I have been in the Netherlands for about 2 weeks now and I can say that this is the most challenging thing I have ever done. School has been a challenge with meeting lots of new people, speaking and listening to a lot of dutch ever day. If you are going to go on a exchange, learn the lingo as much as you can before you go!! It will help more than you know.
Over here in school I do Dutch, English, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, Maths x3 and PE. From first impressions, school over here seems about the same difficulty as in New Zealand so far, but everything is in dutch so it's hard to tell. What I am doing currently is about the equivalent to NCEA L1/L2 over here I feel (based off a couple of subjects I understand like Chemistry and Physics). I go to Zandvliet College and I am in the 5th (out of 6) year of VVO which is the highest level of schooling you can get in the Netherlands. I have a full week at school coming up and I am looking forward to meeting even more people and learning even more dutch!
Over here I have been doing is a lot of biking. Everyone over here has a bike and it isn't uncommon for people to have 3 bikes. Below is a photo of all the bikes at The Hauge Central Station.
I have also biked to a beach in The Hauge which is so nice! It was a nice and sunny day and the water was quite nice after I got use to it. (photo down left). It took my host family and I about 30-40 minutes to get there by bike. Despite what I thought before I cam here, this country isn't perfectly flat! While there aren't any real hills, they do have a few shallow ups and downs on their roads and landscape and they are definitely noticeable!!
Well I can't think of what else I can say so this is all for now and I'll write again soon!
