Hiiii

I keep procrastinating writing my next blog, its terrible I know. So what have I been up to since I last posted? Well i've been speaking french a lot and i'm really happy with how its coming along! I think I had my first french dream the other night, not fully in french but I'm pretty sure certain parts were. That was pretty cool. I really enjoy speaking french and speaking to other people but sometimes its hard to start up a conversation, especially when other people are already talking and having conversations because I don't just want to say something totally random. But yeah i'm really starting to understand people better and I feel like I can speak it better as well. School is still pretty hard but I've been trying to copy peoples notes and try to do some homework I guess. Math is ridiculous here and I really don't like it, or understand it at all. I'm not sure if its just terrible teaching or I just really don't understand it. For me I really really prefer the teachers in Canada and the material we learn. But oh well, I will just stick it out! After this week we have holidays for one week and then we go back to school for 3 days and then another 6 days of holiday after that. So this weekend I will be going to Paris which I am sooo excited about! We are going to the eiffel tower, the arc de triumph, the louvre, Versailles, The Hard Rock Cafe for lunch, Paris by Car at night, and a few other museums. I have to decide which paintings I would like to see in the louvre and the other museums because of course we won 't be able to spend all day in them. I think there are around 50 other exchange students going on the trip.

But yeah, I haven't been doing too too much lately! Just going to school and hanging out with friends on the weekend. Two weekends ago my friend, Janelle, slept over at my house on Friday night and then on Saturday night we took a train to a different town in Belgium and slept over at our other friends house. It was a pretty fun weekend! Last weekend I had plans with my Rotary councellor and his family to go to there house in the Ardennes, which is a farming area with more forests than in Northern Belgium and nice rolling hills. It was really pretty there and I took quite a few pictures. The house was actually my councellors wife's parents house and she had grown up there. The house was an old house but it was big and refurnished so it was very nice! On Saturday we went to the tiny country of Luxembourg. It was my first time being there and it was really pretty! It was a cold day but I had a scarf and gloves so it wasn't that bad. It took only about an hour to drive there. When we got there we just walked around for a little while and did a little bit of shopping. We also saw a rotary booth fundraising for "End Polio Now" so we stopped and had a glass of wine there. Afterwards we ate lunch and it was really delicious. I had pasta and so did everyone else. I also found out at lunch that I won't be going to my second host family anymore and instead will be changing in January to go to my third host family and then after Easter holidays I will be coming back to the family i'm at right now. That was a bit of a surprise for me but I don't mind it. Anyways, after lunch we went to a modern arts museum in Luxembourg. It was very interesting and I liked most of the art. There was one piece of art that I thought was really shocking because I didn't know any information about it before. It was a neon sign that said Arbeit Macht Frei and it had Mickey Mouse beside it so it looked like he was saying it. My councellor told me that the Arbeit Macht Frei was what was above the doors at the concentration camps for the jews and it means something about working for freedom or something I don't know exactly so the jewish people thought that they would work throughout the war and then afterwards they would have freedom but it was a lie as we all know because most of those people in the concentration camps were killed. The artist has Mickey Mouse saying the phrase because Walt Disney was a Nazi as well and Disney stories aren't true either, they are stories. So yeah, the saying on the doors of the concentration camp wasn't true and either are Disney stories. I thought that was really intriguing when I learned the information. The museum was really cool and we stayed there for about 2 hours. The next day I decided that I would make pancakes for the family and they really really liked them! I was scared they wouldn't turn out very good but they did so I was pretty happy. I had maple syrup as well and made fresh whipped cream. It was fun to see the families reaction to my pancakes because they really liked them!

2 Months

Hi!

