here at last

writing this, i'm sitting in the living room of my family's home in Borne. i arrived yesterday in the early afternoon, after flying from New York through Zurich, Switzerland. Paula, Gjalt, and Henri met me at Schipol airport in Amsterdam with a bouquet of wooden tulips and a balloon :) we drove about two hours from there to Borne - all the way across the country! luckily there were no major traffic jams. today Paula took me on a little tour of the town, we went shopping and ran errands: to the grocery store, the butcher, the library, the bicycle shop (to get the brakes fixed on my bike). Borne itself is smaller in size than Homer but has more people and far more shops and the like. everything is very close together, the streets are narrow and paved with cobblestone. there's a church built in 1480, it's huge to me but they tell me it's quite small for a chapel. 

i'm definitely suffering a little jet lag, paula teased me for nearly falling alseep in the market! it's about a ten hour difference i think, so it's taking a bit to adjust. i'm learining new dutch words everytime i do something. one wonderful discovery is that they still have cosmogirl (the magazine) here! although it's in dutch, so i can barely read it, it's nice to look at the pictures :) i got a prepaid cell phone today for 25 euros, and we're spray painting my bike shiny blue to prevent it from being stolen. tomorrow i hope to see Borne a bit more, or maybe even Hengelo, where i'll be going to school. i'll post some pictures of Borne tomorrow but right now i'm unbelievably tired.. even though i've already taken a two hour nap today! haha well i'm going to go to sleep now.