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.



8:25 - After I've eaten breakfast and packed my bags, we leave to school! Since we live close to the school, it's only a 5 minute drive. My host sister is a Sophomore at Eastside so she drives me to school every day.

8:30 - We're at school! In the beginning, it was so weird to see a parking lot full of cars, because in the Netherlands we all bike to school. People here can drive from the age of 15 so it's strange to see all those young people driving. The time before the bell rings we mostly spend either in our car or talking to people at their cars.

8.45 - My first class starts: Honors US History. This is pretty interesting because I don't know a lot about the American history. We have to write lots of essays and sometimes it's hard to understand everything. All the other students have had US History in primary school, so most things are new to me. It's still fun to learn about the history of the country I live in now!

9:45 - Second period which is Drama. I love Drama, it's such a fun class! We do all kinds of games and improvisation activities. We also learn parts from plays, for example 'Romeo & Juliet.' During class we are mostly in the auditorium of school, which is really huge! It's nice to have class there though, because it almost feels like a real performance. In spring the drama department will go on a trip to New York City. I'm going on that trip too and I'm so excited already! We will go to two Broadway shows and get acting workshops. I'm currently selling coupon books to raise money for the trip.

The chorus room

10:40 - It's time for Chorus! I'm in the concert choir of my school and our first performance will be soon, so I'm definitely looking forward to that. What we do during class is basically singing songs, singing the solfège to learn pitch and sight reading, and sometimes we have tests or quizzes.

11:35 - Astronomy! I think this subject is really interesting. We learn about the planets, stars and so on. Sometimes we do experiments or watch movies. Soon we'll go on our schools football field to put all the planets down on scale. And maybe we'll watch the stars in the evening once.

Lunch buddies

12:30 - Lunch, finally! I have to last lunch out of 3 so I'm mostly very hungry, haha. People who know me well also know I can't go without food for a very long time ;) During lunch everyone sits at the same table with the same people every day, and you can really see the different 'groups' at different tables. The only difference with the movies is that my school doesn't have mean girls. So far, everyone's been really nice to me!

1:05 - My fifth period is English. Out of all my classes, I have the lowest grade on this subject. We mostly read literature and poems with lots of words I don't know. Then we just answer questions about it or discuss it in class. It's comparable to English in the Netherlands, but a difference is that we don't learn any grammar or spelling, because they assume you already know it.

2:00 - Sixth period! This is Algebra II, which is just a math class. In the Netherlands I'm an average student in math and I have to work pretty hard for it, but here in the USA I'm one of the best students in my class. I'm glad that I chose this subject because I don't want to lose my math, but I'm also happy it isn't too hard since I don't get any credit for this year.

2:55 - My Seventh and last class, Film Criticism. In this class we basically just watch movies the whole time. In the Netherlands there could never ever be a class like this, haha. Mostly we have a sheet with questions to answer during of after the movie, and sometimes we have to write a review. Right now we are doing a Scary Movie Unit, since it's almost Halloween. I don't really like scary movies, but it's fun to watch movies I'd normally never watch. I love that this is my last class of the day because then I don't have energy to do anything anymore!

We have lots of fun during Lacrosse

4:30 - Lacrosse practice! Three days a week I play Lacrosse after school. I wanted to try something I've never done before and Lacrosse seemed like a lot of fun. And I can tell you, it is a lot of fun! We start every practice by running a mile around the track, which is my least favorite part. I'm not really into running, but I understand why we have to do it! The goal is to run that mile in 8 minutes, which I can't do yet. But hopefully I'll be able to do it in a month or so. After that we practice things like throwing and catching, and making goals. It can be pretty hard but I like it a lot!

6:00 - End of practice! After this I go home and do my homework, have dinner, talk with friends, watch tv, or go to the mall. So my evenings aren't really special.

That was a day in my American life! I hope you liked reading it. If you have any suggestions at all for a new blogpost, let me know :)

What subjects would you like to have?