End of Summer

Hi

So it is getting close to the end of summer and I think here and also in Terrace you can really tell by the weather. Its getting colder and well in Terrace its raining more but here it rains everyday so there hasn't really been a change there. School starts for me on Friday and I have already met some people that will be in my grade and a few that will be in my class. I'm glad i'll know at least a couple people on my first day! These last few days have been kind of eventful. On Saturday I went for a very long walk by myself and listened to my ipod. There are a lot of really nice little parks around where I live so I decided to walk to one that was pretty far away. It had a really nice little lake with swans and ducks in it and a nice trail to walk around. After I walked there and around the lake I had already been walking for a really long time and i've been having major problems with my feet here. They've been hurting really bad lately so I decided to take the tram back home. When I got home my most mom, Claire, and I went downtown and went shopping. They dropped me off at an english bookstore and I bought 3 books. I bought "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" Series. I'm really looking forward to having a few good books here to read. While I was there they were at one of my host mom's shops and then came back and picked me up. We went shopping for a little while and I bought one shirt. I plan on going shopping tomorrow in Lille, France and maybe Thursday downtown. I know how to get downtown on my own now and I really like it! On Sunday we went to a little town called Dinant to go Kayaking. It looked like it was gonna be a nice day but after Claire and I had been kayaking for a while it started to pour. The kayak trip was a lot longer than I thought it would've been and it took probably 4.5 hours. Also, our kayak sunk because we had to go down this little waterfall type thing and it got so much water in it. We got soaked and had to jump in the river and try to get the water out. We couldn't lift it by ourselves and finally some guys came and helped us. We were very very cold, hungry, tired, and not very happy and the end of it. But we had a hot shower and hot chocolate afterwards and that made us feel a bit better. That night I had a dinner with my other two host families and the other two girls who were staying with them. They are very different than my host family now but we'll see what happens. When we got home around 10:30 everyone was very tired and I went straight to bed. On Monday I had plans to meet up with 4 other exchange students. 3 Canadians and 1 girl from New York. We had plans to meet at the Brussels train station at 9:30 AM but I was a bit late because there was construction so my host mom was about 10 minutes late dropping me off. When I got there I couldn't find them anywhere and decided to wait at the entrance for a while but when they still weren't coming ten minutes later I decided to walk around to the other entrances. I couldn't find them anywhere so I decided I might as well walk around by myself for a while so I did that for about an hour and a half. I kept coming back to the Grand Place whenever I thought I didn't know where I was and one time I came back I recognized another exchange student I remembered seeing on Thursday at the parliament. I went up to him and these two other belgian guys and talked to them and then I hung out with them around the city for a while. He is from Argentina and he was with his host brother and his host brother's cousin. Later on I ended up meeting the rest of the people I was supposed to meet and we had a really good day. We went to a greek place for lunch and then had a waffle and just walked around the city for a long time. Walking really didn't help my feet though. Especially since I couldn't even wear my shoes with my orthodics because even though I tried drying them the night before they were still soaked from Kayaking. So today I plan on not going out and resting my feet because I know i'm gonna have to walk around a lot tomorrow in France. Hopefully my feet won't hurt forever!