where in the world is brittany?

i feel that this is an appropriate blog title considering where i have been in the last month or so. here goes the recap attempt... (can't rotate some images and too lazy to figure it out)


meike and i spent a really fun day in amsterdam. we cruised around and bounced around and went to some cool stores. we stopped at this one place where you eat outside all this cool food. it was such and awesome day and was nice and sunny, so it made it even more perfect.


its cool since it is right on a canal and the food was delicious!


later that evening we ate at an ethiopian restaurant where you need to only eat with your right hand, since the other is for wiping your bum. i had the best thing ever there and it was BANANA beer. trust me my friends it is soooOoooo good. meike and i drank way too much coffee then ran off to meet up with her brother and his band to go watch one republic. yeah that was pretty cool. i decided i would classify them as passionate rock


so at the end of march i found out that my grami who lives in connecticut (yes she is like 100% hawaiian and why she was living there was only because of the trees ;) ) got very sick. she had to be immediately hospitalized and that her chances of living were in credibly slim. so after a very crazy water polo game ( a game which we totally kicked the asses of this professional hungarian team), i hopped on a plane to new york to meet my mom. the amazing meike met me in amsterdam for a coffee in the snow ( yeah snow in march!) before i left. due to my 2 hour flight delay i missed the transportation to get me from new york airport to the hospital my grandmother was in. so some how i had to catch a cab to grand central station and take a train there. but due to the crazy fiasco of customs and 3000 people trying to catch a cab i had to use an alternative method. considering the only currency i had was 30 US dollars and euros i managed to swindle the 'cab driver' to give me a ride with two different currencies! the conversion place was closed and the ATMs were broken.yeah it was great. got to add something to make it interesting.


this is my uncle bob. he is so cute. he is really nice and likes to laugh. he was in a motorcycle acciedent a really long time ago, so thats why he is in a wheelchair. we got him some new glasses when we were there :)



so i spent the time in connecticut in the hospital with my mom, crazy aunt, and my uncle. i have to admit that was probably one of the most intense experiences of my life in soOOoooo many ways. i can't be more happy that i had my mom with me. she was pretty much the most amazing thing. i am glad that i was able to be there during this whole situation. i think i am really okay with it since i KNOW that i am living on my grami. my mom is like her and i am like my mom. i am stoked she helped make us this way. now when i travel i feel like i am doing it for her.

well my grami passed away after about 10 days that i was there. since my grami is a born and raised hawaiian she wanted her ashes spread in the ocean where she grew up. so i jumped on a plane and went from new york to hawaii for about 4 1/2 days. i made the most of it for sure! maxi let me use my old car and my boards so i felt like i never left. and travelling during this was horrible. the second major airlines in hawaii went bankrupt, ATA also went bankrupt, and over 1000 flights a day were getting cancelled from american airlines since their planes weren't up to standards. talk about madness! yeah so a whole bunch of people were getting stranded across american and here i am trying to travel across the entire thing!


this is my mom and i before we paddled out to spread my grami's ashes. it ended up being a really nice day.we got a whole bunch of leis to throw out in the water. aunty lisa came too and that was really nice. she is such a sweetheart and i don't think any of this would have been possible without her.


this is my mom and i paddline out. i am stoked for my mom since she doesn't surf, but was a rockstar on the board.

so i finally took a fun 2 day trek back to the netherlands. *oddly* enough!! everything went smoothly. i made ALL of my connections AND my bags ended up where they were supposed to be even though i changed airlines and everything. i think that was a first for me, EVER! well that was pretty cool.

well i got smacked with jetlag 3 days later. i almost missed one of my water polo games thanks to the fact i slept through all my alarms! i woke up to a call from my team manager an hour before my game and it takes my 2 hours to get there. so after doing the math, i would have missed everything. by some stroke of craziness some random man was driving to the game was in the area! i warmed up with 2 laps then the game began :)

so i got back and i went into to work. i busted my butt for the next week or so and things are going well. i am making some really cool advances, so i am super excited. my boss is pretty amazing, so that is always fun.

i left about 10 days after i got back to go to Catania in Sicily, Italy for the European Championships Final Four. It was so cool. I love sicily. it reminds me so much of hawaii. with the giant volcano and the beaches. man the driving is insanely crazy there. it is pretty hilarious. we ended up getting 4th in the tournament but that is pretty good since it is in the ENTIRE europe. yeah its cool.


this was the pool that we played in. it was pretty crazy with all the fans that were in there. the fans for the catania team were really loud with their drums and stuff like that. it was pretty cool to experience.


this is our team. we played pretty well together. our little goalie did so good. i think she was my favorite to watch play this whole season. she's only 17 now but she has just gotten better and better. i am super excited for her that she will get a lot better.

we stayed in this orange vineyard with like 4 houses that we had to ourselves, ALL of our supporters and the owners. It was so great. there was like a total of 53 people or something who came along. that was awesome. i think it was pretty much every water polo person i ever met in the netherlands.



it was really cool since there was a pool and mt. etna right behind us. the weather was nice the whole time we were there. one day was a little chilly but nothing like the netherlands :)



this is nina. she is so cute. she is a little police officer. she lets me sleep over her house some times and we have lots of fun laughing and silly water polo things. she had to leave a little early since she had to go to work.

