I do not have a year full of travel like I had last year (which was insane, really: South Africa – Antwerp – Berlin – Italy – California – Canada, and I am not even mentioning my trips to Brussels for work. Cray zay!), which is logical because I kinda owe the bank some money due to all my insane holidays of last year. This year is a year of taking it slow, although that is not entirely true seeing the fact that I went to Vietnam in January. Let’s just say the rest of the year is going to be slow, with perhaps a week trip to a sunny place for some relaxation (or in my case: trying to relax) and a few weekends away.

The past few days my boyfriend and I have been away to the lovely city of Newcastle. He gave me a mini cruise for Valentines day (omg so cute!) and so we left from a Dutch city called IJmuiden by boat. We left around 17:00 CET, and arrived at 10:00 GMT. So on the boat you have the evening to spend eating an insanely high priced meal (and this is not the Dutch in me speaking, seriously prices are insane on a cruise ship, even if it is just a little ship and a little cruise), and you can relax a bit, play video games, do bingo, check out a movie in the cinema or go to the casino. There is enough stuff to do (though I missed a swimming pool and/or gym on board, which is pretty basic hotel stuff -especially the gym).

We went for a movie at six o’ clock, which appeared to be an excellent idea. We paid 8,50 euros to go to the cinema and we decided to see a kid friendly movie because we do not have kids but we still enjoy a good kiddy flick: Kung Fu Panda 3 it was. We went downstairs and this Eastern European guy (seriously, everybody that worked there was either Eastern European or Indonesian Asian or something, it was very odd, not trying to sound racist but it was just very strange) showed us where the cinema was. So we sat down, to discover that we were the only ones there! Oh my god, that never happened to me before. Sure it is very quiet in Dutch cinema’s when our national team is playing soccer somewhere, but we have never been all alone in a cinema.

This boat cinema was quite small, as was the screen, and the visual quality was not amazing either, but it was still pretty special to have the whole cinema to ourselves. Not that we fully used that privilege 😉 We were at a childrens movie after all! Weird sidestep, sorry for that, anyway, the movie was lovely, I really like the Kung Fu Panda trilogy, how they always switch the animations to Asian themed side stories et cetera, it is lovely. A good voice cast and pretty loveable characters, though I can also imagine why other people would think it is a bit too farfetched.

Anyway, really enjoyed the movie and this private moment together, at least I did! And then we went for dinner, which was nice but totally overpriced, thank the lord we do not drink wine. We looked for some comfy chairs on the ship, because sitting on our bunk beds in the hut simply did not do it for us, and when we found them we had a little marathon of Modern Family (love that show, will write a blog about it soon!). Then we went back to the room and I fell asleep pretty quickly, probably due to the nice rocking of the boat.

Wanna read more? Tomorrow I will post part II of the mini-cruise to Newcastle!