Jakob Hettinga
- Jan 8, 2020
- 3 min read

My vacation

I remember a few months before my departure date I was attending an orientation in Calgary for the exchange students in our district. One thing they mentioned was, "don't let the only memory from your exchange be of the back of your bedroom door," I, fortunately, have had the exact opposite happen. The first 4 months of exchange was so jam packed and busy, they select days I had off I would get home an instantly crash on my bed and have a nice siesta. Of course, it would be a little difficult to try to catch up with everything that happened so I'll start from the beginning of my winter holidays, we start on the 15th of December.

December 15th: We start this morning by boarding a bus for 7 hours as I am on my way to London for a week with my friend Rosie. This week we ended up going into London multiple times and Nottingham for a night.

December 21: I boarded a very late bus and made my way back to Brussels. That night I slept very well because I didn't have much sleep the past week.

Christmas here in Belgium is a big celebration and I was with my host family for the next few days going to dinners with family and friends. We kept very busy as Nöel came and passed. Christmas here is celebrated the night of the 24th and we ended up getting home at 3am with my host family because we waited until midnight to start dinner.

The 27th I spent the day in Bruges with a few exchange students, it's such a lovely town.

The 28th I switched families and now I am living just across the street from school which is very convenient for going to school or the train station.

The 29th I went to the movies with my host sister and her friends in the morning and we watched Frozen 2 (in french). We also celebrated Christmas again with this new family which was very nice and I felt really at home.

And the 30th I went to Pairi Daiza with a girl from school. Pairi Daiza is one of the best animal parks in Europe and it puts the Calgary Zoo to shame. It was really amazing and I was so surprised of how large it was! It was the size of a small town. It was very fun but after spending 6 hours walking around a zoo, I was super exhausted and I just went home to sleep right after.

New year's I spent the night with a friend who lives in Liege as we celebrated with her host family. It was very fun and her host family got very crazy for the new year.

The following morning, I made a solid list of resolutions and one of which is go out with my friends from school more often to benefit my french. I went bowling with people from school on the 3rd of January. The 4th of January I went for a walk in the forest with my host family and the following day I got ready for school as it started once again the 6th.