129!

merry christmas eve everyone!! i wish you all a great night, along with a fantastic tomorrow. hopefully santa will visit you tonight, so you better hope you were good or you'll get coal!! if you are spending time with family, feel lucky! cherish that time even though family time can be a little annoying sometimes. that being said, i am lucky too. so far i've felt really comfortable with my host family around the holidays, so i thinkthats good! normally most kids get really homesick around christmas, which seems normal. but i'm actually fine now, it was before that was so much harder! i will never understand that,haha.but seriously, i was never one for "family time" so much back in south dakota, but now that i'm here i see how much it really means to me. i'm so lucky to have everybody back home supporting my year over here, it is great! it just doesn't feel like christmas, absolutely not, just saying! today i went to school to "pick up my report" because the school is too cheap to mail them remember! it wasn't bad actually..going, that is. of course my report was good as well. 94 in english and an 80 or something in dutch on my tests! then we stopped by the grocery store, and i came home and baked for a long time! i made 6 cakes that will be layered into tw0-3 layer red velvet cakes tomorrow! i also made a bunch of cookies and still will make more in the morning i think. so tonight we went to a nice Turkish restaurant in a town a few minutes drive away. it a very good time with my host family..my host mom kept singing along to thepiano player, which made my host dad a little annoyed (in a funny way), and then my host brother was reading the menu in turkish and i just laughed the whole time. so this is what i ate on christmas eve...not quite like the oyster stew my mom makes normally, eh? the first is the main rolled/stuffed chicken dish then the crazy dessert next. it was like...a nutty flour on top of some ice cream covered in this paste? impossible to explain, sorry!

after that we came home and exchanged presents! it was cool, i got a waffle maker!! thats right, a belgian waffle maker..in belgium! then i gave them my gifts which i hope they liked, i am bad at buying presents for people i've known my whole life let alone 4 months, haha. then we took some pictures with the self timer, and i think they're pretty good! merry christmas (eve) to all, and to all a good night!