Adventures with Camp Adventure!

Hop Holland Hop!

Great first week over here! I love it! I definitely have mixed feelings where I am like: "Oh my God, how am I going to do this all summer?!" but mostly I am just crazy excited and happy. Ideally I wanted to update my blog more, but that just wasn't happening this week. I was crazy jet lagged (still kinda am) and I work most of the time, and when I am not working I sleep! My other excuse is that our internet is very bad, specially with the bar streaming the World Cup.

Day One:

The first day we got in around noon (9 hours ahead of Seattle), My flights were fine, in New York, I realized I was very close to my Aunts, and with better planning we probably could have met up, but we are going to try again on on my way home. I slept all the way from Seattle to NY, and barely slept from NY to Brussels. I ended up meeting my roommate Jasmine on that flight. I had no idea what was going to happen when I landed in Brussels, but a man that works in the Youth Center, Willy, was waiting to drive us to Brunssum - about an hour car ride. We met up with two more girls from Camp, Claire, and Karah. When we got to Brunssum we met Jack and Jolly (who own the hotel and bar), and they showed us our room. It reminds me if I was to stay at the Leaky Cauldron from Harry Potter; staying above a pub and it has crooked halls, tons of character! After we got settled we walked around the city - I was a walking zombie, but we tried to stay up as long possible to adjust to the change. Two girls in our Camp A group have already been here for a month (Kelley, and Rachel), so they showed us around and got us acquainted with the area, bus, and train system. I made it until about 5 or 6 pm and slept until 1 am where, I just sat in bed until we had to be up at 8 for work.

Typical Day:

Work. Which don't get me wrong I LOVE. We work from about 9-6, but I will be starting 8-5 next week. Its about a 10 minute walk to the base, and another ten minute walk to the Youth Center on base. The facility is brand new, and very nice - during our training they lead us to believe, we will be working in some random spare room, but it has everything you could think of needing in a day camp/center. (I might be able to add some pictures but I am pretty sure we are not allowed to, specially not anything on base, but I've seen people do it). After work we don't do much, I've gotten groceries, and walked around a bit, but usually it ends up us just trying to connect to the internet and then passing out. People keep asking me for pictures, but I haven't taken any! That has been most of my week, but now I am not as jet lagged, so hopefully I will be more active at night now.

Work:

Like I said before, I love it. I love the kids, my co-workers, and just everything about it. Everyone is very helpful, nice, and easy-going. We are pretty small for Camp A, only six counselors, so we just kind of blend in with the existing camp, which means we don't have to be so Camp A. That doesn't really affect me though because I work the little babies in the CDC. They are crazy cute and cuddly, I float around from infants, to toddlers, to pre-school, to "strong beginnings", which is like pre-kindergarten (and my favorite room). The thing about working with military kids is you have to remember most of them have a parent or two who are deployed, or never there. The kids are very cuddling, one of my favorites (shhhh) will just come up to me and say "I need a hug". So I hold him and walk around the playground, his dad is deployed and will go up to all the dads that come to pick up their kids and go and hug them and say "daddy". It's like the most heart breaking think in the whole world - I totally baby the kids too, can't help it.

Since I work on a NATO base there are many cultures involved, so our kids speak many languages, which is fun and challenging. They like to teach you their language (most of them speak English, but you can barely understand a 3 year old anyways). They also know you don't speak their language so they try to trick us and test us. A ton of my coworkers have kids at the facility and they say they come home totally speaking another language learning from another student, so bazaar but really great for the kids!

This past week I wasn't even working full time, we had our training week, which included things like: child abuse prevention, anti-terrorism training, paper work, food handling stuff, and blood-borne pathogen training. All very exciting - joke! We mostly did observation hours, just going from room to room and getting to know the classrooms, and how everything works!

Surprises:

Everyone here speaks English, EVERYONE. I haven't come across a person in The Netherlands, who hasn't. If you ask them if they speak English they look a little wary and hesitant but are usually very helpful.
Roundabouts, lots of roundabouts
No one wears helmets when riding bikes, not even the kids
Everyone is VERY friendly. I feel like I'm in a movie, you say hi to everyone you see, it's the coolest thing, totes bringing that back to the States.
^^also never thought I would refer to home as the states
Nothing is open, ever.
Random things will be written in English, like half of an ad or sign. Things in general, will just be randomly in English.
You can get hit on in your Camp Adventure uniform, at least he was cute!
Everything is in orange, HOP HOLLAND HOP! ~Pretty sure that means go Holland go. This one shouldn't have been a surprise with the World Cup and all, but everyone here cares if they win or lose. People at work always say that when Holland wins, they win loudly, if they lose, well they aren't great losers. again, EVERYONE watches soccer, it's like not an option. They haven't lost yet so Holland is Happy!

Challenges:

Communicating with international students
The nothing is ever open thing. Everything is closed Sunday, and most of Monday, and things usually close around 6 - right when we get off work. Except for Thursday. So that's interesting, bars are usually open though.
Showering. Our shower is a 2X2
Time Change, duh.
Grocery shopping. I mostly just buy things that look like what I know butttt still not the same, my dinners and lunch have not been very good that I have made - room for improvement I spose!

New Foods:

Not much to add here, I have eaten mostly on base, which is "American food". Which also sparked my question of the week: "What is American food?" - seriously though it all stems from another culture. We have like fried food, and burgers, cool America, cool. Jack gave me some traditional Dutch dish I can't remember the name of - that was delicious. I have also had what is basically a ham and cheese sandwich, also good. Also cooked eggs in the microwave, which is apparently a thing here - not bad.

I'll post the few pictures I took this week and then post about our first trip to Aaken, Germany! We aren't allowed to do overnight trips during our first week here, so we are doing two day trips!