Personal

Bas Geertsema

The weather here wasn’t that good, but it could be worse. Heavy weather now in Holland: big storms blowing away trucks from the roads! I hope everybody survived and is now reading this while enjoying a nice hot cup of coffee or tea. If you’re not, maybe you should. I would. One of the things I miss the most from back home? Good proper D.E. coffee. As most coffee here is sweet instant-coffee, it tastes just like that.

Bas Geertsema

Hi everybody! Greetings from a cloudy, rainy and cold Vietnam. That is right, after weeks of no rain and sunshine the weather has finally turned around. A little bit surprised and unprepared I was. Having only a single long pair of jeans and one sweater. But it seems this will be the weather for the next days, and as I’m traveling up north it will be even colder. Although cold ofcourse will still be about 20 degrees.

Bas Geertsema

!!Happy New Year to everybody!! At least for the ones that did celebrate it. Since the vietnamese people use a different calendar they celebrate newyear on next 19 feb! But that didn’t stop them from organising a big newyear party anyway. So I witnessed the ending of 2006 and the birth of 2007 this year without oliebollen, but with loempia’s. No oudejaarsconference, but a show of traditional vietnamese dances and music.

Bas Geertsema

I hope everybody had a nice christmas! My christmas this year was a very quiet one. As you maybe know, most people Cambodia are buddhists. So this means that christmas is not really celebrated here. Occassionaly you’ll see a tree with lights in it, or a kid wearing a santa-hat. But that’s about it, and most of it are for the tourists anyway. So I spent my christmas days doing sightseeing in the surroundings of Battambang,_ _the 2nd biggest city in Cambodia.

Bas Geertsema

Hi everyone! Here a short message from Phnom-Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Sihanoukville, the beach-town in the south of Cambodia, turned out to be a really nice place, so I stayed there for five days together with an thai/cambodian girl that I met on the boat. After that I went 100 km eastwards to Kampot, where I did some sightseeing and travelled to an abandoned french colonial town (with hotel/casino/church) in Bokor national park.