Life is good...

... When the weather is warm and you've just had a nice cold beer to cool down.

The Ragweek of 2007 is now a thing of the past. I suppose I gave it negligable if non-existant coverage in my exciting and infrequently updated blog (the sudden mood changes of which no doubt make me appear like a manic-depressive on steroids), but I was in charge of the Ragweek organisation committee of Tafelstraat, so I was rather closely involved.
For those unfamiliar with the tradition, the Ragweek is a one-week a year time when students at a university do stuff to raise money for charity (over here it's always one foreign and one local charity). At Tafelstraat we, according to the custom, sell coffee/tea and vlaai (local type of cake/what the Americans call pie). This year we also organised a night about Ghanese culture (one of the charities is a Dutch organisation that has 'adopted' a Ghanese village and aims to improve living standards there, which seems to be going well) where an exchange student who had been to Ghana told about her experiences and used photographs to demonstrate Ghanese culture. Apart from Dutch students, there were also German, Spanish, American and Czech people present, so it was a nicely multi-national mix with which we could discuss differences not just between continents but also between countries.
At the end of the week, we had collected a grand total of €400,-, a nice sum. The total collected was €15.000,-, half of which donated by the university.

On a different subject altogether, there is a webcam located in a Dutch Peregrine falcon's nest (yes we have speedlimit breaking birds in our country, too, even though we don't have an Autobahn). The little falcons left their eggs on 15 April, and all their activities can be followed HERE. However, tragedy struck, and on the 23rd a rival female Peregrine chased the mother out of the nest, and so since then they have not been kept warm. Apparently this isn't a problem, and in fact it makes the whole thing more watchable, because the chicks are actually visible now, rather than being obscured from view by the mother sitting on top of them. The father falcon is still feeding them and so hopes are that they'll make it. It's interesting to watch for a little while, do you need some luck; when I tuned in today the dad just arrived to feed them which was no doubt one of the most exciting events of the day.