A day in my American life

Hi y'all!

In this blogpost I want to describe a typical day in my life here. I usually write a lot about special or fun things I do, but I realized that I haven't talked yet about a normal school day. An exchange year is not only fun, because I have to do homework and take tests as well.

7:30 - Rise and Shine! This is the time I usually wake up. I'm glad that my school doesn't start really early, since I need all the sleep I can get. Being an exchange student is really tiring, especially speaking another language all day. I notice that when I'm tired, I often confuse Dutch and English. The result of this is that I accidentally speak Dutch to my American friends.

Fall break @ Walt Disney World

Hi!

Two weeks ago it was finally time for the first holiday of my year here: fall break! I'm used to having a fall break of one whole week, but in the USA you only get 2 days off school. Luckily there's a weekend right after that so we had 4 days without school. And we spent those days in the best possible way: by visiting Disneyworld in Florida! It was my first time there and I absolutely loved it. This blogpost will be all about our trip. 

Spirit Week

Last week was a really important week for Eastside High School, because it was Spirit Week! For the ones who don't know what this is: it's a week where the school raises money for a good cause. All week there are a lot of activities and things to buy. Every day has a different theme in which the students have to dress up. The week ends with a big football game and the reveal of the amount of money raised. It was my first and last Spirit Week ever, and I loved it! It's awesome to see how much the students are involved in organizing events and supporting the school. Of course I participated in some events myself! This blogpost will be all about that.

The Junior Girls team during Powderpuff, together with the boys who coached us. 

What I've been up to

Hi everyone! Here's an update with some things I did lately. My life here in the USA is starting to feel more and more 'normal'. It's been 47 days since I left the Netherlands, and everything doesn't feel new anymore. That doesn't mean that I don't enjoy it though! I'm still happy with my choice and I love living in the United States :)

With the other exchange students

A week ago, my exchange organization EF organized a picnic for all the exchange students in the region. The picnic was at the Greenville Zoo which is pretty close to my house. In Greenville itself are 3 exchange students with EF. Many of the other exchange students came from the states Georgia, North Carolina and some came from other places in South Carolina. I'd met a few of them already, but it was great to meet the other ones as well! Every family had taken something to eat with them. Together with the exchange students and an IEC we talked about our first weeks here, adapting to a new school and homesickness. I feel like the beginning of an exchange year is the hardest, because you don't know anyone yet. You have to make friends and adapt to a new life. During my year, there will be more activities with our 'exchange group', so that will be nice!

Exchange student tag

Hi there! Today I decided to fill in the exchange student tag, which I found on another blog. It contains a lot of random questions about my exchange year. Hopefully you'll like reading it! 

1. What is your name, age, nationality and company?
My name is Sarah, I'm 17 years old, I'm from the Netherlands and I'm traveling with EF!

2. Where are you spending your exchange year?
I'm living in Greenville, South Carolina.

Our student section during the football game last friday!

3. Why did you decide to be an exchange student?
I really wanted to go to the USA, but not as a tourist! Of course I want to visit nice places, but I'm more interested in experiencing the culture. The only way to really experience a culture is to live in a local family and to do what other American teenagers do. I also want to speak English fluently, because that will help me a lot in the future. And I want to find out what I want to do after high school, because right now I have no idea. But the most important thing is that I want to have an experience I'll never forget! If you want to read more, I wrote a blog post about the same question a few months ago.

My first month

Hi there! I know it's been a while since I've updated my blog, but I have a good reason for that: I've just been too busy to sit down and write a long blog post. The main reason for that is school, because all the new experiences (and the amount of homework!) are really tiring. In this post I want to tell you about what's going on in my life and what kind of things I did lately!

I'm starting to get used to going to school here, and I still like my subjects a lot. It gets easier to understand everything that's been said and I've met some nice new people! A hard thing about the American school system is that I have the same classes every day. So I can't procrastinate anymore, because homework is mostly due the next day. And we get a grade for all the homework we do! In this way I'm forced to make it.

Football game!

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.