Week Nine

Personal

If at some point you don’t ask yourself, ‘what have I gotten myself into?’ then you’re not doing it right. Roland Gau

Home comforts

This week was one of the week that I asked myself that same exact question, what had I gotten myself into, with my bike breaking yet again, my lovely purple Amsterdam bag breaking the very same day and just a lot of bad luck in general I found myself missing home more than ever. I missed the familiarity of home and just knowing that when I was having a bad week that I could crawl back into my bed with comfy double duvet and watch the sex and the city box set and just feel sorry for myself. On Erasmus this is simply not the case, and in a way I am glad, you just have to suck it up and get on with life,and of course there are many wonderful people here that will buy you a beer or a piece of chocolate in your time of need, and they will always remind you to ‘stop worrying about the potholes in the road and just celebrate the journey’ Fitzhugh Mullan

Erasmus family

My week was saved however with the arrival of a package from home, with Tayto cheese and onion, tea and a box of crème eggs I felt like the luckiest person in the world, I will never take a crème egg for granted ever again. We also had a wonderful night out with our Erasmus group, some of whom I hadn't really spoken to properly, it really made me appreciate how great the Erasmus program is and how I was so lucky to get to do this, sitting in a kitchen blasting music and talking to everyone made me feel part of something wonderful,

when the night ended I dragged a few people back to make them a good cup of Irish tea and it felt just like I was bringing a little of home here to Nijmegen.

Arnhem

On Thursday we had a trip to the open air museum in Arnhem, I have learnt that before people had fly spray and proper windows, they painted their houses blue to keep the flies away, also they used to sleep in a sitting position rather than lying flat, I observed how to make paper out of cotton fibres and how windmills are used in the Netherlands to manage water. On Friday we had some colleges from a Turkish university come and observe our tutoring class, we compared the different layouts of our classrooms, all of which were very different especially the younger classes compared to the older classes. We discussed why they thought the classrooms where laid out that way and also the positive and negative points, ending the discussion with what we would apply to our own teaching back home.

Sunday lunch

Sunday was a glorious day as we finally saw the sun; I had such a beautiful view of it out of my window so I spent most of Sunday lying on my bed with the curtains and the window wide open soaking up the vitamin D that we Irish people are severely lacking. I hope this means that the summer is here and I can finally cycle (when my bike is fixed) in shorts and t-shirts and without fear of being blown off the bike in the wind.