So I babysat my neighbor last night, she's three and absolutely adorable. And I honestly think I may have learned more Dutch in the 6 hours spent with her than at all my Dutch lessons combined. We read books most of the time, which was great for my Dutch, but once you've read Ivo gaan boodschaapen doen about 7 times, you've had enough with Ivo and Mama and Tante Rosa and Paultje. It was an interesting night, seeing as she doesn't speak English, my Dutch is rather limited at this point and she speaks with a mixture of French and Dutch because her mom speaks French and dad speaks Dutch. So I was running on intuition a lot of the time while trying to decipher what she was saying. But despite all that, we had a great time, and it was actually surprisingly easy after a while to communicate. And all the effort was worth it when she woke me up in the morning (I spent the night because her parents were out late) with a big kiss and another book to read. Maybe that language barrier isn't so big after all...
In other news, I made scones yesterday- the ones my mom always makes for everything. It was pretty amusing, because I had my laptop at the kitchen table since I had to keep checking the internet for temperature conversions, ingredient translations and such. They actually turned out just as they always do, only a little bit tough- I think I got over excited during the kneading process. But anyway, Annelies and Frederik (my host-brother and his girlfriend who live in Leuven) were here and we ate them for breakfast. It's interesting, because in Belgium, they don't have scones, so it was a very new experience for everyone- something that I hadn't really expected, although I guess scones are more from England, but I'm a little surprised they haven't traveled over here, seeing as Belgium is only about an hour away from England.
Enough about my scones- here's a picture of me, Annelies and Frederik that Laura took a few weeks ago at the Graslei:
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