I've been here for two months already! That is so crazy! Time is going by really fast and I think its only gonna start going by faster and faster. I have approximately nine months left here before I come back to Canada. In two months my french has really improved I think! I can have real conversations now and I feel really good about it! I can understand so much better than before. When I first got here I felt like I could speak better than I could understand, but now if I concentrate I can understand pretty much everything people say to me! It makes me really happy, but i've had a couple instances where people have lowered my confidence about it but thats okay, i'm just happy with how much its come along. I hope by next month I will be able to communicate very well and hopefully understand school a l

ot better. School is very weird for me right now because I don 't really understand the teachers and I don't know whether they expect me to do all the homework or not. The problem is I never know what the homework is! No one really tells me what it is so I don't know until the day of that we actually had something for homework usually. I haven't gotten in trouble but it's weird because I kind of do want to learn stuff and maybe I could attempt the homework. Last week for school the sixiemes which are the 12th graders had a week off of school to go on a retreat. There was probably 10 different options you could have done with the school or you could've done a personal project. Some of the choices were things like helping handicapped people, helping out at a school with young children, helping old people, helping homeless people around brussels, etc. My option wasn't really like that though. I didn't have to work with the public, and I was chosen for the option "Marcher" which means to walk in french. It was my first choice because a lot of people told me it would be fun for me and help me meet friends and improve my french so I took their advice and chose that option. On our first day about 15 of us and two teachers took a train to a place called Eupen, whic

h is in Belgium but is right by the German and Netherlands border. On our first day we walked 18 km through a MARSH. I thought it was going to be a nice walk through a forest but it wasn't! Pretty much the whole way was marsh will tall grass. Sometimes there was a boardwalk to walk on but when there wasn't you had to walk through the water. I only had running shoes on so my feet were soaked and my white shoes are now black. One of the teachers actually sunk up to her thigh in mud too on the first day. The second day wasn't exactly the same terrain but it was still quite muddy and wet. On the second day we walked 25 km. It was kind of tiring but it was just really difficult for me because I was very sick. On wednesday we were supposed to walk 27 km but I knew that I wouldn't be able to do it because I was really sick and on tuesday night I just slept the whole time and couldn't participate in the activities. So on Wednesday I took the train back to Brussels and slept the whole day. I slept a lot on Thursday as well and I felt much better so I could go to school on Friday. On Friday we only had courses in the afternoon because all morning we just talked about the retreat. It was a pretty interesting experience but i'm not sure that I would want to do the exact same thing again!

Last weekend I had a day planned with rotary on Saturday and plans with a friend on Friday after school. The weekend was a lot of fun! On Friday I met up

with Pooja, a belgian girl who was in Vancouver last year with rotary. I met her at the orientation weekend in Prince George with all the other exchange students. She is living in Brussels now going to fashion designing school and she has a little apartment with another girl. I was actually supposed to meet her and her friend so I could model one of her friends clothes that she made but when I got there her friend said I wasn't tall enough. Oh well. Afterwards we just talked and then went and ate something. It was nice to see her again and talk to her about Belgium and also Canada.

On Saturday I had to wake up pretty early because I had to take a train at 7:40 to go to a city called Namur for my Rotary day. It was a day organize

d for all the exchange students in Belgium so there was a lot of people there! Probably close to 200! The train we took to Namur was actually going all the way to Switzerland and on the board where it says all the stops it said all the names of the little towns I went through almost everyday when I was in Switzerland like Pfaffikon, Thalwil, and Zurich. It made me really happy! I miss Switzerland and I hope i'll be able to go back there sometime! When we got to Namur we just met everyone at the train station and then walked to the Wallonie (French speaking part of Belgium) Parliament. Sitting in the parliament was a bit boring for me because I couldn't hear or see anything because I was way at the back but it was okay. After that we just had a drink and then we took a group picture. After we ate lunch we all got to go on a boat that went down the river. It was a really nice hot day so it was really nice to go on the boat. The boat ride was probably around 2 hours and we got to see a lot of really nice houses and also a really cool chateau. After all the rotary activities were done a lot of exchange students went back to Brussels to hang out. I went out for dinner with a my friends from mexico, brazil, colombia, canada, and the US to a mexican restaurant and it was really nice! I miss eating mexican food in Canada even though its not real mexican food. They were trying to teach me spanish but I wasn't for good at it. I learned one or two phrases though! But yeah it was a very fun day hanging out with all the exchange students! I always look forward to those kinds of days!

Thanks for reading!

Brugges

Bonjour!

So this will be a blog that I should've written about 2 weeks ago, but I guess i'll write it now. Better late than never! So two weeks ago I was staying with my host sisters dad with her from Friday to Tuesday. His house was outside Brussels by about 15 minutes and it was close to another city called Waterloo as well. Her dad's girlfriend was staying there too on the weekend so I got to meet her and she was very nice. I talked to them a lot about Canada and the things I do there and I enjoyed talking in French. The first night I was there we ate really good spaghetti and after we watched Survivor. The show wasn't called survivor but it was the exact same, just French edition with french people. It reminded me of back home besides the fact that I couldn't really understand much. I find it a lot harder to understand shows on tv because people aren't talking directly to me so its hard to pay attention. On Saturday we ate breakfast and then just hung around the house and then after lunch we went shopping in Waterloo. I didn't buy anything because i'm trying to wait to buy any more close until the sales start after Christmas. Its really tempting to buy things here all the time because its so easy to just go downtown and go shopping. But I really want to not spend too much money on clothes so I won't buy anymore for a while! After the day of shopping I was pretty tired and we didn't do much after dinner. Sunday we had plans to go to a different city called Brugges. I was really excited about going there because before I came to Belgium I had read about it in my book and it looked really nice. Brugges is in the Flemish speaking part of Belgium and it is known as the Venice of the North. It is a really nice city with canals flowing through it and there are always boat tours going down the canals. The Flemish people don't really like the French speaking part of Belgium I guess so they told me not to speak French there. I took a lot of pictures of Brugges and I liked that city a lot! The architecture was really different there and there were so many horse and buggies going around the cobble stone streets and I just thought it was really cool! While we were walking around Brugges just looking at different things we stopped at a little cafe/bar that looked over the canal and had a beer. I tried a special beer from Brugges that came in a really cool glass. It was pretty good and we also ate some caramel that we had bought at a chocolate store. The caramel was so good! I think everything sweet is a lot better here than in Canada. I'm really getting addicted to the chocolate here! Belgian people eat it ALL the time! Everyone at school always is just eating chocolate bars for a snack but it's weird because no one is fat! I'm just hoping my body will turn Belgian here and i'll be able to eat all the chocolate I want! The drive to Brugges took probably 1.5 hours and it was a pretty nice drive I think. We passed huge windmills that were pretty amazing to see up close! They are sooo big. I remember the first thing I saw when I flew into Amsterdam were windmills and of course they looked tiny from the plane but yeah, up close they are enormous. That weekend I was also working on a presentation about Canada for two English classes. I finished the presentation on Monday and presented it two times on Thursday. The presentation ended up taking me 2 hours because they teacher asked me a lot of questions and we had a discussion at the end of it with the classes. I think the presentation went pretty well! I was glad it was in English then, but soon i'll have to make the same presentation but in French for my Rotary club. Oh, and on Wednesdays I usually meet up with my exchange student friends from around Belgium in Brussels and we just walk around and stuff, and this wednesday I ended up meeting up with another Canadian girl from Regina. We walked around and tried to find a cheap sandwich shop because we were both starving and then after we just walked around some more. It was a really funny day though because a bunch of other exchange students said they couldn't come to Brussels that Wednesday because their parents told them it was too dangerous. I was pretty confused because I hadn't heard of anything being dangerous in Brussels that day! Apparently there was supposed to be a huge riot that day though in Brussels about expanding Europe or something. The whole day Janelle and I were looking for the rioters but we didn't see anyone that could've been dangerous. We saw so many police men on horses riding around but they weren't even doing anything! It was really funny! Everytime we heard police sirens we would always yell "rioters!" and we would look around but there would always be no one. Eventually we saw a few people wearing the same blue jackets so we assumed they were the rioters but they weren't dangerous or anything and they weren't doing anything. It was a very weird day!