Nog Een (Another One)

If you haven't read my first blog post from this morning, go ahead and read it now. It's okay, I'll wait.

.....

Well, now that you're back, I have a few more things to mention.

If you happen to ever have contact with me, please remind me to do the following:

1. Get more exercise.

2. Eat less candy.

3. Never drink coffee again.

4. Put my clothes in the wash.

5. Go to bed earlier.

Thanks. The combination of these bad habits means I have a headache, stomachache, backache, and eye ache. Plus my clothes smell weird.

The hamster has been missing since this morning. I'm going to try and find him in a bit.

Last night I learned just how loud the 2 year old can be. I woke up because she was wailing, as usual, trying to get one of her parents to come to her. Since everyone is sort of used to this, nobody came for a little bit. But then she just started SCREAMING, I mean, she really went for it. It sounded like someone witnessing a murder. Then I heard running footsteps, (one of the parents, of course, probably just as freaked out as I was), and then she stopped. But really, wow. That was a wake-up call. (I'm so punny, I know.) :D

Today we had company over, because December 5th is "presents evening". Imagine 6 children, their parents, and me, all in the living room. A couple of zwarte pieten also came over to give me and the little kids presents. These are similar to Santa's elves, except they're basically slaves. Actually... this whole holiday seems like it's all happy and nice, but it's really not. It's scary. There's this cute, upbeat Sinterklaas song that we have on a CD, and one line goes:

"Whoever is sweet gets yummy treats, whoever is naughty will be hit by a rod."

And the kids sing along. Nice.

And if you're really naughty, the zwarte pieten come in the night, steal you from your bed, throw you on the steamboat and take you back with them to Spain to learn how to serve Sinterklaas alongside them as a slave.

And yet nobody is afraid of these guys....

Oh, here's a picture:

My host mom said that the ones who came over today were pretty good-looking, and that I was lucky to get to sit on one of their laps. She also said that I should be really bad so that I could run away to Spain with them ahahaha.

Well, after the presents and cookies and bread and marzipan, I pretty much just did puzzles with the two year old all day. Which was fine. Oh my, she's crying again....

These kids cry a lot. I don't know why. Sometimes it's for a pretty strange reason too... like this morning, Sebastiaan said, "Emily, someone will come to the door soon with presents!" and Elise said, "Not that soon, it's presents EVENING, not presents MORNING." And Sebastiaan just sort of stopped, looked at the ground, groaned, hit Elise on the arm, started crying, and ran out of the room to his mom. Maybe he just doesn't like to be corrected. Dutch kids are pretty different from American kids. Here the kids are the bosses and HATE to be told "No". Anne-Laure started crying today because her dad told her to stop running with the scissors and give them to him.

On the subject of kids, I was next to this little boy on tram once, and we passed the halt called 'Monstersestraat', and he said to his mom what I had always thought, which was: "This is where the monsters are!" I thought that was pretty funny, because I think everyone has the same thought when the tram passes that stop. Whenever someone gets out there, I assume that they turn into a witch or a werewolf in the full moon.

Just kidding. If you want to live with the monsters, I have nothing against your life choice.

Right... did you know that melting snow has a sound? It does. It's sort of like a crackle.

Tomorrow after school I'm going to buy some new gloves and a new jacket.

Oh my, one of those random explosions just went off. I really have no idea what they are. But it's probably the same person doing it every time, because it always sounds like it's coming from the same spot.

You know what I hate? When people don't believe me. This wasn't recent, but at our orientation camp we had to play these games to learn Dutch. One of them was to match the name of the animal to its picture. And one example was a squirrel. And a few of my friends didn't know the word for it. So they were like, "I don't know... maybe it's 'vos'?"

And I said, "No, that's 'fox'. Do you want to guess again or do you want me to just tell you the answer?"

"Just tell us."

"Okay. It's 'eekhoorn'."

"Uhm.. hahah no it's not, that's what a squirrel eats, duh. So what is it?"

"...."

"I think it's 'vos'." "Yeah, that's probably it."

(Dutch volunteer steps in): "'Vos' is fox."

"Oh. So what's squirrel then?"

"Squirrel is 'eekhoorn'."

"Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh. That makes sense."

Me: -_____-

I know I shouldn't let things like this bother me. It just seems to happen a lot. I could go on. But I'll just get worked up about it.

Let me see did I have anything else to add...? No, I don't think so. Except I really don't feel well, so maybe I'll go try and find the hamster, then sleep.

Tot zo,

(Oh man, switching it up on you!!)

Emily