Thursday, December 9th, 2010

Nothing particularly exciting happened today, but like I said before, I'm trying to back into the habit of daily blogging, so here's my little tid bit for today.

By the way, did everyone enjoy my little French post yesterday? I have to say, I'm pretty proud of it.

Today, we continued exams. I took the religion one this morning, first thing when I got to school.

OK PAUSE. I need to rant about something here. THE BELGIANS DON'T KNOW HOW TO DRIVE. Ok I got that out there. This is seriously something that is driving me bonkers. Ok first of all, they drive slowly to begin with because it's winter. But there's no ice on the roads. Not even snow. In fact, this morning it was above zero Celsius which means that it's not even freezing temperature. So the roads were completely clear. But they were still crawling. And then, oh baby, it started snowing. My host mom immediately dropped speed down to about 40 kilometers per hour. For those of you back in the States, that's about 25 mph. OH MY GOD. Nobody ever drives that speed in the States. Ever. EVER. I swear I was going to tear my hair out. It took everything in me to keep from yelling "ALLER!!".

If you couldn't tell, I'm a little stressed lately.

It has also hit me recently that I am actually living in Belgium. Obviously I already knew that, but yesterday when I was making cookies, I had my first conscious moment where I felt truly at home in my host house. The good part about this, I really finally am almost completely comfortable where I am. I truly feel at home here, and I am really no longer intimidated by my host dad. That's an accomplishment, trust me. The bad part? I leave in less than a month. Yessir, in a few weeks it will be time to change families. That boggles my mind. My exchange is creeping along, but at the same time, it's going so fast. Next weekend, I will have been here four months. Crazy!! But then the other thing I was thinking about was that it's probably a really good thing that I am leaving right as I am feeling homey. A good thing? she says. Why, she's crazy! What is good about that? Well think about it. How difficult was it for me to leave my house? How much time did I spend missing my family and being sad? Well if I stayed in the same house all year, it would become my home. And then I would have to do all of that over again when I leave in August. So I guess it's good not to get too attached to one place. Our heart can only be pulled in so many directions.

I got totally off topic here. So about that religion exam... I'm actually pretty confident with it. I answered all the questions that were necessary and I knew what I was talking about for almost all of them. They were all short answer, so by the end of it, I had written three pages worth of French. Which, a couple months ago I would have thought an impossible feat. But I am proud of myself and of my work.

On the downside, I received zero out of ten on my last geography test. And that, boys and girls, is why Emma Clark opted out of the geography exam.

Apparently I'm going to a Chinese restaurant this weekend.

My cookies were a big hit today.

I'm exhausted and I need to go to bed.

I'm ranting now and this is getting extremely random.

Bonne nuit!

It's Really Freaking Cold Here

It's Thursday. And it's like negative seven degrees Celsius. And granted, it gets much colder than that in Ohio, but I don't know what it is. It just feels so much colder here. Talia doesn't think she's going to make it through the winter. But she will. And so will I. If nobody else, Eduardo will. He's loving the snow. He was outside having snowball fights today :)

Yesterday, I went to school as usual, but I have the same teacher for all four hours on Wednesdays. And she wasn't there. So I had study hall all day yesterday. So I wrote out a Christmas shopping list and I also wrote out my bucket list. It's about two pages front and back and it's not done. Let's just say I want to do a lot with my life. Anyways, after school, my host mom picked up me and Talia and took us to the train station in Waremme where we caught a train to Liège, got sandwiches from Point Chaud, and met up with the majority of the rest of the exchange students to get a train to Welkenraedt, where ALL the exchange students from our district were getting together, along with the Rotary guys in charge. We all got on a bus from there and went to GERMANY for the Marché de Noël in Aachen. But like I said, it was really cold. I was wearing a pair of really thick lined leggings, my knit shorts under a skirt, socks, boots, a long sleeved shirt, a really heavy sweater, a scarf, three pairs of gloves, my new lumberjack hat, and my big coat and I was alright, but I was definitely shivering. Talia was wearing even more. Four sweaters, I think we finally counted. I lent my earmuffs to Hadley because she had no hat. But as we got on the bus, the Rotary people gave each of us Santa hats! Except they weren't the big fluffy ones that we are used to in the States. Regardless, they were pretty cool. The girls got ones with white braids coming out of them, and the boys got ones without those, but the puff balls on the end of the hats had jingle bells on them.

It took us about a half hour to get to Aachen from Welkenraedt. Once we got there, we all walked into the center of the town together. Germany is beautiful. There was all kinds of cool art on the streets, fountains and such. Plus everything was decorated for Christmas and it was just too cute! And, on my things I love about Europe, there was street music. So you walked through the streets and there was just music playing. It was wonderful. We all gathered and they told us we had about two hours and then we were meeting back up again. So we split off and I went with Hadley and Brittany and Oakley and Alexanne and we walked through the whole thing, and even found a Starbucks! I got a gingerbread latte, which I said in German, and it was great. I missed Starbucks! After that, we walked through it all again and this time actually looked to buy things. I found a few really nice gifts, and so did the others. We talked in English the whole time, though, because nobody spoke French, as we were in Germany. Duh!

After two hours, we met up with the other exchange students. This was around 5 30pm. And it was already dark. We each were given a ticket that we could redeem for either hot wine or hot chocolate. I got the hot wine because the last time I had tried it I really liked it. But I have to say, hot wine is definitely better in Belgium. But it was totally worth it because we got to keep the mugs and they were so cute! They were little boots with German writing on them. I like it :) After drinking our hot drinks and some people getting some food, we all piled back on the bus and drove the half hour back to Welkenraedt. There, the Rotary people gave us a each a bag full of marzipan candies from Saint Nicholas, since that is coming up. Everyone in Belgium is celebrating Saint Nicholas and after Monday, which is the official Saint Nicholas day, we start getting ready for Christmas.

So all the exchange students bombarded the train station and took over the next train to Liège. Which, unfortunately for the people already on it, was a small train. Once we got there, Talia and I were super lucky and our next train pulled up on the same tracks just two minutes later. Talia called her host mom, and since it was snowing, we worked it out so that I could just sleep at Talia's. That is one thing that is very interesting. The Belgians really freak out about driving in the snow. They find it incredibly dangerous and they won't go out if it's snowing. There was probably two inches of snow on the ground, if that, and to them, it was bad enough that I couldn't go back to my house. Which I didn't mind at all! We got back to Talia's, ate pasta, and talked with her host sister, Géraldine. Then we ate some chocolate, went up to her room, had a really deep conversation, and went to bed. We got up this morning, really hoping for a snow day, since her host brother had gotten off of university just a couple days before for the inch of snow that was on the ground, but alas, the buses were running and we had to go to school. It was very cold out though, and Talia's host mom said it was a record cold in Belgium since 1930 I believe. Wow.

So I went through a normal day of school, got a bunch of stuff done at home, like organization and post card writing, didn't go to dance because of the snow, and tomorrow I'm going back to the Village de Noël in Liège with Alexanne and Hadley :) More Christmas shopping! We're going to have a good time, I'm sure!

Yup, that's all for tonight. I'm very tired. It's bed time. Bonne nuit!