Guus Bosman

Next weekend I'll be going to Frankfurt, to Milena's birthday. Today I (finally) bought a train-ticket. I'm looking forward to it a lot, and I love the fact that I can go by train.

I did some more useful things today: I took some pictures and applied for a new passport.

In the evening I was chatting with Daniël, who now has a webcam in Hungary, which is really great. Daniël forwarded me an e-mail. Sometimes you have to laugh about something, even though in reality it's sad.

When I came back in Haarlem Janneke and Fiona were at Chess -- the first time I saw Fiona in real-life. I saw her before, on a webcam, but that's not the same.

There was beschuit met muisjes. It's a Dutch tradition to serve aniseed sprinkles on a buttered rusk when a child is born. Blue aniseed sprinkles for a boy and pink aniseed sprinkles for a girl.

A nice letter to the Editor in The Economist this week:

"Sir -- you gave both candidates in the 1998 American presidential election -George Bush senior and Michael Dukakis- the collective name "Mr Bushakis". Your cover of January 3rd inspires me to suggest a name for the younger George Bush and Howard Dean, the potential cadidates in the forthcoming election: Mr Bean."

This weekend I went with a group of friends to Center Parcs, where we stayed in a small holiday villa. We were twelve people, and we had a really wonderful time.

It was relaxing, and I had a lot of fun. It was terrific to have so much time to talk to everybody. We've played many boardgames; I especially enjoyed "Koehandel" a lot.

Jean-Paul and André had organized everything very well: thanks!

I've placed some pictures of Center Parcs online. If you'd like a bigger version of some pictures: let me know. There are also two short movies, one of Daniël explaining a game and a short fragment of Saturday's dinner.