General – Page 4 – The Anna behind Yannani

Tourist train and 2 lovely dinners.

Yesterday I met my parents in the city together with my boyfriend. The plan of the day was a simple, yet nice one. We would start our day with taking a small tourist buss around the city and then later in the evening they would come over to my apartment for the first time since I moved.

The day started really chill and relaxing. We planned meeting up at 2 pm at Grote Markt in town. When we met up with them they were in the middle of buying tickets to a small tourist bus which would take us around town with an audio guide. We drove along the cannal, through the mini china town, past the lovely central station and through the diamond streets. Almost every place had a small explanation or story attached to it and even I learned a thing or two about the city. It was a really lovely and sunny day too which was a nice change from Tuesday’s weather.

After the mini bus tour we headed into the Cathedral so just see the enterior and and such. It was really huge inside and had lots of lovely paintings and artifacts. Everything we did took about 2 hours.

Then my boyfriend and I headed to the store on our way home to just buy some food for dinner. We had invited my parents over for raclette, so we bought different meats and veggies they could choose from. They arrived at around 8:30, because they had some trouble with the taxi’s.

The evening starter with a very small tour of the apartment, just showing them each room. Then we sat down for some cheese and cracker for starters while we just talked until we eventually moved over to the dinner table where we had set up the raclette maker. As for food we had some sausages, burgers, chicken, mushroom, aubergine, potato’s, beef skewers, a salad, cheese and some bacon. We defiantly did not eat all of it, but we did to my surprise finish the entire aubergine. It was apparently the star of the dinner. The dinner lasted until almost 11:30 pm. Then it was ordering a taxi for my parents and that was the day.

Really nice and relaxing and it was very nice to be able to show my parents where I live. It has always been on the list of things I want my parents to take part of. Other things on that list are wedding and birth of their first grandchild, but that is further down the line. I just hope my dad is strong enough to experience all those things. It does sometimes worries me that he won’t due to his condition, but it was nice crossing one thing off the list.

Fast forward to today. We were planning on going to the botanical gardens, but my dad did not have a really good night, so he was sleeping for the majority during the day. So today I just went a bit of shopping with my mum, she sponsored a new outfit for me. Then it was back to their place until we all headed out to a small and cute restaurant called ‘t Hofke. The restaurant was quite hidden in a small alleyway and it even took my boyfriend 10 min to find it because he was going to meet us there.

The food there was amazing and much better than the dinner place we went to the first night. For starters I had some snail and then some more beef. My boyfriend had a shrimp croquette and Duck. And my parents had salad, snails and beef as well. The people there were really nice and even took a lovely photo of all of us. We sat around and had some lovely conversations until it was time to leave, because my dad was feel quite tired today. They are leaving tomorrow so most of the day is going to go to them traveling and explain more of the central station. I said I would join them to help out with the bags and after that the visit is over.

Now I’m just relaxing again on the sofa while boyfriend is playing some Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

Family meetup came with museum visit and juicy stories.

Today for the first day I met up with my family and I was not expecting the things that they had experienced so far on their travels. Been here less than 24h and already had a run in with the police.

The day started as normal. I woke up, took a shower and picked out what to wear. I had already scheduled with my parents that we would meet up outside of the MAS museum in town at around 1 pm. It was really great seeing them again and it did feel kind of weird heading in to town knowing that I would be meeting them there.

We spent most of our day at the museum. There were in total 10 floors, but we didn’t have the time nor the energy to visit them all. The staff there were really nice and helped us out with the elevator when we needed it. We saw 3 different exbitions; first one about the prehistorian columbian times, second about homes and third one about the WW2. My favourite I would say is the home one. It was unlike anything I have seen before.

The exebeition was about what differnt people associate with the word “home” and what made their them feel like home. There was a small video where they showed differnt living situations and ask the people about their thought. I felt I learned quite a lot which I liked.

After we were done at the musesum we took a taxi back to where my parents are staying and I got to see there hotell room or should I say mini suite. We started looking for places to eat which ended up being quite the challenge because the place needs to have comfortable chairs, preferably padded so that my father can sit comfortably. All the places we looked at had small wooden chairs until we finally found an Italian one which looked nice and wasn’t even that far away from the hotel.

