Well, but now I am in Holland, where all this Visser deal begun once upon a time. Dutch is far different from English or Spanish… I hear my host parents speaking and cannot understand a word of what they say… Yet learning the rules of the language seem similar to learning English or Spanish… so hopefully getting familiar with verbs and normal talking will take me to understand conversations… some day! haha…
This first week in this foreign country has been very fun and interesting. Sometimes I forget that I will be here for a few months, and I go crazy with the camera, capturing all those moments and places on photos. Even though I know I will be here for a while, the moments I live today here will never be the same as the ones I’ll live tomorrow. My biking experience, for instance, is helping me to truly live the moment, and when I say that I mean it! Since I have a couple of accidents already in this first week, but I’m alive! Haha…
Biking in the Netherlands has really been a cultural experience. I thought I was good at biking… until I came to Zwolle! Here we have traffic lights, an entire route, and rules for bikers. As bikers we need to give signals with our hands showing whether we are going right or left. One day, I had to cross the street with the bike, and a car stopped in front of me giving me only two choices: crashing the car or kicking it and keep biking… of course, I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, and in that half of second that I had to pick a choice, I decided to kick the car and keep going… haha… I have become a gangster in Zwolle!
What I love the most about Zwolle is the water… We bike over several bridges to get to school, and I love watching the water… now it’s close to getting completely frozen, then a new experience will be ice skating in a frozen lake! The people are great, very friendly and much warmer than I expected. I had a ton of very positive interactions with Dutch people, except for that one lady who yelled at me because I was on her way with the bike… haha… yeah… I should start a different blog for my biking experiences!
This is only a short summary of the tons of things I experienced this first week in the Netherlands. Perhaps images will add to the words… but if there is one thing I’m learning here is to enjoy the moment for what it is, even if it’s too cold to take a picture (when I bike) or we are having such a good time that I forget to take my camera out… it doesn’t matter… because it is the present what really counts… and being here in Holland is a present from God to us :)