Owner: Elianne van der Ploeg
Played by: AlidaMaria
Played by: AlidaMaria
Name: Elianne van der Ploeg
Nickname/Alias: Elly, Elle, El, Liedje Age: 20 Gender: Female Orientation: Heterosexual Race: 2/4 Dutch, 1/4 Jewish, 1/4 Russian Ethnicity: Dutch. Although she prefers to use the term 'citizen of the world' herself. Spoken languages: English, Dutch, German, French, Japanese and Russian Occupation: Elly is currently focused on being an exchange student, and while she is still searching, she has no part time job as of yetPosition: Third year History student at Open Mind University Relationship status: Single and not particularly looking as she tends to be quite nervous around members of the other sex. Crush: None Dwelling place: Elly lives in a rather small apartment provided for by the university, which she shares with five other international students. Living location: Oso |
Family: Elly has a younger sister, Merel (16), to whom Elianne is really close. She is quite close to her mother Eva (41) as well, who is married to her stepfather Erik (53). Elly is almost as close to him as to her mother. Her father Sergei (48) is presently at an unknown location. Her grandparents on her mother's side are a gentle old couple called Heleen (72) and Abraham (71), and they are living in the Netherlands a few blocks away from Eva, Erik and Merel. Finally, her grandmother on her father's side is called Anna (68), and is currently living in a small Russian village near Oblak City.
Appearance: Elly is 170 cm tall and weighs roughly 66 kg. Ever since she became an exchange student, however, she has had some trouble with keeping in shape. Back home in The Netherlands, she'd simply cycle to her university every day to keep fit. Here in Oblak she usually travels by public transport and thus she's currently looking for a sport that might suit her. She keeps her light hazel brown hair long and prefers to put it up in a bun or ponytail when working or studying. Like her younger sister, she's the spitting image of her mother except for her hair, she inherited her hazel locks from Sergei. Unfortunately, she seems to lack her mother's genes concerning chest size. During her pre-university secondary education, she became rather insecure around boys due to this... property she seemed to lack.
Attire: Elianne prefers to keep her clothes simple, comfortable yet elegant if the occasion requires it. You'll often see her wearing hoodies and jeans, but a few skirts and dresses have also made their way into her wardrobe. If she had to choose, Elianne would prefer simple, comfortable clothes over cute clothing. However, she will try her best to dress appropriately to every occasion and regularly pay attention to the way she looks.
Matching colours are quite important to her as are few but matching accessories. She wears a small silver locket no matter where she goes as well as a plain silver ring. She'll wear earrings from time to time but bracelets really aren't her thing.
As to make-up, Elianne is a girl who goes for natural. She wears a bit of mascara and concealer but no blush, eyeshade, lip-gloss, eye-pencil nor eyeliner. If you were to ask her about it, she will most likely reply that it's just too much of a bother and that it takes up too much of her precious time.
Attire: Elianne prefers to keep her clothes simple, comfortable yet elegant if the occasion requires it. You'll often see her wearing hoodies and jeans, but a few skirts and dresses have also made their way into her wardrobe. If she had to choose, Elianne would prefer simple, comfortable clothes over cute clothing. However, she will try her best to dress appropriately to every occasion and regularly pay attention to the way she looks.
Matching colours are quite important to her as are few but matching accessories. She wears a small silver locket no matter where she goes as well as a plain silver ring. She'll wear earrings from time to time but bracelets really aren't her thing.
As to make-up, Elianne is a girl who goes for natural. She wears a bit of mascara and concealer but no blush, eyeshade, lip-gloss, eye-pencil nor eyeliner. If you were to ask her about it, she will most likely reply that it's just too much of a bother and that it takes up too much of her precious time.
|| Personality ||
Elianne is often described as a very blunt girl by her friends, even by Dutch standards. If something has truly sparked her interest, she won't stop pondering, talking, researching and asking anyone who might know more (no matter how inappropriate the questions) until she knows the ins and outs of the subject. She is rather ponderous as well, which often results in her spacing out when thinking about something. When focused, she's pragmatic, analytic and tends to put things into perspective before worrying about them. Elly is very open-minded, which is a good thing on one hand. On the other hand, all the different angles and perspectives she tries to take into account, often make her unable to choose or make up her mind about important things. Due to this, she takes a lot of time to properly phrase her sentences. If directly asked an important question, she might panic and become unable to speak since she doesn't want to give the "wrong" answer or offend anyone.
