First day of school! First day of school!

Contrary to popular belief, we here at the Kasteel Well program are not just here to putz around Europe and have fun. As of Monday, classes began. In my last post, I talked about culture shock. Being on a campus of all American students, I didn’t think I would experience that much shock. However, as I spend more and more time here, I find I am surprised by new little things that creep up on me every day.

For example, my professors so far seem the same as my American professors, though they have great accents. One of them is Flemish and gave us the history of Belgium which is interesting, but after attending each of my classes, they don’t seem that dissimilar. Time will tell  if this proves to be true. One major difference I noted though was that they all want to take breaks during our hour and forty-five minute classes. At Emerson, this is the average class length and in Boston, professors don’t give us breaks. It makes me wonder how long the average class is at other universities.

In two of my classes, my professors instructed us to make name tags as well. I don’t think I’ve had a name tag since maybe the third grade. But then, it occurred to me that with the most popular names for The Netherlands being Sem and Tess,  the American names that they have in class here probably seem very foreign.

Regardless, I am excited to get started and  to see more of the differences between school here and school in The Netherlands. I am slightly disappointed that I can’t take Dutch as a class, but hopefully I will pick some up while I’m here.

Tomorrow we leave for a weekend excursion to Amsterdam. I’m sure to have stories when I get back!