It’s almost 4 weeks ago I left the Netherlands. The time goes so fast when a lot of new things happen in such a short time. I had a lot of fun these 4 weeks, but it sometimes also was a difficult time for me. A lot of new people who don’t understand you, living in such a small village, following Spanish lessons which you don’t understand etc. But it every week gets better and better. The nice thing is that me and my host family do a lot of things in the surroundings of Salamanca. My Spanish also gets better and better. Ria (my host mother), Jaime, and I also started with Spanish lessons every Monday and Thursday to improve Jaime’s Dutch and my Spanish. I every day understand more of the lessons, especially mathematics. This is the easiest for me because it’s all about numbers (an international language). But the rest of the subjects are still pretty difficult for me since nobody speaks english.
The school is is a very small but nice high-school. It is pretty new and has a lot of space. They also have a lot of space for sports, which I like a lot. But in the Netherlands the school gives much more responsibility to the students than here on the Quercus high-school in El Encinar. For example: the teachers always give homework for the next day and then also check if the students made it, while in the Netherlands a lot of teachers plan homework for the next week and don’t even check a lot of times if the students made their homework. Another example is that at school times the school also closes the gates. This means that from 08:45 am until 14:40 pm, you aren’t aloud to leave the school terrain. The nice thing is that because of the fact the school is so small and only has 80 students, it is very cosy. Everybody knows each other and is nice to one another.