243..8 months!

my dear, dear readers..good evening. today is a day of many mixed feelings here in belgium, but before i get to the heavy stuff let me first tell you what i did today, because thats how this blog thing is supposed to work, right? today was an absolutely lovely sunday in belgium! i must have brought the sun back with my from Italy, because we had lunch outside and it was pretty much a perfect temperature in the sun! although i'll admit, it took a little getting used to after it being super summer warm in Italy. but anyways! other than that i unpacked my suitcase from Italy and then tonight i went to a movie with a friend from school. i must say, the movie theater in Turnhout is a big step up than ours in Brookings. but the down side is that they get most of the movies later than we do in the US, and now that its Easter vacation and a sunday night, almost all of the movies were in dutch for little kids except "just go with it" with adam sandler and jennifer anniston. it was decent! but now back to the news of the day. 8 months in Belgium today! well thats not quite fair to say, because i've done some traveling to other countries in between, but i've been here for the last 243 days and i have never been more proud of myself in my life! the dictionary definition of proud is the following. Proud–adjective
1.feeling pleasure or satisfaction over something regarded as highly honorable or creditable to oneself (often followed by of, an infinitive, or a clause)...and i can completely agree with this copy and paste from dictionary.com! i'm very pleased and satisfied with my time here. all the things i have seen, learned, experienced, observed, tried, accomplished, and all the words in between! but all good things come to an end, and to everything there is a season (although that makes it sound like somebody died or something, but i dont mean it that way at all). anyways. i have never wanted it to sound like i am "counting down" on my blog, because thats not the point at all! and although there have been some bad days in the blog posts as well, i can say that up to this point i've successfully managed to count up the days that i've been here! today is the exception! today i'm informing the world that i have chosen my return date to the United States to be May 17th, 2011. exactly one month from today, making my exchange a total of 9 months. no need to worry, i'll be sure and blog every day (i hope!) up until i leave, which is also something i'm proud of myself with! i've thought a lot about what to do with all my blog posts, all 243 days worth..and the best thing i can think of is print them all off and read it when i'm an old granny! i don't know if i could ever make a real book/novel out of it, my writing skills are definitely sub-par, but who knows. this year has given me so much more than what i could try to write in a book, its even hard to describe on my online journal aka blog. (dutch readers: aka =also known as...een andere naam voor?hah). well anyways! thats the news for today. and since i feel like this was sort of a bummer of a blog post, i'll leave you with something you can maybe laugh at. it's definitely one of my favorite photos i took in italy.

have a great day/night/week/afternoon/whatever! love, jamie marguerite