High School Holland studente Lavinia vertelt je wat zij de afgelopen maand heeft gedaan in Nederland. Zo vertelt ze over haar nieuwe thuis, over de toetsweek en nog veel meer!
My new home
On the 23th of October I finally moved into my new house! My new host family is really sweet: the mother is a really pretty lady who loves flowers, while the father is a very friendly man. I also have a little brother and a sister, who I already knew from school and who is very nice, sweet and really creative, as she does animations and other artistic things. They have welcomed me with open arms and have already done so much for me. Aside from providing me with a new home, they’ve shown me kindness and warmth and they’ve done so much for me and for my room already:
- they’ve retrieved a huge bookcase for me to put all of my books and vocabularies and all the useless things I brought with me;
- they bought me new sheets for my bed;
- they made me a desk out of an unused door, fixed it in place for me and even set up some extra plugs for me to use to charge all of my stuff.
Out of your comfort zone
Last Friday my host family had a birthday party to attend and I was brought along and introduced to the rest of the family. I’ll admit, initially I found it very awkward, because I didn’t know anybody, my Dutch is bad and I was being thrown into a situation completely new for me and I was obviously being pushed out of my comfort zone. But things went surprisingly well. All the family members were extremely nice and welcoming with me and I especially had fun thanks to the fact that my host siblings, their cousins and I ended up playing board games all together. So, as usual, I started off really worried, but the evening turned out to be quite amusing and fun, I learnt a lot of new games which I had never played before and I met some possibly new friends.
Exam week on my Dutch school
But carrying on, this past school week has been test week: a week during which all lessons are cancelled and only tests are done, which implies possibly having days off or having to go to school for just one hour a day. Even though the language is still a problem, I tried taking all the tests that I could (so all of them except for Dutch, because, no matter hard I try, I obviously cannot write an argumentative text in Dutch) and tried my best at each and every one of them.
Getting used to my new home
Last Monday has finally concluded test week (even though Greek still awaits for me next Tuesday) and things have slowly returned to their usual pace: my Dutch is as bad as ever, but things go on somehow and so far I haven’t failed a single test, which makes me incredibly proud of myself. I’m also slowly getting used to my new home and to the new landscapes around me.
A citytrip to Groningen
But moving onto the clue point, today I went on a school trip to Groningen for the University’s Open Day. This morning we all met up near school at 6:45 and from there we started our journey on the bus. To be perfectly honest I had started off quite stressed, as the prospective of being alone the whole day and finding my way around a city all by myself I had never been to before, didn’t seem quite that appealing, but things couldn’t have gone more smoothly: the bus journey has been one of the most fun that I’ve ever had and getting around Groningen turned out to be actually really simple.
Friends and family
Yesterday my host family allowed me to go out in the afternoon with my friend Boaz. As usual, he came to pick me up and, since we had planned on meeting around lunch time, we both brought a packed lunch with us to eat together at some point while on our way to his house. Not far from Raalte he had found this spot with a bench by the river, so we decided to stop there and quietly take our time, but the unimaginable happened; just near the spot where we had stopped to eat was this kind of platform to get across the river. Needless to say, we wasted SO much damn time on that thing, going from one side to the other, bringing our bikes and ourselves back and forth and getting the best possible view of the river: it was beautiful.