Sitback Sunday: update!

Hi there gorgeous, how’s it going?

As you might have realized by now, I’m not exactly good at writing blogpost on a regular basis. Life is known to sweep me off my feet and carry me around for months, without me even realizing actual time is flying by. I’ve been pretty busy lately, traveling, celebrating my birthday, working on uni stuff and board stuff.. I didn’t sit still. So today is another Sitback Sunday, where I will share my thoughts and photos of the last couple of weeks, so that we’re all on the same page again, haha!

First off, at the beginning of February, I went all the way to London for 3 days to run a relay competition. Sounds pretty cool, right? We were running for our student athletic team, NSAV 't Haasje, with a group that has grown to be my second family. 

The competition was a 5k running relay, where student teams from all over the world could compete against each other. Apart from that, however,  it was the perfect excuse to skip uni for a day and indulge ourselves in the glamour that is London.

I freaking love London. The atmosphere is so exhilarating, it inspires me to do more with my life for some reason I can’t explain properly. It’s seeing all those strangers with their busy lives and their classy outfits standing in the subway talking to their phones.. it’s a different world and I love it.

The competition itself was wonderful as well. A 5k run through the big Hyde Park, accompanied by lovely students from Imperial college, who’d yell “you can do it darling” or “good effort, love” which made me, a Dutch girl who isn't used to endearments at all, run harder with a blush not only from the running.. English in the British way is really something I could get used to.. as are the British guys, haha ;).

After this lovely trip I had a week of studying, after which a group of 12 Romanian students came to my town for an exchange project I was participating in. One of them, a really sweet girl named Alina, became my “twin” and stayed in my room for a week. 

We did everything a tourist in the Netherlands has to do, from checking out the coffeeshops in Amsterdam and watching the parade at carnival to eating frikandellen/kroketten out of the wall.(only Dutch people will know what I'm talking about. but believe me, you gotta try it when before you drop it!) We had such a lovely time and the Romanian students were all so nice and understanding, you couldn’t not like them.  Seeing your own town and country from a foreigners view is an amazing experience, because you look at ordinary things in such a different way. I always found our houses to be pretty normal, and biking is a second nature to me, but when they were here the red-brick buildings looked special, and biking wasn't at all that easy.

After this week it was time for a week of studying and exams, only to go to Romania the week after. I wasn’t joking when I said I had been busy, haha! We went to visit the Romanian group in Cluj-Napoca for a week, and we left on my 19^th birthday. To say that it was my best birthday ever is an understatement. 

My week in Romania was such an amazing experience, I can’t possibly begin to describe it. Romanian students are so motivated, it makes me feel guilty sometimes. The competition is high over there, and the better grades you get, the easier life gets for you. Straight A students get to live in an apartment with only one roommate, others need to live with 3 roommates 24/7. Getting good grades isn’t only about the knowledge for them, it’s about comfort and privacy as well. I can’t even think of introducing a system like that in the Netherlands, I think the students would just stop going to university. It was really inspiring to see how they did their best at going to classes and asking questions and paying attention, while doing so much voluntary stuff beside school as well.

Apart from the educational differences, Romania is simply a beautiful county. The mountains are breath-taking, and one day it snowed a lot and we went to the castle of Dracula and had a huge snowball fight, it was lovely. Snow is something special to me. It only snows in the Netherlands a couple of days a year, and i love those days so much. I turn into a little child when i see the snowflakes falling, so having the chance to experience that in another country with such great nature was amazing.

Some of the students have become great friends of mine, even though I only met them 2 months ago and have only seen them for 2 weeks in total. It’s amazing how an experience like an exchange can bind you to people in such a way that you feel like you’ve known them for years.

All in all, I’ve been many places and experienced many things these last couple of months. It’s been 3 weeks since my Romania trip now, and I’m back in the normal routine (I’m writing this blogpost in the train towards my student’s room, yay), but my thoughts and my being are so different from January. Not only can I say that I’ve lived on this planet for over 19 years now, I can also say that I’ve got friends all over the world, that I’ve seen surgery, that I know how to suture (kind of) and that I’ve ran a relay in London, just because I could.

Life is pretty great, you just have to seek the great things yourself. Experiences like these are priceless, and will never leave you again. I feel so happy and blessed that I am able to experience things like this, because this is what life is all about. It’s about living in the moment, meeting new people, making new connections and experiencing new things.

Stay true to who you are, I will hopefully see you soon!

Jane xxx