Dutch Assignments Well my dutch homework for this week was to compose a short story and then present it to the others during our next lesson. All in Dutch of course. Since I have not many better things to be doing, I decided to share my Dutch knowledge and story writing skills with you. It's in Dutch so you'll just have to try and figure out what it says. Please please don't put it into an online translator, because my sentence structure and composition, not to ...

Calm before the storm.... After a week of frantic cleaning, extra hours, and tempers flaring all departments of Mennorode have managed to recuperate from the Ridwan group that was here. I believe that I wrote about them in earlier blogs from October or so. Even though we finally cleaned everything up from them, the one day that didn't have many rooms to be cleaning was filled with frantic preparations for the next group of Ridwans coming tonight! The kitchen h...

Groeten van het strand Hello! I apologize for the severe lack of blog updates and failed uploaded photo albums. Spring has sprung in the Netherlands and the weeks have been filled (mostly) with gorgeous weather of the kind that causes sun burns. Last weekend Zach, Matt (the newish trainee here from Niagria on the Lake, ON) and I travelled to Schoorl to see Dustin and the new 'trainee' Janelle. We departed after supper on friday night and arrived only at 10pm. Al...

Sunday must be the day for English programs on dutch television. Usually we're lucky to get one program in English with dutch subtitles, but today there were only two on the eleven channels we get. I also came across the most random programs while flipping through the channels. One channel was a program about boy and girl scouts with such thick Irish accents, that I had to rely on the dutch subtitles to understand what they were saying. Another showed a woman i...

I am ready for Christmas again. Lately I have become very aware of the fact that I 'missed' Christmas and that I now need to wait 11 more months before the excitement comes again. This all stemmed from listening to the Straight No Chasers Christmas album. But it's a new year, and for most people that sometimes means turning a new page over, creating resolutions, and making life changes. Yet for me, the new year indicates that I am half way there, half way to g...