After taking John to the airport bright and early (or actually dark and early) Saturday morning, Erin returned home to live her last two and half weeks in Amsterdam. The fact that John has now moved back to the U.S. and is never coming back to live in our apartment in Amsterdam was quite sad. Even though Erin is here for another two and a half weeks, things have already changed. Much of regular life here in the Netherlands is over already.
John made it back to Dallas safe and sound Saturday afternoon around 2:30. He enjoyed a pleasant conversation (in English!) with his taxi driver and went over to his parents' house to pick up some clothes he had left there. The commotion started already as John pushed the wrong buttons on the house alarm, didn't shut it off in time, and had to endure the loud sirens and a call from the security company. Everything was settled quickly and easily, so it wasn't too big of a deal.
John figured going out to dinner with his Grandmother was a good idea, not only for company and a nice visit, but also to help him stay awake Saturday evening! Between dinner last night and breakfast this morning, John has already eaten Mexican food twice since his return to Texas!
When John woke up at 2 a.m. last night he decided to watch some TV. It's much safer to do this in the U.S. in the middle of the night; late night TV in Europe is rife with "adult" material. To John's dismay he was confronted with commercials every 10 minutes! In the Netherlands we got so used to watching movies uninterrupted by commercials for at least 30 or 40 minutes at a time. We may never get used to the American commercial phenonmenon. Movies for us will now always be on DVD or in the movie theater!
While John is back to a pleasant work environment on jobs where he knows what to expect, Erin is in a kind of two-week mourning period waiting to move from Amsterdam without any idea of what lies ahead in her life. Well, of course she'll live in Dallas again, but there's no certainty about a job or anything else that will fill up her time and life. It's funny how stressful life is living in a foreign country... and how sad you are when it's time to leave. And even after all the stress and difficulties, we look back over the last 18 months and think what great opportunities we experienced, what fun we had, and what great adventures we took part in! We guess it's these memories that leave the door open for us to want to do something like this again.
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