In my usual way, I'm not at all packed, my room is far from clean, and we're leaving tomorrow at 12 to start the 8 hour drive to Switzerland. Yay procrastination! (And having rehearsal until 8 pm) We'll stay overnight in Germany and be in Grindelwald, Switzerland by Saturday mid-day :) Aaaaaaaaaaaaah! I am way beyond excited at this point- 6 solid days of skiing in the most beautiful area ever, who wouldn't be?! Not to mention that my mom worked/lived in the same town for 1 year when she was 17- pretty cool! (she's quite jealous...) :)
Hmm what's happened recently...
Indoor skiing of course! If I haven't already told you about it, I went indoor skiing with my school in Bottrop, Germany a couple of weeks ago. While it was definitely a wonderful day, I'd still go for the outside skiing any time :) The most surprising thing for me was how many people had never ever skied or snowboarded before. I guess that's to be expected when you live in a country with only a few hills though... To get to the top of the slope (piste in Dutch) again you had to take this lift that was exactly like a moving sidewalk that you find in airports except tilted at a steep angle and covered in a thin sheet of ice. Scary! I only made the lift stop once and that definitely wasn't my fault. (A boy in my class let go of his snowboard, sending it flying into my legs and causing me to end up with one ski on the moving lift and one on the side, resulting in me almost doing the splits.) Skiing all day made me realize just how much I've missed it in the last two ski-free years and made me even more excited for Switzerland :)
Theatre: I think I've written about this before but I'm part of the theatre group from my school and our first performance of The Tempest (translated into Dutch of course) is in two weeks... EEP! But I'm all memorized :) I'm glad I'm able to keep up with theatre here, I still miss the Thespians though of course.
A while ago all of the AFS students had to take this big Dutch test in Utrecht. It was only reading and listening so not too bad (no writing thank goodness). Just super boring- all the stuff was over manuals and insurance and work and blah blah. But I passed!! So that's pretty happy :)
I passed my half-way mark- can't believe how fast it's gone- and I also passed my 6 month mark (I'm trying to stop counting haha). My parents are in the process of making official plans to come visit but as of now they'll be here for the end of April and the beginning of May. I managed to convince them to be here for Koninginnedag (Queen's Day- the biggest holiday in the whole country- April 30) and for Bevrijdingsdag (Liberation day, May 5, celebrated only in a few cities-one of them being Wageningen- biggest party in Wageningen) so that should be fun :) I'm also planning to go with them when they go visit Vera in Germany which makes Vera and I both super happy :)
Last weekend, my (REAL) relatives picked me up in Wageningen and we all drove up to their vacation house in Friesland (the north part of the country). It was great to see them (the last time was when they came to America a couple of years ago) and it was quite weird (but great) to be able to finally speak Dutch with them :) It was one of those times that made me remember why I had to chosen to come to the Netherlands and it just makes me more excited to go home and speak Dutch with my grandpa! My cousin Florian and I spent a lot of time watching the Olympics- especially the speed skating- and cheering for all the Dutch people. Go Sven Kramer!!! (He won gold in the 5000 meter). They took me skating on natural ice (opposed to a skating rink) with Nordic skates (the skates with the really long blades) for my first time and I managed to avoid completely embarrassing myself and didn't fall once, though the little kids did totally outshine me.... On Sunday, we all went to the huge skating rink (Olympic size!) and did some more skating. My cousins are all very good at skating- way faster than I'll ever be! :) It was a wonderful weekend with real family and I'd love to see their house in the summer (when they go windsurfing instead of ice skating haha).
Oh! This is kind of exciting- there's another AFS student at my school now: Abbey from New Zealand. My class loves her accent and now we're the "foreign pair" haha. She doesn't speak Dutch yet but it's fun to translate stuff in class. And I taught her some animals in Dutch today so she'll be speaking Dutch soon enough :)
Seeing as it's now almost midnight and I have some serious packing to do, I'll end here :)
Miss you all!
xxx liefjes
P.S. In English, the title says: "This is for the crazy but sometimes I am (crazy) so be normal."
That's a rough translation that makes more sense than the word-for-word one haha (for example 'doe' means 'do' in English but you wouldn't say 'do normal' in English...). It's a line from a Dutch rap song called Broodje Bakpao. Here's the video (it's supposed to be funny...think along the lines of Flight of the Conchords):
