Nimavenl - Nicole's Random Ramblings

I love how easy it is to copy words, head over to Google Translate, paste the words and find a translation online without having to search through a dictionary to find the words. Having translated to and from languages I know, I understand that Google Translate is not foolproof or always right, however translations tend to make sense, especially when one understands the context of the words one wants to translate. With the recent murder of Özgecan Aslan in Turkey and my desire to learn more about what people write about that, I've been trying to translate Turkish via Google Translate. Whether I translate to Dutch or to English does not seem to matter - I am stumped by sentences that barely make sense to me. I'm used to being able to to translate Arabic and Hebrew with relative ease... I can only hope that Turkish translations will soon be as easy. I learnt some basic Turkish a very, very long time ago from friends. These days, I can still say some swearwords, count to ten and...

In case you read last night's post and are wondering how getting to sleep went... The imaginary little shoulder devil was right. I heard music almost as soon as I'd written the words. The music dulled the voices a little though, so it was more like a blessing in disguise, thankfully. After being unable to sleep last night because the noise from next-door was bugging me, I decided I would try to 'write away' my frustration while listening to some soothing music. It worked, which I'm quite happy about. I usually enjoy being awake in the evening or at night when it's quiet and there are no noises to remind me of how many people live in The Netherlands and how crowded it can feel here. I like city life, people and living in the middle of Europe, however after almost ten years in New Zealand I've grown to appreciate peace and quiet as well. I don't mind having neighbours as most of them are friendly and living in a building full of people makes me f...

Music is playing on my headphones yet the noise behind the music is still bugging me, just a tiny little bit. I can't quite relax, can't get to sleep. My brain keeps thinking "hey, something's up" because I can hear the voices next-door so well. Normally voices heard that clearly are nearby, as in right outside my house. Voices right outside my house means there are people outside my house, people in my garden, people by the door, people who shouldn't be there; strangers who are too close to the house. Hearing noises outside my house signals DANGER danger DANGER and means I need to call the police, need to be sure the doors are locked, need to be sure the windows are closed, need to be ready to scare intruders off, need to be ready to hide, need to... No. Stop. Wait. There is no danger.

Wat een herrie weer... Vuurwerk mag officieel nog niet eens afgestoken worden, overmorgen pas, maar daar lijkt men zich niets van aan te trekken hier in de buurt. Vorige maand al liepen er kinderen over straat met rotjes, mensen te terroriseren en huisdieren expres bang te maken. Ik vind het zo ont-zet-tend asociaal van de ouders dat ze kinderen en tieners met gevaarlijke wapens laten spelen zonder ZEER duidelijke uitleg over wat grappig of leuk is en wat echt levenslang letsel kan veroorzaken voor hunzelf of een ander. "Je bent een rund als je met vuurwerk stunt" lijkt een boodschap te zijn die de jeugd van nu nog nooit gehoord heeft. Die boodschap kwam vroeger vaak genoeg langs rond Oud en Nieuw, samen met plaatjes van mensen die door onverantwoord gebruik van vuurwerk bijvoorbeeld een vinger, een oog of een hand kwijt waren. Vandaag de dag voelt het alsof geen van de rotjochies op straat ook maar nadenkt over wat vuurwerk kan doen en hoeveel schade het kan aanrichten... ...

Woke up today to my (ahum) lovely and (ahum ahum) considerate neighbours drilling into shared concrete walls, banging on shared walls, hammering away and - I can only imagine - generally having a good time pretending to be workers at a construction site instead of people who live inside a building they share with other people who all have their own lives.  It's not a fun way to wake up; being forced awake by things happening outside my own flat yet inside my building. I can't change anything about the banging and noise or the complete disregard my neighbours have for other people, however I can't get away from it either. Not without leaving the entire building, which means waking up, getting dressed and leaving the house to... to.... to try to go to sleep in a park or by the side of the road because sleeping inside my own house is impossible? Do they seriously not realise that their walls are also my walls? That when they start banging away, everyone else in the bu...