Merry Christmas from Eindhoven!

So, here I am on Day 5 of Holiday Break 2009. I’m in a hotel in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. It’s Christmas Day.

This is the 2nd time in my life I’ve ever spent Christmas away from my family, and the only time I’ve ever spent it by myself. Ironically, it’s also the only White Christmas I’ve ever had – there’s snow everywhere, and when I looked out my window it was falling on the few people ambling through the Square outside the hotel. Very nice.

There’s not much to say about the Netherlands so far… When I arrived at the airport last night, it was practically empty. I ended up splitting a cab with some people to the train station because we just missed the last bus. Almost everything is closed today, and a lot of stuff will be closed tomorrow for St. Stephen’s Day. So the city seems kind of dead. Everything is significantly more expensive than in Spain. Damn. I’m going to go see Avatar later on, assuming it’s in English. There’s a lot more in Dutch here than I remember from my brief trip to Amsterdam, but pretty much everyone speaks at least a little English, so it hasn’t been a huge problem. I’ll have to try the movie 3D, so we’ll see how that goes. Looking it up online, though, it sounds like they’ve changed the technology, so I should actually be OK, despite the whole lack of depth perception thing. Consider it an experiment. Nothing else to do today except sit inside and read the news or wander around in the snow, anyway.

Earlier this week I was in Málaga and Ronda. It rained almost all week. Frustrating. So I didn’t get much of a chance to see the sights of Málaga, but it seems like a nice enough town. The people in the hostel I stayed at were really cool, so I spent a lot of time hanging out there, in the dryness. I was determined to see Ronda, because I only had a little over a day there and didn’t know if I’d ever get a chance to come back, so I braved the cold, rain, and ridiculous wind coming off the gorge to see the sights. So worth it! There will be a lot of trips to write about in January, and a slew of photos to share with them.

So, for now, I want to wish you all a very Merry Christmas!