Speciaal voor alle thuisblijvers… (Epko, Ireen…… 😉 ) zijn hier weer wat foto’s!
And for all the non-Dutchies: enjoy more photos of Maria’s stay in Yellowknife. We’ve had a great time together. Bas and Judith showed her almost everything there’s to be seen in the Knife! 🙂
By the way… we might be posting a few more pictures tomorrow… because we had some more adventures today (snowshoeing and ski-dooing… but haven’t found time to sort the pictures yet!) 😉
Hi all,
Judith’s mom, Maria, arrived safely in Yellowknife last Friday. We’ve already spent a wonderful weekend together and here are some pictures to show what Maria looks like in a parka 😉 We are looking forward to 10 more days of spending time together. We will keep you posted!
Hello everyone! All is well!
We had a couple of fun weeks. Judith’s friend Jon (they met way back in 1997 during Judith’s high school exchange in London, Ontario) whom she hadn’t seen for more than 10 years, came up to the true North to visit for a week (from Feb. 5th – Feb 12th). Fun times! We had great weather, and of course we went dogsledding (a must for visitors!), Northern Lights watching and hiking up to the Cameron Falls.
But there was more that happened, which we captured in photos. Enjoy the pictures below.
Hi all,
Sorry, it took a while, but here are a few of the last photos we took when Harma was still staying with us and some more that we took over the last few days. Also, we finally rendered the awesome dogsled video that Harma took and that we still had to get online. Talk to you later!
Harma has gone back home to the Netherlands almost two weeks ago. We had such a great time together and it’s strange not having someone else around, but we are both working a lot and enjoying the evenings together. Time is flying. We are already awaiting our next visitor, Jon, our friend from Ottawa, who will arrive February 5th and stay for a week to experience the true North!
Anyway, this is just a short post to share something pretty cool…. Sorry Harma, your dogsledding clip has to wait (it’s a difficult one to edit and get online, apparently because it was a pretty long clip, but we will do it soon, we promise, because it is a cool recording!), but we couldn’t resist posting this link today!
It’s a short clip from the national tv broadcaster CBC News, and Bas is in it!!! Check him out with his colleagues from the Science department. Bas can be spotted in the following minutes: 1.30 / 1.54 / 2.06
Awesome, eh?!
Time for pictures! There’s so much going on these days, it’s hard to keep up with! The usual: work, work, work, gym, dinner, teaching ballroom dance classes (Bas), choir practice (Judith), and the more unusual: the Christmas parade, Bas’ birthday party, celebrating Sinterklaas with friends, the Christmas concerts by Judith’s choir, fun get-togethers with friends, Bas’ work’s Christmas party and more… Unfortunately, sometimes we forgot our camera or didn’t remember to take any pictures, but here are a few highlights of the last couple of weeks.
We are looking forward to Harma’s arrival on Wednesday the 15th. It is going to be great to be able to show her around Yellowknife and surroundings and have her experience the North! We will keep you posted with more pictures and stories, since we’ll probably have a bit more time on our hands to do so. Bas has only one more week of teaching to go and will then have 2 weeks off. Judith takes a couple of days here and there to spend time with Bas and Harma. It will be good!
Click on the photos to enlarge them and read the subtitles.
Don’t worry: we haven’t forgotten about our weblog and we are doing well! There are several reasons why we didn’t post an update for a while now. First of all, last month went by very fast. Since we now both have a fulltime job, our life has definitely become busy and ‘normal’ at the same time. We still have the weekends and evenings to do fun stuff, but sometimes we’re only relaxing after a week of hard work. There aren’t many ‘new things’ that we do or things of which we think are worthy taking a picture of. And sometimes, we just forget our camera. Therefore, here is a small selection of pictures we took over the last couple of weeks.
Guess what… time for more photos! Even though Bas and I are now both spending our weeks working full-time, we still find time to do fun stuff (mostly in the weekends, though!)
Last weekend was Thanksgiving (and we enjoyed our traditional Turkey dinner with our friends and downstairs neighbours Colin and Jason). And this weekend we spent a very relaxing time with Vincent and Jesse (and their puppy Tulip) up at their cabin, a short half-hour drive outside of Yellowknife. A beautiful place. The photos we took say it all!
Oh.. and it snowed on Thursday, it has not been above zero (Celsius), so it stayed. More snow actually is falling at the moment (Sunday night). Winter is here! We like it! 🙂
It’s been a while since we wrote our last blog post. We made some updates with pictures and a bit of text, but no real long stories anymore. In our second year living in Yellowknife things seem to be a bit more “normal” and besides that, both Judith and I are spending a lot of hours at our new jobs.
New Jobs? Explain the plural there!
You heard me correct: new jobs. Besides the two jobs that I am doing (Teacher at Ecole St. Patrick High School and Ballroom Instructor at Bella Dance Academy), Judith started on a new job two weeks ago. At a “Tweetup”, a meetup for people on Twitter in Yellowknife, she met a guy that was working at Kellett Communications in Yellowknife. This company started a few years ago and has currently about 20 employees. They talked about the possibility of Judith doing some freelance work for them and at the end of the Tweetup, Judith promised him to send him a copy of her resume.
