time I've done the sums and it sounds nuts, huh? It's fair to say that we are not a carbon neutral couple. The travel time varies. 'I will never complain about Melbourne traffic again. All I had to do was travel 200km return. Easy, right? 4 hours and counting, probably an hour to go' (Source - text message from Cessy stuck in traffic jam yesterday)

Because of the commute and the nature of our jobs, we generally leave around 7.30 in the morning and get back around 8ish at night. Dinner is usually relatively quick and easy and quite late and then we spend a few hours in our favourite places.... Cessy on the couch in front of the plasma and myself on the internet because I'm a facebook addict. Then we're off to bed and ready for the next WES cycle.

Our week also has a regular pattern:
Monday - Yuck! - Have to cram our Dutch homework when we get back from work and 5 days until next weekend.
Tuesday - Long! - Straight after work, go to Dutch class from 8-10pm, get home 10.30, dinner at 11pm and straight to bed.
Wednesday - Tired! - Because yesterday was a long day.
Thursday - Wahoo!! - Almost weekend and late night shopping today.
Friday - Fab! - The weekend is just around the corner.

Having said that we're still enjoying the novelty of living in Europe. We love that Paris is 4 and a bit hours away, Brussels is just over an hour and everything seems so close. I've realised that coming from Australia, sometimes we suffer from 'Isolation Syndrome'. ie. 'I'm so far from the rest of the world syndrome'. Since moving here, it's been really evident that most Dutch people consider Australia as a dream country, a land with beautiful landscapes and nature, wide open spaces, abundance of resources and relaxed people. Of course, we're biased and despite being far from the rest of the world, Oz is always going to be our Numero Uno.