Soooooooooooo.....

Where to start? I realize that Ive been away for quite some time! I have been trying to focus on graduating the last month, and with great results; I will be able to hand in my LL.M. thesis either today or tomorrow and my supervisor is pretty satisfied with it already so Im pretty excited about graduating!

Also I went on a 3 week trip to Indonesia... we started off in Jakarta, which was pretty horrible because the city might just be the worst place in the entire world. It is dirty, the traffic is insane and there is a lot of poverty. Oh yeah, and I also got robbed day 1 - lost my passport, iPod, mobile phone, camera, and some other stuff. Not a good start. And the Dutch Consulate wasnt very helpful either, anyway... 

Then we took the train to Yogyakarta - on the way there we saw a lot of beautiful landscapes, rice terraces, very very pretty. Yogyakarta was a lot more pleasant than Jakarta - it is a more green, clean and less poor city. We went to see the Borobudur - a huge ancient Buddhist temple.

We then hopped on a flight to Bali (Sanur) where we treated ourselves to a few lazy beachdays. From Bali we took a boat to the Gili Islands, which are three very little islands on the coast of Lombok - and let me tell you, within 1 week we saw both the worst place on earth (Jakarta) to the most beautiful place on earth... We stayed on Gili Trawangan which is the biggest island of the three, and its still extremely small.

On Gili we snorkelled with sea turtles and multicolored fish - we had the best fresh fish at night - experienced the best parties at night... all in all; it was pretty fucking amazing! After 5 days of snorkelling, laying on the beach, eating & partying we went back to Bali for another few days in Ubud, which is somewhat of the cultural centre of Bali; 

 

the finest Balinese culture can be found here. After 2 days of Ubud we had to leave for Jakarta again. Although we pretty much hated the city first time around, it turned into a somewhat love/hate relationship as we discovered the AMAZING shoppingmalls on our last day there; from Topshop to Chanel and Nine West to Armani to Forever 21 - THEY ARE ALL THERE! Unfortunately my credit card was also stolen on the first day in Jakarta so I really had to hold myself back :( So there you have it, a little update of my life ;)