After translating her resume, Judith sent it a few days later. In between she also worked a day for Office Compliments, a company that outsources temporary workers to different companies throughout Yellowknife. She got a reply almost instantly, in which they guy from Kellett told her he had forwarded her resume to his boss. Mr. Kellett, the boss of Kellett communications, e-mailed Judith a good two hours later. He regretted that Judith wasn’t looking for a fulltime job, but still wanted to meet for coffee and a talk. Barely having sipped the coffee, he offered her a job when they met, a few days later on a Wednesday. Judith initially declined, but made an appointment two see the office on Friday. After some brief discussions and some encouragement by yours truly, Judith decided that this was actually a huge chance! So she e-mailed on Thursday that she changed her mind and would consider taking the job offer. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow”. At that Friday, when Judith walked in the office and sat down with her current boss, he said: “You thought about it. Can you start on Monday?”. Which basically sums it all up: that Monday Judith started on her new job with Kellett Communications. Her experience working for clients and nailing deadlines made her get a position as “Team leader”. Yup, you heard that well. Amazing eh?
Visitors from The Netherlands
In the second week of Judiths new job, a week in which I had two classes write a test, a third class with a deadline for a Slideshow for marks, a three-way-conference (parent-teacher night), we had Martijn and Renske over for a week. After a tour of three weeks in the Rocky Mountains they had 1 week of exploring Yellowknife, some of the surroundings and being a part of our day-to-day life. It was a great week, which started out driving the Ingraham Trail, hiking to the Cameron Falls. We had great weather that day. Actually, considering we’re as North as we are, we had great weather overall.The week before Renske and Martijn arrived we had some snow and temperatures near and under zero degrees Celsius. We were worried they would miss the fall colours, that they would be forced to be inside most of the time because of rain or snow, but it turned out way better than all that: there were still beautiful fall colours, temperatures averaged out around 10 degrees Celsius and almost everyday proved to be a good day for hikes.
Unfortunately, they had to do most of their hikes by themselves. Judith and I were gone from 7.30am-5.00pm and were only able to do some stuff at night. So that meant going out for dinner (Vietnamese Noodlehouse, Fuego’s), spending time with friends (with Camille and Emma @Vinnie and Jesse’s place) and me taking them to one of my Ballroom classes. Their last night in Yellowknife was a night at Robyn and Travis, with beer, wine, wodka and great food: we actually did a Dutch raclette, with pieces of bison meat and moose burgers. Great fusion for sure! The week flew by and a few hours ago we had to say goodbye to them and we watched their plane take off. But it proved to be a good week for sure!
Judith’s birthday party
The Saturday that Martijn en Renske arrived Judith was throwing a birthday party. Our new place is in a building with many ammenities, one of them being a partyroom, which one can rent for a very modest price. BYOB and potluck was the way to go for us and over the entire night about 35-40 people came out to celebrate Judiths birthday. At 11pm (when we had to leave the partyroom) we went up with Martijn and Renske and two more friends two drink some champagne and we had some more good conversations. After the last two friends left and we were cleaning the last few things, we were surprised when we went to our balcony and saw the Northern Lights. They were amazing! Although they weren’t as sky-filling as we have seen before, they were bright (with all the city lights there they had to be) and were green, pink, purple, even a bit blueish. I have never seen so much colour beside green before, let alone for patches this large! Dancing in fast pace they were a phenomenal spectacle! We told Martijn and Renske how lucky they were and the rest of the week proved we were right: no more lights. But they sure were a nice birthday present for Judith!
Wrapping it up
We were really happy to have friends over this week. Life in the Knife is at times exhausting, but it is fun, rewarding and exciting! And we have more people to come over this year as well! Some long time ‘knifers are a bit jealous: we seem to get a lot more visitors that even travel further to get here! But thos of you who haven’t booked yet (you know who you are), we have two more witnesses that can testify it is totally worth it! Martijn and Renske were already talking about getting back in March, for dogsledding, skidoo-ing and more winter fun!
Tomorrow it is a new day of work for me; catching up, marking tests and presentations, prepping for a new chapter in Science and more classes of Math! Looking forward to it. On Monday a new week awaits us, filled with work and hopefully some more miracles from the North. We’re looking forward to it.
In a next update I will tell more about my adventure at Bella Dance Academy, which allows me to share my passion for Ballroom Dancing with a fast growing group of people. Judith may tell more about her job and hopefully we have seen some more lights, bought a skidoo or did something else that was fantastic!
The summer has gone by fast and our trip back to the Netherlands didn’t turn out the holiday we expected it to be, as most of you probably know…. Therefore, we didn’t have the time and energy to update our blog as much as we would have liked to.
This short blog update is just to let you to know that we are back in the Knife! We flew back to Yellowknife on August 16 and have since then stayed with our awesome friends Robyn and Travis. We are very grateful to have such kind and special people around us. We can move into our new apartment on September 1st, which I am looking forward to. Even though it is nice to stay with friends, it will also be great to have our own place again with all our own stuff.
Please let us know if you would like to have our new postal address, so we can send you a private (email) message.
Anyway, we are very happy to be back in this beautiful town, which really feels like home to us. Bas is very much enjoying his new job. He started teaching math and science last week. I haven’t been bored either: I’ve had some work to do for a couple of Dutch clients and I have been reading and resting a lot.
That’s it for now: we will be back soon with new updates and photos. Take care!