We made our reservation at started getting ready. The place was nice and the people there were also really nice. For food I ordered “Aubergine with tomato sauce and mozarella” for starters and a “Entrecote with veggies and potatos” as my main course. My parents had aspargus as their starter and as their main dish my mum had scampi while my dad had squid.

During the dinner my parents told me a story how they had a run in with the police.

After they arrived yesterday with their boat curise, they headed into town with some of the other people, just to do some sightseeing. On their way home in the cab they came upon a problem. The road that the taxi need to drive to get to the boat was closed off. They tried to look around, but found no solution. Then they asked a police man who was standing near by and he aparently answered very rudly “No you can’t drive here, it’s against the law”. The driver tried to explain that my dad was handicapped and need a direct as possible acces to the boat, but the police man didn’t seem to care.

After a while they found a small road would lead straight to where the boat was, but it was partly on the “no driving” area. The taxi driver takse responability and goes there anyway and when my parents steped out of the taxi to get on th boat they same police mane approached them and this time he was angry. He started yelling at them telling them how they have now broken the law and that he will be speaking to the manager of the taxi driver to issue a punishment. He went on to saying that the cruise boats are suppose to dock next to the fort and not where it was currently staying. My parents told the curise manager to which he responded with “We tried, because we also want to be stationed by the fort, but we weren’t allowed by the people in charge”.

Then today as they were leaving the boat they saw multiple turist busses parked in the so called “No driving” zone.

So there you have it. That was their little run in with the police. It’s hard to determin who was right or wrong in this situation without knowing the full picture, but in my opinion I think the fault lies with multiple people. It was just an intersting story in general.

When the food arrived I was already quite hungry. My food was tasted really good. The aubergine was nice and soft, perhaps a bit too soft for my liking, but not a big deal. The entrecot was really tender. Sadly my parents did not have the same experience. For my mum the tiger prawns were aparently tastless and quite soggy and for my dad the octopus wasn’t directly bad, it just was as tender as he hoped.

After we were done eating we called it a night. I followed them to their place and then proceeded to head home.

I am now just sitting on the couch, writing this post while my boyfriend is playing on the switch. Tomorrow is going to be another full day with my parents and they are even coming over to our place to eat dinner and watch a movie.

Spring Cleaning before family visit

After 2 years I finally did a spring cleaning of my apartment and 7.5h later it was looking like a normal living space 😀

I know it’s been a while since my last post and this might be a weird one to write about, but here we are xD

So my family is visiting us this week. Although I do see them once a year it’s mostly me traveling back to Norway as I have written about in previous posts because my father wasn’t allowed to travel out of the country before last year due to his health condition. Last year they visited England again after almost 2 years, so they planned a trip to come and finally visit me here in Belgium. The started their trip in Amsterdam and are taking a boat cruise down to Antwerp where I live and are arriving this evening.

Therefore I decided to tidy up and clean our apartment, because it was quite messy. We rarely have visitors over so the mess tends to pile up quite a bit after time. So yesterday I woke up at around 12:30 pm and immediately started on the first room aka the kitchen. Most work was to gather all the trash around the apartment and throw it away and doing the dishes. Then it was over to the living room which didn’t take too long. After that it was time to head over to my “gaming” room which really needed a thorough clean because I had tossed a lot of things on top of the spare bed that need to either go in the trash in be put away. Last room was the bedroom which mostly involved laundry tasks aka folding and putting away the clean clothes. My boyfriend was doing the bathroom and the toilet room and after a total of around 7.5h the apartment finally was starting to look half decent.

When we finally called it quits for the day we decided to order out as a small reward. So we ordered kebab. I ordered one with lam, feta and bacon in a regular pita bread and one lam with feta in a Turkish bread. While we ate we just sat in front of the couch and watch some anime and headed to bed to too late afterwards because we were both feeling quite tired after an entire day of cleaning and tidying.

Today I had my last stream before the mini vacay. I decided to try my luck in League of legends ranked and I was actually blessed by riot today. Played total of 6 games where we won 4/6 and after that I won 2 ranked TFT games where I ran the exact same comp

I am really looking forward to meet my parents tomorrow and show them around the town and also the place where I have been living for the past 2 years.

