First day of school

Eastside high school!

Yesterday my first day of American high school finally started! I was really nervous about it before, but there was no need to be nervous. School here is a lot of fun and I love all my classes! In this post I want to tell you how my first day has been.

I don't have to take the school bus, because my host sister can drive me to school. It's only a short drive. In my opinion the school starts very late: at 8:45! It's great though because in that way I can sleep longer, haha. When we walked into the school I immediately felt like I was in a movie, which was really fun to experience. It wasn't really hard for me to find my classes during the day, because I already had a tour through the school. I only got late one time so that's a great accomplishment for me!

Biggest differences so far

I thought it would be fun to tell you something about the biggest differences between the USA and the Netherlands I've seen so far. Even though I've only been here for 10 days, I can tell that there are many!

1. The food

I love the food here! I've tried many things so far: Reese's, twinkies, Chick-fil-A, hamburgers (of course), Chipotle and El Jimador (both Mexican restaurants), bagels, frozen custard, P.F. Chang's (Asian food), cream soda... My two favorites were Reese's (peanut butter cups) and Chick-fil-A! In general, the food is not as healthy as in the Netherlands because there are many fast food restaurants. The dishes are also bigger. Another difference is that they take leftovers of the food in restaurants with them, so they can eat it another time. I think that's a good thing because the food doesn't go to waste.

Arriving in South Carolina

In my last post I talked to you about the Welcome Days, and in this post I want to tell you what happened after that! Together with a girl from Denmark I flew to Atlanta, Georgia. There we had to change planes to fly to Greenville, South Carolina. Both flights went okay and in the flight to Greenville we were booked in First class! It was the first time flying First class for me and I really enjoyed it. During the flight we were nervous but also excited to meet our host families. When we got out of the plane we walked around a corner and there were our host families already!

My host family and their welcome signs

The Welcome Days

I've been with my host family for two days now and I just love it here! I'll write a post about arriving at my host family later. In this post I want to tell you something about the Welcome Days.

Last picture with my family!

On Wednesday August 5 my exchange year finally started! I drove together with my parents and sister to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. There I had to check in to my flight and shortly after that it was already time to say goodbye to my family. I found it really hard to say goodbye and the hardest thing was to walk away from them knowing I won't be seeing them for a long time. That was also the moment I realized that I was really starting my exchange year.