It all comes to an end

Summer is here and in full swing. Many of the projects, classes, etc I have been working on the past 6 months have ended and much of the country shuts down as people use some of their abundant vacation time. Gearoid is technically still working but won’t have to teach until September. There are no Dutch classes offered during the summer putting my tentative grasp on the language at risk.

1)      Socks- I tapped out at knitting 7 pairs of socks and have already distributed my prolific efforts. My hands could no longer hold the needles without a very scary potential of early arthritic ache. I was happy to finish though and the presence of Angry Birds on my phone keeps my hands busy.

My Florida Parents modelling their cozy new socks.

1)      Dutch Lessons- Dutch lessons are over for the year. I took 4 tests (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) to assess my knowledge of the language and did pretty well. My lowest score was in listening but honestly I would have the same difficulties in an English language assessment test. I am happy to report that I have exceeded level one and am now considered in a level 2. I have no idea how many levels there are but I’m happy to have passed the lowest level. To celebrate our success at not dropping out of the class (there have been several casualties), my fellow students and I took our teacher Carla out to eat at a boat restaurant that served Brazilian food. Gearoid and I ate our strange pancake wrapped vegetables while my omnivore classmates ate chunks of meat off of dangerous looking skewers. The food left much to be desired but we were in good company and my side of the table was the farthest from my teacher so we whispered in English.

Dangerous meat skewer.

Weird pancake wrapped vegetable burrito like thing.

1)      English with Asian Ladies- My ladies treated me to a Japanese All-you-can-eat lunch as a thank you for volunteering my time to speak English with them. It was an over 3 hour lunch and my English was pretty strained at the end of it but I enjoyed myself.  It was pretty amusing the way the all-you-can-eat restaurant differed from American versions. You only had 2.5 hours to order the food. You could only order 5 items at a time up to 5 times (so total you could only eat 25 items). If you didn’t eat something, you had to pay extra for it and wouldn’t be allowed to order anything else. All these rules to eat lunch! It was good food and I couldn’t order anything after the 4^th round. In fact, the Asian ladies had to eat my 4^th round so we didn’t have to pay extra. Hopefully, when we meet up again in August we’ll have more topics of conversation. 

"All you can eat"

1)      International Refugee Day- I helped plan this day of fun at the local refugee center and eventually just became in charge of the children’s activities. My plans for outdoor relay races were literally rained out and the children had more fun popping the balloons for the races rather than racing. At one point I just dumped the balloons on the floor and 6 seconds later the popping fun was over. My afternoon art table ended up being more successful. I don’t blame the kids for not being interested in my activities when there were awesome drum groups, football games in the rain, henna and make up, and belly dancing going on. Despite the rain and the small space, it ended up being a nice event. However, there seemed to be more Dutch volunteers than refugees present.

1)      Bike Lessons- We ended the bike lessons with a small reception of juice, grapes, cookies, and certificates. Almost all of the ladies have to come back in the Fall to finish the lessons. Some of the ladies still had to master indicating with their hands and others needed to learn to break without using a bush as a stopping device. However, with only one lady refusing to have both feet on the pedals, I think we were pretty successful.

So what was I going to do with my summer? I thought about going to the volunteer center again to see if there were any summer projects I could help with.  I got a library card so I could borrow Dutch books and keep up with my language. I had a standing appointment with my language buddy to practice speaking once a week. Gearoid and I were also planning a long camping trip that involved the northern Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. Instead we came back to America.

                A friend getting married offered us some Delta Buddy Passes so we could make her wedding as well as visit family. It was too good of a deal to pass up so we exchanged a sleepy summer in the Netherlands for busy America.