Repeat after me...

Some things haven't changed. I hit the snooze button at least 3 times this morning before I finally got up. I once thought that my problem of struggling to get up in the morning was down to the fact that I was using my radiating cell phone as my alarm, so, I bought this instead.


I can vouch that the flying alarm clock definitely wakens you. Once you've gotten over the shock of hearing the *sonic boom* type noise first thing in the morning, convinced yourself that you're just having palpitations and not a cardiac arrest, then, then, you can test how good your motor skills are at getting the spinning top back into the unit Krypton Factor style. Sound like fun? I think I should try a sun lamp, or the radio, or just some plain old jumping out of bed quickly, or...

After faffing around this morning, I headed out to my first Dutch class. Now, as a foreigner, I'm thinking I missed something today. Is March 13th 'leave your bike upside down in random places day?'

Only a few streets later, I stumbled on the floating van ;-)

Dutch class was fun and challenging already, and it's only my first lesson *meep*. There are about 16 non-Belgies in the class, which is more than I was expecting for this time of year. There's a really good mix of nationalities, and it would appear that I'm the only one from the land of skirted men and Irn Bru.

After taking the register, which, I think I've managed to register under someone else's name...we got stuck into pronunciation. Going round the class it was obvious which people weren't happy about being asked to speak out loud in another language. The first wee test that wee had was dictation. I didn't do too badly on the first round, and I missed out one answer on the second round. After finishing the dictation, each of us had to write an answer on the board. Just my luck then that my turn worked out to be the answer that I'd missed! Typical!

- I walked up to the whiteboard and wrote down attempt number 1 - Hoost.
- Teacher: "Nee. Ik zei *hoist*" (that's what I heard)
- I wrote attempt number 2 -Hoist.
- Teacher: "Nee. Ik zei *hoost*"
- I scrubbed out all previous attempts.
- Teacher: "Nee. Ik zei *houst*"
- I wrote houst.
- Jo: "Ok, help me out here " *blank expression on face*. I scrubbed out spaces for the vowels and leave H__ST on the board.
- Teacher: "Ok, boek. Ik zei *hoest*"
- Epiphany.

I couldn't stop laughing, no matter how many times the teacher repeated the word, I just couldn't get it.