Catching up with family

Yesterday my boyfriend and I went over to his mom’s place together with the brother and his family to eat dinner. We had a really nice time, but some of the conversation topics were quite interesting to say the least xD

We started by heading over to the brother’s place like we always do, because they always drive us. I had a small chat with them, catching up on how their holiday was etc. I told them about starting to go to the gym and my boyfriend talked about which game he has been playing lately. The drive is not that far so it only takes us around 15-20 min.

When we arrived at the mother’s place we said our hellos and gave everyone a hug each. We got there a bit earlier just to hang out before dinner. The brother had bought a couple of mini games such as mini Pool, mini table football, mini basketball, and Mikado from Flying Tiger. It was quite fun, and my boyfriend’s nephew also joined. The nephew even found 2 of the missing pool balls that had gotten stuck inside, which was quite funny because the brother (aka nephew’s father) had also been looking for them but gave up and put it away.

After a couple of hours, the stepdad went out to pick up the grandmother and then we got ready to eat. We had Raclette, and the brother had bought a huge variety of meat. We had sausages, mini burgers, bacon, slices of steak, schnitzels, chicken, and so much more. We could safely say that after dinner, we were all quite full. We had just about enough space for pancakes ^^

During dinner, the mother brought up the fact that she wanted another grandchild and was trying to make jokes about when my boyfriend and I would start trying. We also talked about glow-in-the-dark dildos and waterproof vibrators because apparently the wife of the brother has a store and was trying to talk up her products. Needless to say these topics were a bit awkward and weird, but the family seemed to have fun talking about them xD

We headed home around 8 pm, which I was REALLY happy about because I was already feeling quite tired after all the food and waking up earlier than usual. All in all, despite the convo topics during dinner, I did have a nice time.

I hope everyone else had a lovely weekend and I will see you in the next post ^^

Happy New Year Everyone!

First of all, I’m sorry for not posting here for the past 6 months. I planned to create posts several times and even took the photos for them, but I just totally forgot, and now it’s the new year.

Nothing unusual has happened in recent months. To sum it up: Nathan and I tried Korean BBQ for the first time, I visited the place where Nathan’s dad lives for the first time, Met up with my friend, streamed a lot, attended a work dinner, cut my hair short and explored both the Christmas markets in Antwerp and Brussels.

I think the highlights these past months was Korean BBQ and go bowling up with my friend, because those were both new experiences where I had a lot of fun.

When it comes to the new year I do have some goals or just things that I would want to improve in general:

Create more TikToks, Reels and Youtube video of my content.
Remember to post updates on my blog.
Speak more Dutch to become more comfortable
Be better at applying for jobs
Going back to excersising
Cook more dinners

I will try my best to uphold these goals, but I won’t beat myself over it if there are some things I don’t manage to do before the next year starts. I am quite exctieded and feeel somewhat motivated, but that might just be the New Year vibe talking xD

I hope you all have had a wonderful holiday weither you celebrated or not and I wish you all the best for this new year to come.

BBQ party with the bitches and homies

This weekend met up with some friends for an amazing BBQ party. We had a lovely time with bunch of jokes and wholesome moments. Even some spicy ones xD

The agreed to rent a place on a small campiste in the Netherlands. All I had to do was to get my ass on the right trains. Thankfully this time the distance was shorter, so I only needed to change train one time. My friend picked me up at the station and we head to the place. When we arrived everyone else were already there.

The people I met up with are a group that I have gotten to know online through either games or streaming. I had met some of them before like Nacho_gal, Joouwx and Pinbals. It was my first time meeting my friends Difan and Mr.Moopie. They were really nice ^^

We got to know each other a bit and then we two of us headed to the store to buy the food and drinks. We got some sausages, burgers, bacon and chicken scewers. Mr. Moopie had bought two small grills for our food. We just hung out, ate food and had a lovely time all together.

I had to leave a bit after 8 pm because I needed to catch the train home. I didn’t want to take the very last one in case I would get stuck again xD Three of the people were staying over, but I wanted to take things slow and decided to not do it this time around. My friend Pinbals drove me to the station and I had to run because I only had a couple of minutes. I managed to get on the train with 1 min to spare.

I got home at around 11pm and spent the rest of the night streaming until around 6 am before I headed to bed ^^ It was really nice to finally meet more of my online friends and I’m definitly looking forward till next time.

A huge loose for public transport today!

Today we were heading home from Germany. That shouldn’t be too hard, right? Well I’ll just tell you this. It’s was one of the most annoying and frustrating travel experience I have had.

