Current Music: Madonna – “Die Another Day”

There was a party on Friday up in C7. Was fun – they really went all out – candles and a DJ-type person and stuff. And that’s a corner apartment, so they had two balconies and a really big living room and stuff. I met a couple nice people – a French girl who’s my age (yes, 19 – that’s a first!) and a really nice Irish girl who reminds me of camp people. N and I were both in a dancing mood and wanted to go out, but we needed student IDs to get into the Woo (student club), which we don’t yet have because of stupid Dutch red tape. So we didn’t go. I eventually got sick of the party and went back home, and then 10 minutes later S came down too, with C and N and L, and we sat around and talked until 2.00. Then they all left, but we’d been talking about restaurants and worldwide cuisine and stuff, so then S and I decided we were hungry, so we made tortellini and had ice cream and went to bed around 3.00. Thus I got up at 11. Nice.

And the internet situation is still going downhill. I can look at MSN Messenger and see that I have new messages, but now I can not only not write mail, I can’t read it either! Not through Outlook and not through the website. This is really getting annoying. I guess I have to start complaining again… *zucht*

New amusement: ilse chat. It goes really slowly, but it can be fun.

BOSWELL STARTED TODAY!!! And it was actually cool. I was kinda worried at first – after all, I totally skipped the B-course and I’ve only been living in Holland for a month – but it was great. We didn’t have our normal teacher (Ciska or something) today because she was sick – we had this guy Edwin instead, as a sub, but he was fine. Hard to understand at first – he pronounces ij like e - but I got used to it. And this is my level. I was worried that everyone else would be better than me, but I’m actually one of the better ones… or at least as near as I can figure – it’s only been a day. The class is full of different nationalities – there’s another American woman, older than me, and then a man from Iraq and a couple of Swiss people and Spanish people and Germans and an Arabic lady and oh, all kinds… some of whom are very difficult to understand because of their accents. I guess Edwin thought so too, because we were going around the class reading parts of a ‘stukje tekst’ (can’t think of the English term) and he had to correct the pronunciation of every single person, but then I read and all he had to say was ‘uitstekend!’ and asked me to continue. :) Go me, go me…

And it sounds arrogant, but finally, finally, it’s all new and different and challenging, not review. We’re doing stuff now that I used to ask about back at UF, like when to use which of the ‘little words’ (toch, al, even, maar…) and stuff. Finally, I’m getting my answers. And I had my ‘shining moment’ too… Edwin was explaining about split verbs that can look exactly the same (in the infinitive, anyway) but mean different things because the stress is on different places in the word – like voorkomen and voorkomen, or ondergaan and ondergaan. Their meanings are totally different because of where the stress lies, and I was the one to figure out why. When the stress is on the preposition, it’s something physical – e.g. ondergaan means to literally go underneath something, like a bridge. But if the stress is on the verb itself – ondergaan - it’s metaphorical, meaning in English ‘to undergo’, e.g. a test or something. And all of them are that way – material versus metaphorical. He was explaining and nobody understood how they were supposed to be used, but all of a sudden something just clicked in my head and my mouth fell open. I can never hide it when I get a brain wave… which is one of the greatest feelings in the world, by the way, when you suddenly completely understand something that made no sense a second earlier. (IB people, you know what I’m talking about.) I got that stupid grin that wouldn’t go away (D: the BSG!) and kept saying under my breath, “Ik snap het, oh, ik snap het!” Then Edwin asked for an example of the usage of ‘ondergaan’ and nobody could tell him. So he looked at me and winked and said, “Jess?” because he had seen the faces I was making, and so I gave my theory and it turned out to be right. I had to explain part of it in English because I just didn’t have the Dutch words for it – I barely had the English words for it at that point – but I was right anyhow, so go me! (But then later I got called on for – of course – the one sentence in the exercise that I didn’t understand, and did it completely wrong, so I had a ‘stupid moment’ too, LOL!)

Anyway, but I have a ton of homework – for phonology and Boswell – so Jess is going to go be good now. Ciao…