You all know how fond I am of a list...

...so here's a few I've been keeping.

Things I missed about home (other than family and friends of course):

• Fruchocs
• Tim tams
• Allen’s lollies (they're a better kind of chewy than the Haribo gummy bear type lollies that abound in Europe)
• The buzz of a newsroom, after work drinks, work freebies and events

• Heading out before midnight!
• Wine tours and nice wine (I think I’d forgotten the difference and for a while there was subsisting on 3 euro bottles and exclaiming that everything was just “very drinkable”)
• A nice shower in a clean bathroom
• A proper mattress and pillow... on a a bed bigger than a kiddy bunk
• Windows with bug screens
• Fan heaters
• A couch!! In a living room
• Watching AFL
• My car (but only every now and again - like when it was freezing or raining, although having said that you didn't need to scrape frost off a bike's windscreen and it always started in the morning!)
• Sea  water and the sound of the beach (even in winter)
• Living 5 minutes from my boyfriend
• Cheaper public transport
• Eavesdropping! (although my Dutch reached a level just before I left where I could listen in on the odd conversation going on around me)
• Confidence in brand names and being able to ask for advice when shopping
• Philli cheese in blocks (they only sell it in tubs in Maastricht)
• Copperpot Houmus (I finally found a brand of houmus mildly as good in Jumbo and like 3 weeks later they discontinued it!!!)
• Haighs (clearly - within days of getting back to Adelaide I went in and bought a bag full of all my favourite flavoured chocolates)
• Waking up and its 30C (instead of minus something degrees)
• Swish dancing (although there was an abundance of 90s music played at random Dutch pubs its just wasn't the same)
• Beer weather
• Getting dressed up (nobody does that in Maastricth, the hoodie is the official uniform of most evenings)

Things I miss about Maas:

• Stroppwaffels and stroopwafel mcflurries (although I've found a place in the central markets that sells "syrup wafels" imported from the Netherlands and I'm going to recreate a strropwafel McFluffy by ordering a caramel sundae and adding the crushed biscuits)
• Gouda cheese from the supermarket (it was the cheapest brand, like Balck&Gold here and it was the smoothest, tastiest, meltiest cheese ever)
• The crazy gusthouse cleaning lady yelling “CLEANING!” as she comes in at 8am on a Thursday morning
• Dutch ads (they’re hilarious even if you can't understand them, in fact... they're probably hilarious because you can't understand them)
• Dutch subtitles (good for practice)
• My roomies
• Sitting on the Vrijtof drinking beers in the sun, eating bitterballen ... or sitting on Emma's balcony drinking Pimms eating chips!
• Biking (most of the time - I really need to get my bike sorted here but its a kind of mountain bike thing and I miss the nice bikes with pretty handle bars!)
• Being able to just wander down the corridor and be at a friend’s place
• Living in a TRULY 20 minute city, which Adelaide no longer is
• Having a common room at uni where people play musical intstruments and stage plays with bananas as guns... just because
• Studying crazy stuff like Theorising Terrorism and analysing Aqua songs for assignments
• Being surrounded by well-informed people who debate politics over pizza
• My new friends :'(
• Being able to pop over to another country for the weekend!
• Authentic pubs that are small, with dark wood and cool bartenders (not the huge modern things we have here which can get a bit sterile)
• Communist dinners (the sharing of ingredients among guesthousers)
• Cycling as a posse on a night out
• The choice of beer (Belgian, Dutch, German ... fruit, white, dark...)

Things I don’t miss about Maas:

• Cobble stones and resultant bingo wings (this one's for you Katie!)
• Cycling up the steep cobble street out of the city (I will never forget the dread of that street as long as I live)
• Getting letters in languages I can’t understand!
• The banking systemSchizophrenic weather (13C one day, 30C the next, raining the day after)
• Being able to hear a pin drop from everywhere in our tiny flat
• The teeny tiny bathroom and crappy shower, and generally no fans in European bathrooms
• Worrying one of the little neighbourhood punks is going to puke in the guesthouse entrance again
• Getting soaked on the bike
• The dread of being ONE minute late for a class at UCM
• Lack of wine choices in Jumbo
• Working out time differences
• Television shows being interrupted for adbreaks at the stupidest times (like mid sentence) or the intervals at the cinema!

Things I didn’t expect back home

• Stripper heels and fur-trimmed vests are fashionable now
• Lunch for 2 cost $62!!
• Stamps are now 60c
• Bus route names have changed but the routes are still the same!
• How much I would mind not having a car
• How much I would be bothered by not having a job for a while
• How unenthused I would be by uni back home
• How much I would appreciate having a dishwasher again
• The sunny winter weather (I think I luckily missed the worst of the winter here)
• To feel as though I've been back for SO long when I've only been back a month at this stage
• The odd feeling like the whole exchange almost didn't happen - its really hard to get my head around the fact that I was there and now I'm here but other people are still there... or elsewhere ... if that makes any sense!