April

Hello everyone,

It's strange how time has flown and dragged the past few months. If I look at how my percept until today, with one unit of time being what last year felt like, it would probably look something like this:

August 16th-19th: 1 month

August 19th-September 9thish:3 months

September 9th-November 18th: 5 months

November 19th-November 25th: 1 month and three seconds at the same time

November 26th-January 1st: 1 month and a few days 

January 2nd-31st: three weeks

February-March: three weeks

April: one week

I'm not sure why this is true, but I have confirmations from other foreign exchange students that this is the case with them too, so either the stress and awesomeness of an exchange has made us all completely bonkers, or our all experiencing it indicates that I'm not insane. Hopefully the latter is true, as I think I'm already at a level of insanity that I'm happy with! 

My mental status aside, I think that I'm supposed to be telling you about what I have been up to this last month-week. 

As already stated, it feels like the past month has gone by really quickly. Mostly everything has been good, certainly with my host family. Due to some things going on with my family back home, it was sometimes kind of stressfull, but now that everything's settled down with them mostly, it's going well. On my side of the pond, I have been somewhat busy I suppose. 

I'm fairly certain that Easter happened this month, which I didn't particularly celebrate. But we did get Friday and Monday off of school, because everyone is Christian here, and that was nice. Yona, who is one of my sisters friends and who I do circus with, was in Amsterdam visiting a cousin, so I got to see him on Easter, which was very nice. It was rather strange to be in Amsterdam with him, which is somewhere completely separate from Eugene in my head, with someone who I associate very strongly with Eugene. So it was somewhat surreal, but I had a good time. 

Two weekends ago, I think, I went to Texel, which is the biggest island in the Netherlands, above Den Helder, with a group of foreign exchange students also in Noord Holland. We saw the island, and went on a shrimping boat which was interesting. They had new nets that roll across the ocean floor instead of digging into everything, which is much better for the environment, so that's good! One of the foreign exchange students lives on Texel, so we stayed at her house. Sunday we went to a seal rescue center, which was interesting. I barely got any sleep though, so was pretty exhausted by the end though. It didn't help really that I was reading The Hunger Games series in Dutch that week, so kept staying up late to finish them. (I read Mockingjay in Dutch in one day!) 

I had orchestra last weekend for the first time since our concert, which was a lot of fun. We're playing Le Sacre du Printemps right now, which is an incredibly difficult piece, so we worked on that most of the time. Because it's the rhythms that are the biggest challenge, everyone in the orchestra has spoken études to practice the rhythms. It's pretty funny, because it's a group of eighty people maybe, with half saying Papapapaaatrrrriiiiil and the other jigidigijigidigyPa pa pa at the top of their lungs simultaneous. 

Now I have May Vacation for the week, which is great! Dutch people have lots of vacations. Yesterday I went with my host parents and one of my host sisters to a sort of walk in the tulip fields. It was a lot of fun, though the weather wasn't too great. We walked for 7,5 km, though it was also possible to walk 15, 20, and 30 km, but I didn't have the right shoes on, so we only did the 7,5. 

Today was Queen's Day, which is a national holiday. Essentially, everyone wears orange and lots of people go to the bigger cities and party and get very drunk. I hung out at home and had a fairly generic, nice day. 

That's about it for now, I need to go to bed now, it's getting very late. 

Hugs to all,

Irene

P.S. I'm fairly certain that my English is really disjointed in this post, sorry! It's partially that I can't check my spelling since the spell check is in Dutch, but mostly it's because I almost never speak English, except while skyping and emailing.