21..

just another day. sometimes i go to bed feeling really excited and open-minded about being here, but other times i am skeptical and frustrated. i think today is the latter of the two. its not that im unhappy, unsatisfied, or ungrateful..its just one of those days where the differences are overwhelming me again. today i woke up and went to dutch school. after biking through the rain i sat there for three hours listening to a lady speak dutch. the concept of the class is nice but being in a room of foreigners gets old pretty quickly. our teacher tries to let us speak as much as we can but i've realized that its mainly just listening and learning, which is fine with me. my host family on the other hand is more concerned about my growth speaking wise, but i think that will come. i would much rather understand what is going on first then learn to say it later rather than saying things i don't know the meaning of. we'll see how it turns out. then i met my friends for lunch and we had soup!!! it was really neat. you can go to the "cafeteria" and buy a bowl of warm water and a PACKET of instant soup (like instant oatmeal) that actually doesn't taste that bad. it was like less than 1 euro which didn't seem that bad. so i ate some soup then some bread that i brought in my lunch box and then we had music class. class was really hard and i ended up just sitting there confused. the class would be tolerable and semi-interesting in english but in dutch it just frustrates me. after that we had math, where i did my dutch class homework. then school was over and my friends helped me see why my new belgian debit card wasn't working. turns out the bank was closed but i finally found an ATM that works with my american card so that is good news. then i came home, had dinner, and didn't really do much else until now. basically today was a normal day..but sometimes its hard being american, ya know? everybody in school wants to speak english to me..and thats fine because i love english, but it doesn't really help my dutch. and its not like i know enough dutch to actually have a conversation with them, so what do you do? don't say anything at all? for now i will speak english at school because that is what i know, and that is how i am making friends. after the 3rd day of language class i don't think you can expect me to know that much. but if i have learned one thing today it is that instant soup is a novel concept that needs to be brought to brookings. we don't have that do we? anyways, thats all for now! only language class tomorrow..early out of school on wednesdays remember. byebye