We woke up really early because our train was planning on leaving at 6:33 am from the neighbour town. Thankfully our friend was able to drive us. By following this route we would be home at aroun 1 pm. We got there with like 10 min to spare and all is well. We sit down on the train, look up at the monitor and it still says that the train is on time and then it starts driving. Around 15 min later we suddenly stop to let a train from the oppisite direction through and then suddenly after that the monitor changes to say that we will be 13 min delayed, which was just the beginning of our annoyance.

We arrive at Frankfurt and walk as fast as we can towards the other platform just in case our train was still there. As we take walk anot the platform we see just see the conductor walk onto the train and the doors shut. The really frustrating part was that the train even stood there for like two minute before driving off. So we look up alternatives and qickly figure that we need to head to an another big city called Köln Messe/Dautz so that we could take a quick train to Köln Hbf. On that route the exact same thing happens. Waiting for opesite train and we miss the exchange. We do manage to get a anoter one quite quick which still gave us a chance to get the direct train from Köln Hbf. We get on, arrive at the station try to run as this time, but constantly gets stopped by other people and MISSED the train AGAIN by a hair!!

At this point we are REALLY frustrated. We don’t like spending time on traveling so the longer it takes the more annoying it gets. Nathan also has to work tomorrow and didn’t want to spend all day on just traveling. We decided to wait 1h for the next direct train instead of taking an earlier one that had 3 different changes. We got something to drink from Starbucks, sat down, relaxed and got our grocerie shopping done since there was nothing better to do.

We get on the train and make it to Brussels with some odd stoppes that weren’t even mentioned on the timetable. When we got of we even realised that we had stopped at Brussels Noord instead of Bruxelles Midi, which was good cus that is closer to home. The we hopped on our last train and even took us one step CLOSER to home than what the other ones that we usually take do. Got of the train and onto the bus. After that it was only a short walk which felt like it took forever. A bit over 2h delayed we were FINALLY home!! We went from 1 pm to 3 pm and we were both just exhausted since we had woken up before 6.

Today was defintly just a big loose when it came to transport. My friend suggested that it the reason might have been becasue Germany is missing insanly amount of people right now, but we learnt that next time if we go by train we should take the on BEFORE our original plan and just basically expect delays and include that into our planning. Now we are just chilling, gaming, updating everything and stuff like that before we will be heading to bed, maybe a bit earlier that usual.

Tomorrow everything goes back to normal. I’m quite excited to be back to streaming and gaming. I have missed that part of the vacay the most. We did a bit of gaming at my friends place, but nothing can compare to using your own pc.

The debut of Brownie Cake

Today was our last day here in Germany. Our plans were escape room and then end it with a nice bbq.

Our day started by walking the dogs. Since it was raining we just walked around town. When we got back we almost left imidietly to the neighbour city.

The place was called “Stage Escape” and our theme was backstage theme. Long story short, our band aka Brownie Cake was about to go on stage, but then we suddenly got locked up by a crazy fan and we have to get out before our support band was finished and we had to go on stage. We had 1 hour

The quickly figured out that we needed a bunch of sheet music. There were like 4 cases with different combinations that all needed to he unlocked and then contained new music. It was really funny experience especially since my friend got hung up on a clock thinking it was important, but got told at the end that it was only to confuse her 🤣 We were almost made it out. We had 1 min overtime.

On our way home we stopped by the store to buy some hair colour and snacks. Then when we got back our friend who cut our hair the other day can back and we started the process of bleaching and colouring my hair. I went for a red colour and decided to have it like “Nezuko” (my favourite anime character) has it basically only doing the ends on the back hair.

Then it was finally time to start the bbq. We grilled some sausages, bacon and steak. We ate it together with some potato salad and variety of sauces. It was tasted really good and its been a while since I had bbq. The dogs also enjoyed it and kept us company even though they mostly sat by the table hoping for some food and sometime they got lucky.

The rest of the night was spent gaming and just hanging out. We are heading home tomorrow at 6 am in the morning. The train tip is 5h30 min which means we will arrive in our city at around noon.

It was been a really great vacation. Got to spend some quality time with my family and also with my friend. We did a lot of fun things, but I’m looking also really looking forward to get back home and be able to game and stream again.

Animagic 2023

Today was the most exciting day, because it was one of the biggest reason why we took this trip. A whole day filled with nothing but anime.

