Netherraw

****NOTICE****
I ate raw herring today rolled in onions. 


The weather today was absolutely beautiful! The sun was out, the skies were clear, and the snow was starting to melt. I cycled to school - and it was really nice. 


I was at school for a while working on my lesson plans for next week because I'm taking over all of the classes for both my mentor teacher and the other teacher I'm working with. It's going to be a really busy week but I'm coming up with lesson plans that hopefully will motivate the students to work. 


I had individual meetings with different students, and I was a little worried that they might not show up, BUT they did! The two Turkish girls that I'm working with showed up at 11 and we worked for an hour. They took this pretest for me so that I could see what needed work. I also set up a penpal for them with my brothers. My two little brothers are 18 and 16 - same age as the girls. They were really excited to be contacting someone in America. 


Also, the guy from my 5th year also showed up! He's having problems with subject-verb agreement, so I've been giving him exercises to work on. I thought that he would want to work on it together so that he didn't have anything to do during the weekend, but he wanted to work on it over the weekend! I was impressed. I did tell him that I wanted to sit down with him and go over some things with him. :)


Anyways, about the raw herring - one of the caretakers of the school thought it would be nice to buy me raw herring since I told him I wanted to try it. I wanted to take my time with trying the raw herring - meaning I was not ready for it, but since he brought it to school, I couldn't say no! I was so scared and nervous...but I actually liked it! The teachers were impressed. :) However, I did smell like fish and onions the rest of the day. 


I also helped out with setting up for Open School Day on Saturday - it's a way to persuade new students to choose our school for their secondary school. I put up posters with English words that the 1st years did, and put proverbs around the school that had Dutch translation as well. I talked to one of the English teachers and he said that if I was serious about working in Holland, I need to meet with the Ministry of Education in De Haage while I'm here to see what all I can and should do to be able to teach here. I will definitely be doing that while I'm here. 


***Exercise***
I realized that I cycle two miles back and forth to school so 4 miles everyday. :) I also lift weights everyday for 30 min, do cardio (hour of ZUMBA, 2.81 miles on treadmill), and been doing ab workout twice a day. I really want a toned body, if you couldn't tell. My diet is a lot healthier as well, which excites me. (Don't worry, I do take at least a day off from working out for rest.)


Oh yeah, I had a bad dream about Ant again. :( It makes me really sad that all of my dreams about him are bad, never good. Then again, they are just dreams right?


I have a busy weekend ahead of me - lots of hard work and of course, lots of play as well.