so of course a few of us went out one night while we were there. it was soooo hilarious since the place we wanted to go to turned out to be a hard core heavy metal show. so 7 of us piled in this teeny weeny car from one of the mothers and drove around catania. just for the record, sicilians don't speak much english and dont like accents. so we ended up finding this cool bunch of bars in this sqaure. we ended up in this one bar where we are still not sure if it was a gay bar or the italian boys just dress like that ;)

when we got back one of my teammate's brother who was with us jumped in the shallow pool. he ended up cutting his elbow on the bottom and had a huge cut. hahaha :D heel slim!


oh yeah i went up to mt.etna. i got in a big snowfight with my coach it was great. we didnt get to see lava but it was still pretty awesome to see a different kind of volcano. the rocks were different than the ones in hawaii. well makes sense other side of the world and all.


this was on the way up in this sketchy bus. thats iefke in the back and me, marianna (mini), mieke (another one of my rockstar olympian friends)

while we were there one of the days we went to taoromina which is this awesome city. mini and i wanted to stay there but i think they would have noticed.


we went to the greek theater and we were taking silly pictures
oh yeah 2 ice cream cones ;)

mini the model. i told her she should be a reef model. hahaha


no people this isn't hawaii. i know it looks like it



isn't the view gorgeous. i swear it really does look like all the postcards

i got to see beth while i was there. it was so great. she is a bad ass italian speaker now. she got to hang out a bunch. she used her italian to get us some parking spaces with this mafia parking guy it was cool. we saw this old fish market of all this fresh fish with all these old sicilian men screaming random things. the atmosphere was probably exactly like how it was back in those days.


i really like this pic


its soo cool since that is probably how it was like wayy back in the day

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we later went to the place where the cyclops threw rocks in the water after ulysses fooled him. it was pretty cool. this is the next cyclops.

this is micheal ( marianne's brother) he is totally cyclops in this pictures

and michael is such a good photographer he caught the rock that cyclops brittany threw in


this is beth doing something sketchy right before we leave. probably talking to her mafia friends :)


so in the netherlands on the 30 may is queen's day. we happened to be in the airplane at the time of all the festivities but mini and i made sure that we did our best to keep the dutch tradition alive ;)

queen #1



queen #2

woohoo fun times!



oh and since a life as a queen is so hard we fell asleep


we happened to find these eggs with smily faces. wonder how that could have happened...

karin picked my up from the train station at like 4 in the morning. i made some drunk friends on the way back it was cool. they were impressed with my dutch. i have to admit it got a lot better. spend a week with dutchies and it helps ;)

the next day went to meike's. her brother's freakin amazing bad ass band was playing. i was super stoked since i heard some of the songs that they are going on their cd and i vote them as bad ass! yeah so luckily i could make it to one of their shows finally. meike's friend iris happened to be in town too. that was really rad since she is soo cool. man the stories of where she has been and where she is going is pretty awesome. and she is so humble about her successes. she works with the god of volcanology or something. crazy man. anyways we went to joost,meike's bro,'s show and it was so good. it reminded me of the good ol days of punker rocker shows back in hawaii. oh man you definately must see this band live. if you can. to all of my reader fan people. their drummer is so cute. he is super into the music and puts his all into it. well i guess you have to do that when you are the drummer of a nemo band :)

the insanely talented artist meike strikes again. she made this piece for iris. it is so so so good! i almost tried to steal it in the night when we were sleeping with each other


so it was meike's birthday the next day. and we all hung out in the garden and ate some nice apple cake and drank coffee and took excessive amounts of pictures of meike :)


meike's mum aka. my 2nd mom. she is so cute. we danced to valerie by amy winehouse at the place where joost played music


this is some good good food


little brother. i think it is a nice pensive look


oh and meike's daddy. i love him. that is such a good picture of him. i like how him and joost are in such a good mood. they are probably looking at meike picking her nose or something ;)


yeah so stayed at meike's an extra day and hung out and made some awesome jewelry from these beads meike's parents got from the ivory coast. all of them have such character in it. they are all different. they are like little people.

aren't they really cool? my favorite is the stringy looking one. it is my ingenious design of having a reversable necklace




this is my personal concert from joost. so he can play canon in D in this insanely incredible way. man i am so in love with it. i wish everyone could here it. nah but it is really good. sounds good on the electric.

joost, meike and i also played volleyball, soccer and some funny dutch game outside. we had a wonderful laughing fit at the end of it all. man it was so great. it is so much fun to just do silly things with. oh yeah and i kicked joost's ass while we were in the back yard ;)

i finally made my way back to my house and finally saw karin. i lugged back a 4/5 kg bag of clay with me. she's passed out on the papsan chair since it is almost midnight. hope you had fun with you 40 min break while you read my update. i tried to keep it short since we all know that there are a million other silly things in there :)

going to greece in about 3 weeks! woohoo..
oh yeah quick where's britt date..
now - 29 may in the netherlands
29 may - 9 june greece
9 june - 18 july netherlands
19 july - LOVE PARADE in berlin!
18 july - 11 august adventure (maybe in croatia and slovania or france or i dunno..)
11 august -13 august LA
13 aug - ~20 august vegas
~20 august - who the heck knows when NASHVILLE
don't worry everything changes every second with me, but this is pretty much all that i know right now. let me know if you want to rendez-vous somewhere ;)