We started our day by heading out at around 10 am since it took us around 1h30 to Animagic. We just enjoyed the ride listening to some music from different anime’s to put us in a perfect mood for the day.

Upon arrival we could already see a bunch of people cosplaying all kinds of characters. Anything from “Demon Slayer”, “Naruto” to even “Genshin Impact”. Some of them the cosplays were really good and you could see all the effort people had put into them.

We spent most of the first 2 hours just walking around seeing what was happening where and what the convention had to offer. At around 2 pm my friend and I decided to split up from Nathan since we were planning on listening to some concerts while Nathan just wanted to walk around. My friend and I went to grab something quick to eat and then headed to the stage room. It was quite a long queue to get it, but thankfully a lot of people were leaving from the previous concert. We sat down and then the shows began. We had to turn put our phones on airplane mode during performances so it wouldn’t interfere with the microphones.

First up was Ito. He was really good and such a fun performance vibe to him. He talked about how happy he was to be back at Animagic. Second preformed was Renoa who is apparently internat known. She had a lot of “Sword art online” songs. She was also really good and she also had full house (aka all seat were taken). For our last performance was my friends favorite and her reason to come here, Yuki. She is not a singer, but a composer who travels together with her singers. She was the last concert of the entire event. It was also her birthday so the crowd sang “Happy Birthday” to her. Which made her even tare up in happiness. It was really sweet.

After the concert it was already 5 pm so we spent the last 2h looking around some more. My friend and I had apparently missed some more merch on the lower floor, so we headed there first. I ended up getting an “Anya” figure form the anime “Spy Family” and Nathan got himself an “Emya” one from the Fate series. I got myself a new bag that was “Harry Potter” themed. Last thing I got was a smaller Nezuko key chain. My friend got herself a figurereen as well figure. When we were all done with out shopping it was almost 7 pm which was when the event ended, so we just headed to the car.

The rest of the day was just spent eating, walking dogs and playing more games. Our vacation is now slowly coming to an end.

From bad waiter to mediocer bowler with sushi power

We had a lot of fun yesterday. We went did some gaming, got a hair cut, ate really good sushi and ended the evening with some bowling.

The started just like the other ones. Wake up and first walk the dogs. When we came back we decided to try to play “Plate Up” with the three of us. It was a really great hit. You and your friends need to run a restaurant. Do everything from making the fun, then serving it while keeping the place semi clean. We split up our responsibilities. I wad the waiter, my friend was the cleaner/second waiter and Nathan was the cook. I might have caused us to loose a couple of time, but all in good fun….right? 😅

Later in the afternoon a friend came over to cut our hairs (me and Nathan’s). I got rid of all my damaged edge and cut it down to a bit longer than shoulder length. Nathan got his really short. It had been at least 6 months since we both had a haircut if not longer. After we were both done we played some more games before we headed out for the evening/ night.

Our first stop was a sushi place where I had been the first time I came to visit. They have really great quality sushi. My friend and I got like 3 dishes to share. Nathan ordered two things for himself since he don’t avocado. They served it all on one plate and it looked really fancy. We were quite hungry since we finished the plate around 10 min later. It was SOO GOOD!! We had a small MacFlurry for dessert.

After the sushi it was time to get some exercise. We headed to the bowling area that wasn’t that far away. Got our fancy shoes on and started our round. We ALL MISSED our first shot, but we were all very rusty. Then the really game started.

Nathan won the first round, followed by my friend and then I got last place. For the second round my friend got first, Nathan second and me third, but both me and Nathan scored a strike each which meant we got a free shot since that was a deal they going on. For our third round we only had around 20 min left so we decided to do a little challenge. We had to try pick random ball and couldn’t have the same ball on both our first and second throw. Nathan got another strike, but I was in the lead for the most part and could potentially won if we got to play it out.

It was really fun. My friend and I were on the same team in the sense that we both wanted Nathan to loose, cuz he is too good. We sat and gestured our hands to like shove the ball to either side so it would fall in the gutter and he would miss. It seemed like it worked a lot of times which made it that more funnier.

We ended around 23:30 and wasn’t home until around midnight. We played some more before heading to bed since today we are heading to Animagic which I’m really excited about. It’s apparently one of the biggest conventions in Germany with that theme. So expect a lot of photos.