Paperworkk

Soo this past week has been preeetty busy, filling out paperwork. We had to go apply for my temporary residence permit, and that involved lots of things like going to the local government to get papers and really quite not interesting things. But we do get to bike alot so that's really fun. But the day we went to get the temporary residence permit was kind of fun because we had a little time in the city (Den Bosch) and there was a fair there!! all throughout the town. so that was really cool to see.

Then yesterday we went to the school that I will be attending with Anne-Claire and Jelle, and got all my classes organized. I will be taking nine classes!! that's alot more than I'm used to, but that's less than normal for the Dutch students. So I'm going to be in VWO, which is a school for pre-university education, which is really good for me to be in. I'm in grade 5, which is the level below the final exam year which is grade 6. So for each typical Dutch student, they take alottt of classes. They all take: Dutch, English, another second language (French or German), general science, History and Social Studies, Cultural studies, Mathematics and P.E.
So since i'm hear to learn dutch and not German, so I wont be taking another language. I will be taking English however because they read books in that class, so I think it will be fun to read with the rest of the class. So then in addition to those classes, I have to choose a profile. and these profiles are what the kids want to do in college. So my sister Anne-Claire wants to study medicine in college, so she her profile is "Nature and Health". I decided to choose Economy and Society, for two reasons. I don't have access to these classes at home (like economics)so I thought it would be fun to take that. And I also didn't want to take Culture and society because they take like 3 or 4 languages and that would be way too hard. So school starts next Wednesday, and on Monday we will go to get my locker and bike parking spot (they have so many students that they have to be assigned a spot!!) and find out who my class teacher(that acts kind of like an advisory) will be. So I'm pretty excited to start school, but I'm also worried because my dutch is definitely not strong enough for school!! haha OH right, I haven't talked about biking hardly at alll!!! So obviously we bike everywhere. And that's because there are bike paths everywhere!! And here everyone rides next to each other on their bikes instead of behind the person in front of you. So we bike pretty much everywhere that's close enough. We didn't bike to Den Bosch because it was way to far to bike so we drove there... but I have to bike to school everyday. I'm sooo glad I worked out at the gym biking because otherwise I would NOT have been able to make it to school. Coming back was alott harder because I had to ride there and back with my host mom in less than like 3 hours. so that was sooo hard. but she keeps saying I will get used to it, and I'm sure I will.

Today for the first time also I got really kind of sad. But instead of isolating my self in my room I went downstairs and talked to Jelle and Andrea. I think they could sense that I was kind of upset because they were asking me how I was feeling and we were talking about things I missed and things like that. But Jelle was like, do you like monopoly?! And I lovee monopoly so we played monopoly for a very long time and that was a really good way for me to feel better. So I feel really grateful that they are doing so much to make me feel welcome and happy because I have to say that some of the other exchange students seem to not be doing so well... and I don't know if its a personal thing or a family thing, but I feel really lucky to have such a wonderful host family. I'm sure I've said this at least twice now, but I can't even stress how important it is to have a good host family. And I've been telling my host family stories from the AFS facebook page and saying how some kids aren't doing well at all... So I feel like I'm doing really well :)