She's not exactly religious and has a scientific but respectful and open-minded approach to all world-religions. She always tries her hardest to be respectful to all others, regardless their ideas, intelligence or background. She hates to force her ideas onto others and never does so, especially since she's still figuring out what exactly 'her ideas' are. To her it's a natural thing to always attempt to improve oneself and she doesn't take pride in her grades and accomplishments nor does she tend to boast about them.
She has a typically British sense of humour and especially a lot of self-deprecation. She never seems to stop smiling as long as there are others around her. Smiling and joking around are her way of hiding her true emotions and they prevent her from breaking down from panic, fear, sadness or other emotions in public.
El's an outgoing girl (when she isn't pondering about something), as long as she's surrounded by friends or when she has consumed too much alcohol. Unlike most of her fellow students, El would prefer to spend her evening by reading a book over going to a local pub. She can't hold her liquor but she does enjoy drinking sweet cocktails when she goes out with friends. The only time she'll dance is when she's drunk. However, drunkenness combined with her not always spot-on sense of rhythm have often resulted in embarrassing situations in the past. Those experiences have made her reluctant to dance and she has grown to dislike it over time.
El's always happy to help out others when they seem to need a hand. She is a bit naive when it comes to "love" and malevolent people, she hates telling lies and she's a really poor liar. As a result of these characteristics, Elly has been misused multiple times by people she thought to be her friends. She become shier over time, learning not to trust just anyone. Her scientific education helped a lot with that, since she has been taught over and over again to be critical towards any information.
People who just met her, would describe her as a shy young woman who's very polite and obviously intelligent. If asked to describe herself in a few words, her response would most likely be something along these lines: 'Well... I'm a happy person... and yeah also rather curious... In both senses of the word I suppose.' Followed by her signature half-of-a-smile.
|| History ||
Sergei van der Ploeg was of Russian descent but born in the Netherlands. His mother Anna had come to the Netherlands with her family after the Second World War when she was only five years old. She met the Dutchman Stefan, his father, in the hospital where she worked as a nurse. They fell in love, married in the 1960's and had Sergei not long after. They were dog-poor, but they were happy which was what mattered most to them. Sergei grew up to be a handsome fellow who never had trouble attracting women with his slight accent and sweet talk. He had a great sense of humor and was always able to lighten the mood with his silly, but rarely inappropriate jokes. His goal was to earn a large salary, allowing him to let his parents live a lifestyle they never had. His sense of duty and truth however, led him to become a journalist. After a few years he became a beloved columnist with his own assistant, a woman who was a few year younger than him, called Eva de Groot. She was a smart young woman with great ambitions and a cute face. She fell deeply in love with him and after dating for almost a year, had Elianne and married.
Elianne grew up in Groningen, a relatively small city in the northern parts of the Netherlands. For the largest part of her youth, she lived in a small house just outside the old city centre, near a gorgeously park with luscious trees and a large pond. Her mother and father apparently hadn't known one another well enough and though their relationship had been fiery, the passion burned up soon enough.
When Elianne was four years old and her mom was still pregnant with her younger sister Merel, Sergei proclaimed that he wanted to leave them for another, younger woman who he claimed to love more than Eva. He accused her of having changed drastically after becoming a mother. She didn't want Sergei to leave them even when he slowly began having more troubles with alcohol, which worsened after the sudden death of his father. They had a lot of arguments and fights about the alcohol and their love, from time to time resulting in Eva being hit by him.
Elianne's oldest and haziest memories are of her mother and father yelling and screaming at one another. When her father finally left them, her mother was heartbroken and she suffered from depressions for a long time. However, after Merel was born, Eva decided not to give in to the circumstances and be a strong, independent single mom and she struggled to combine her job as a now prominent journalist with motherhood. She raised the children in a combination of Jewish and Christian influences as she had been herself. Eva was born from a Jewish man and a Protestant woman, making herself officially not Jewish, but she still passed on some of the traditions to her daughters. Her parents would often come to babysit the children and Merel and Elianne have always been close to the gentle elderly couple. Eva has always claimed that the tradition of writing the words of the Torah in honey was the first step that turned Elianne into the reading addict she is today.
