Adventure is out there!: First Week of School

My first week of school was great! I am taking Intro to Dutch Studies, Museum Studies, Public Policy Studies, and Crime & Context. They are all great classes, and I am having so much fun learning Dutch. My pronunciation is slowly improving, but it still sounds like I'm trying to spit at the person I'm talking to half the time. The classes here are all very small, so the largest class I have is 28 students. It feels like high school again, but it is nice to actually know my professors, unlike the 300-student lectures at UW. A lot of people have Fridays off...I, unfortunately, do not, but that's ok! I also love how all my unit mates and I keep going in and out from our unit in between classes. It really does just feel like a giant family where we all live in the same house. It's been a lot of fun! We have a pretty centralized living room, unlike a lot of the other buildings, so I love that we get to see each other often, and we somehow end up playing games almost every night.

Yesterday, I attended an Intro Day for international students with the main university (Utrecht University). It was a lot of fun exploring Utrecht with my "family" and meeting other internationals. We took a boat ride in the main canal (Oudegracht), visited the Dom Tower, played pool at a bar, had lunch together, and much more. It was a great experience!

I also had a good time making a home-cooked meal at night with my friends. We made pasta, which turned out really well, considering that we can only cook on hot plates in our units. None of them have stoves installed, so we are all just provided with hot plates. The distribution is a bit odd though. My unit has one hot plate for twelve people. We'll manage though!

Lastly, I just wanted to announce to you all that I can now ride my bike without any hands on the handlebars (besides turning and braking)!!! I was pretty proud of myself the first time I did it, and I still amaze myself every time. I can also pull something out of my closed backpack while riding a bike and then reclose the backpack, as well as enter directions into Google Maps on my phone while riding. I'm pretty excited. Riding my bike is one of the things I love most about living here -- it's so accessible and so liberating!

My phone died halfway through the day yesterday, but here's some pictures below still!

Meeting up with UW friends! (Lucie, on the left, is a Belgian international student at UCU and studied abroad at UW last year while I was there. Sarah, on the right, is an exchange student like me and also from Spokane!)