23!

hello! day 23 in belgium..where does time go? i wonder if the whole year will feel like this..somewhat of a dream/fantasy land where everything is so different at first but you finally start accepting it and living in this weird world. not sure if that made sense. anyways! today was kind of fun! i started the morning with language class, where we learned (or attempted to learn) the difference between "het" and "de" ...they are both articles used to describe something such as "a, an, & the" in english but there are no real guidelines to describe when to use one or the other..basically the teacher said that when in doubt, choose "de", because it is correct 80% of the time. apparently it takes years of practicing and listening to actually figure out when to use one or the other, but i don't have time for that. so then i met my friends for lunch and we went to a little (what americans call) cafe and they had (what americans call) sandwiches. what i mean by that last sentence is this, americans call a cafe a place where you eat a light lunch, get some coffee, or something like that. here a cafe is a bar..so watch out for that!! and a sandwich at home is bread, meat, cheese, maybe some lettuce or something and some mayo. here a sandwich is what we would call a hot dog bun, haha!! not a gross spongey wonderbread bun, but a fresh hyvee one kind of...and that is a sandwich. so after that we went to our afternoon classes. the first one was "orchestra", or as i would rather call it, band. at first they tried to make me sing but then i found a tambourine and was much happier. we practiced this march song a few times then we got up and walked to a different building with our instruments. after walking up 95 stairs to the top of this old creepy lincoln-music-hall-ish building we started PLAYING the march while walking back down the stairs!! needless to say all the other classes were disrupted and we looked..out of place. reminded me of when the middle school marching band marched through the MMS cafetorium sometime before the hobo day parade. so after marching through a couple more buildings band was done. then we went to art history, which seems like a nice class if i were to understand it. after finishing my language class homework while in that class, i decided to pretend to pay attention. then the teacher looked at me and said "oh, great, are you understanding!?" and i proceeded to reply "um..no. sorry" and he was like "its a pity because this is really interesting"..and that was the extent of my art history for the day. following that class i had a music class that i do not like. last week we all got a piece of choral music and we were supposed to rehearse it and then one by one sing it in front of the whole class ALONE in SOLFEGE...yeah not happening. so during that class we heard some "jazz" type music coming from the other room, and guess what!, the teacher let me go play with them instead! it was great..and i think i can do that again next week! way better than singing. then we had to climb back up those 95 stairs to go to a class called expression, which i don't understand, so i just sat there. and that, my reader, was belgian school. after school i met the south african girl for some ice cream and we walked around on the winkelstraat. yes, wink-el-straat. it means shopping street! so far it is my favorite dutch word..makes me laugh every time i say it or hear it. the fact that a "winkel" is a shop is just too funny. so at some winkel i bought three childrens books to motivate me to learn dutch, or something.

then i biked home and we had dinner a little later. then after dinner i had an ice cream bar without realizing i had ice cream after school. oh well. it was all still yummy. i sincerely apologize if my blogs are lengthy and poorly written sometimes, but i really enjoy quick-blogging every nigh about my day..in detail. way easier than a journal! haha, goodnight!