When Elianne was ten years old, her mother started to feel the need to fill the empty space which their dad had left behind. Eva was a young mother, only twenty five when she had given birth to Merel and she wasn't unattractive. And thus, a new boyfriend entered their lives. Erik was a professor of Political Science at the University of Groningen. He was also a nice and kind man, in his early 30's, who looked after Merel and Elianne as if they were his own daughters. He encouraged Elianne to take up violin classes, take extra classes in foreign languages and always perform as well as possible in her academic studies. At first, Elianne had often neglected her homework to take care of Merel, but due to Erik's encouragement, she began to put all her time and energy into her schoolwork, violin and reading. Erik owned a large house in the city's center and after a few years the family moved in with him. The house had a small personal library in which Erik kept books on all sorts of subjects where Elianne would spent most of her spare time, reading every book she could understand.
During her basisschool time (google Dutch school system or simply ask me c;) she was like most children, except more driven to gather knowledge. Perhaps it was because both her parents had been journalists, possibly Eric's books had wakened her desire to learn, her mixed heritage might play a role or maybe Eva's theory about learning of the sweetness of words at a young age was right. Elianne would often give inappropriate (but right) answers or ask her teachers difficult questions which attested her multi-sided upbringing. She had only one friend around this time, since her curiousness differed greatly from that of the children around her. During the time she spent at the middelbare school (I suppose that would be middle school and high school combined, again, Dutch school system) she was bullied because of her extensive vocabulary and her never-ending questions. This experience made her shyer and more reticent but it never stopped her from being curious about the world.
Only when Elianne was fourteen and Merel ten (after lots of fights and pouting), did her mother start telling them about their father. Besides describing his past, his looks and his character, she also told them that Anna had moved back to her hometown in Russia after Stefan's death. With this information, Elianne has always harboured the wish to find her and perhaps even her father in the village where Anna grew up.
At the middelbare school, Elianne learned some basic French, as well as German and English. She took English and German classes until her exam year, making her German quite good and her English almost on the level of a native speaker. Her accent however is still rather obvious although she tries to cover it up with a British accent. She taught herself some Japanese by an online course, after becoming interested in Haikus. However, the most she would be able to say in Japanese would be "Hi, my name is Elianne and I'm twenty years old. Could you tell me the shortest way to the train station?" She had a clique of six great friends in this period, who were all of very different origins, but they shared their taste in music and they'd often hang out or go to concerts together. Elly still has contact with most of them from time to time.
At the age of eighteen, Elianne finished her pre-university education with flying colours. She continued her education at the University of Utrecht for two years, where she studied history, as the science of history had long fascinated her. One reason for this interest was that it seemed to her and that this science combine a lot different disciplines in one, such as Geography, Political Science, Economic Science, Psychology as well as (of course) History. She participated in yoga lessons, had a part-time job and also enrolled in a course teaching basic Russian during her spare time. Her Russian is still on a very basic level though.
Now that she's in her third year, she's on a one-year exchange program at the Open Mind University in Oblak, Russia. She has lived in the city in a small apartment in Oso since July, but she still isn't quite used to the enormousness of the city and still suffers from homesickness from time to time. She has regular Skype conversations with her old friends, mother, Erik and Merel. Especially her bond with Merel is really tight.
A few likes in general:
1. Cocktails
2. Reading books
3. Learning languages
4. Chocolate, ice cream, muffins and other sweets
5. Meeting people from- and learning about new cultures
6. Conversing with people about historical, sociological or psychological subjects
7. Playing music or listening to it, her musical interests range from classical to rock
A few dislikes in general:
1. Fights
2. Dancing
3. Hangovers
4. Being unable to find an answer to things
5. Disrespectful, self-centred or simply rude people
6. People who complain too much (without good reasons)
7. Being unable to find the right way to phrase something
Allergies, phobias and medical conditions: Elly is allergic to cats, however this hasn't stopped her from taking one in and she's taking medicines daily. She also has a slight sun allergy. Under the Dutch sun, she didn't have any problems whatsoever. The Russian summer sun however, isn't as mild to her skin and she tends to wear sun block and take medicines for that allergy as well.
License: Driver's license and a basic first aid license.
Pets: A fat and grumpy cat named Katja, who has one green and one dark-brown eye.
Themesong:
Themesong:
Het gras van het Noorderplantsoen
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"Ordinary World" by Joy Williams
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