Counting down the last 2 months, time is going way too fast…
I already got my flight times from EF. Flying on June 10 from Idaho Falls to
Denver, Denver to Chicago and from Chicago to Amsterdam. But first 2 more
months here! So it’s been a while since I wrote on my blog. In school we’re
already in the last, 3rd trimester, so which means; I have some new
classes. First hour is Physical Science, Seminary, desktop publishing (so
boring, we just work with adobe photoshop and stuff) than we have lunch and
after that I have a class called Horticulture, it’s a class with plants and
flowers. It’s kind of nice, since we don’t do a lot,
just hangout and planting some plants haha. Last hour is
World Languages, that hour I’m learning French. Can’t remember a lot from the 3
years of French I had in high school back home, but it’s ok. I don’t do sports
after school anymore. At the beginning I debated if I wanted to do softball or
track. But it just takes so much time and you can’t miss any of the practices
otherwise you will be sitting on the bench during games.
We didn’t really have a lot of special things going on in
school the past few weeks. The only thing was Junior Miss. It’s a pageant
‘show’ for the girls in my class and they can win scholarship for college with
it. It was kinda funny to watch since we would never have that in highschool
haha. And we only know it from television like Toddlers and Tiaras ha! The week
after that there was the same thing but than for guys ‘Mr West Jeff’, it’s not
really serious, they just do it to make fun of the girls in Junior Miss.
So it’s April now and the weather is really weird, some days
there is still snow and some days it feels like spring with 18C. So I went
skiing one more time in the ski area that’s called: Grand Targee! It’s pretty big and popular
around here since people are coming skiing from allover America over there!
Last weekend we had spring break, we only had Friday and Monday off since we
already had 2 weeks of Spudharvest in October. Anyways, EF wanted to go on a
trip to Utah to go indoor skydiving but eventually there were not enough people
who wanted to go, so my host mom, Summer, decided that we could go without EF
and stay the weekend in Salt Lake city. We took the Norwegian exchange student
from my school with us, Grammy (summer’s mom) plus my little sister Brooklyn.
We left Saturday morning and went to Ogden, Utah where iFly was with the indoor
skydiving. It was so cool!!! It just makes up my mind every time how cheap
America is, for the whole skydiving thing they charged us only $30. In Europe
we probably would have paid hundreds of euro’s haha. So we got in to iFly and the
instructors explained us how it would work. So we got on some special ‘suits’
with wind goggles and earplugs. When we were ready, we would go and sit around
the ‘wind tunnel’ first the instructor showed us some cool tricks (that we
couldn’t do, lol). A few people in front of me were first. When it was my turn
I had to stand at the opening of the wind tunnel and kind of jump into the wind
tunnel. It felt so weird, but it was way fun!! You just kind of flew around and
the instructor would help.
After iFly we went to in-and-out Burger, definitely my
favorite fast food in america, it’s so much better than McDonalds or Burger
king or whatever! Around 01:00 PM we went to Salt Lake City and we would stay
the night there. Salt Lake is like the ‘Mecca’ of the LDS religion haha. So
they have the biggest temple over there with a big visitors center, since me,
and Ilse (from Norway) are not LDS we can’t go into the temple. So on temple
square we went looking for missionaries from our own country. Mormons, have to
go on a mission for 2 years where they have to teach the gospel to others and
they can be placed all over the world. So we found 2 missionaries from Norway,
one of them lived in the same place as Ilse back home and she knew her sister!
So that was a crazy coincidence! Of course, there was nobody from The
Netherlands, which didn’t really surprise me, because I never heard of the
whole LDS, Mormon religion before I came here. Eventually we found a girl from
Bolivia who lived for 5 years in The Netherlands and she spoke Dutch! I think
as an Exchange student far from home, nothing is better to talk with somebody who
knows your language and culture; I haven’t met any exchange students from my country
since the beginning of the year in Boston. It was actually really hard to speak
my own language again, of course I talk Dutch with friends and family but it’s
really hard to talk to somebody you don’t know in your own language again haha!
Salt lake city was so busy, because there was General Conference. General
Conference is twice a year, and it’s a big Mormon thing, where big leaders
talk. There are 4 sessions from each two hours. Two sessions are on Saturday
and two on Sunday. The one on Sunday morning is the most popular. You need
tickets to get in (tickets are free) but it is really popular and you can fit
21.000 people in the conference center. So on Sunday morning we went, and
seriously I have never seen so many Mormons in my whole entire life, all
dressed up in suits and dresses haha.
But since we didn’t have tickets we couldn’t go in. There
are seriously people standing on the streets begging for tickets, well we
decided not to do that so we ended up in stand by line. So when everybody is in
they will give us the tickets that are left. We never thought we would get in,
but at the end there were around a couple of 100 tickets left, so we got in. I
seriously never saw my host mom so happy; she even gave the guy from the
security a hug haha, it was hilarious!! She definitely makes this year so much
better haha! The conference center was huge!! And there were so many people! After conference we went back to the hotel and picked up grammy and Brooklyn, ate lunch and went back to Idaho! It was such a fun little spring break! (:
