ten days in.

this first post is later than i was hoping for. my excuse? getting acquainted with my new surroundings is time consuming. it also didn't help that my blog has been stuck in dutch until now. ;)

So we got here last Monday morning. The flight wasn't too bad. I didn't get more than twenty minutes sleep because I had the stinkin' middle seat. But we got here and unpacked for a bit then they walked us to the mall with the grocery store and I'm not gonna lie, at first I was so disappointed. I couldn't help but wander what the heck it was that everyone loved about this city. The surrounding area of the guesthouse is nothing more than retro style apartment buildings. Nothing terrible, but certainly not all that impressive. Jason and I were famished, so we bought a baguette and took a break to eat it on a curb before walking back to the guesthouse with all of the essentials that we had bought. The only other part of the city I saw on my first night was an area down by a local bar called the Highlander, and that's not all that impressive either. But I had a good time at the Highlander that night. It was Lisa and Spencer's birthday and Muhlenberg kids were essentially the only ones there. I wasn't entirely sold on Maastricht that day. I cried that night--I thought I made a mistake coming here. I think a lot of that emotion had to do with the fact that I had no way to contact home because we had no phones or internet yet. I just felt very alone and vulnerable.

But the next afternoon, after orientation stuff in the morning we spent the whole day in center city wandering around trying to find phones and bikes and blowdryers. That's when I fell in love!!! Absolutely loved it! I feel like every day is some sort of festival here, but really it's just an average day! No luck finding a bike yet though. That's becoming a source of stress. But we went to the MECC, a huge warehouse, that night for a school sponsored welcome party. One word--INSANE! 'The Venga Boys' played (ya know the ones that have the song on the SixFlags commercials?) and the techo music was so loud that you could feel it in your chest. I was really impressed by all the student organizations who all sported their respective clothing; some wore polos, other's vests, and some rugbys. They seemed to really take pride in their organizations.

The next day we did more orientation stuff, walked around center city some more, cooked dinner for the first time and even though we were exhausted and didn't want to go out, we did want to check out the welcome bar crawl, so back to center city we went. We wandered around some more and sat at a cafe and had beer and tea and chatted it up with the waiter a bit. The next day we had to be up early and since I was up til like 3 skyping with my mom, getting up at 7:30 am was brutal! My eyes hurt. My mom said I looked like a hot mess. haha She could see the bags under my eyes even over the computer. I told her I knew it was bad when I could no longer cover the circles with make-up! haha So definitely, no going out that night. I stayed up late chatting with Jason and Shari and packed for the 5 day study trip.