Blog 6 Weekend in Vilnius and a basketball weekend

From this blog onwards I will be writing my blog not only in Dutch, but also in English. My international friends are also interested in my life here in Lithuania.

The 4^th and the 5^th of November I was a weekend in Vilnius, we had a YFU meeting on Saturday which started at 11:00. My alarm went off very early, at 5.30, because traveling by car from Vilnius to Klaipeda takes about 3 to 4 hours. I would go with Alyssa’s host family and we would leave at 6:50. It was really nice to see the other exchange students again; we talked about our problems and irritations. The biggest problem everyone had, was the boredom at school. That for sure is my biggest problem as well. During most lessons I do nothing, the other students have to follow the lessons that I don’t understand. They don’t have time to translate everything, and not everything is translatable. Furthermore the schooldays are very long, most day I’m in school from 8 am to 4 pm.

I am lucky that I found something this week that motivates me again, something to do during the lessons. This Which is the Lithuanian language. At the moment I am learning: Linksniai (noun endings) en Veiksmažodžiu laikai (verb tenses). These are both very difficult, and if you want to get it right you have to practise a lot. Luckily I have a lot of stamina to do so. I am also happy that I get help school and my teammate Saule who gives me extra lessons Lithuanian. Furthermore I try to upgrade my vocabulary by in the lessons where I can’t do anything, I learn words that are valuable to that subject. So for example geography words like: country’s, nature, animals etc.. Because of this the lessons are less boring. I also try to learn at least one word each day

Anyways I was talking about Vilnius: After the meeting all the exchange students went to eat pizza and chat about how we were doing. After that Alyssa’s family and I went to a modern dance show. It was kind of interesting, however I had to do my best not to fall asleep, I was so tired. After the show we went to our apartment and ordered sushi. In the apartment Alyssa and I thought it was a good idea to write a thank you letter to the owners of the apartment, since it was such a cool apartment. We got a call back from the owner and they were so happy with the letter that they put it in a frame on the wall. Sometimes it is so easy to make people happy, I will try to do this more and spread more happiness in the world!!

Sunday morning we went to an amber museum, and hung around in the city to take some photo’s. After that Alyssa’s parents dropped me off at the gym, where my team had a basketball game. They were very surprised I came all the way to Vilnius to see their game, because I had only talked about it with the coach. The game was an easy win, after that it was a long trip back to Klaipeda. Which became less long with Mac Donald’s hamburgers, conversations about religions, believes, karma, Lithuanian languages, and a hope and a lot of other weird stuff.

Last weekend (10/11/12 November) my weekend started on Friday. Because we would leave around 14:00 to Latvia for a friendly game  against a team there. So I didn’t go to school since I would only be able to go to PE and Lithuanian. (I had permission for this, don’t worry) I played two games with two teams. The first game I played with a younger team 2002/2003 and we won. The second game with my own team 2000/2001 we unfortunately lost. On the way back I learned a lot new Lithuanian words, with help of this new App (Fabulo). Of course some teammates laughed about my Lithuanian pronunciation, but it is so difficult. I am already used to them laughing about it. I would probably also laugh if they tried to speak Dutch. I just have to keep practicing, then it will hopefully become better.

Saturday I went to some kind of ice hockey championships. To be honest: in the Netherlands I had never seen an ice hockey game. I had seen it on TV at the winter Olympics, but that’s it. I saw to matches: Ukraine against Estonia which Estonia won, and Lithuania against Latvia which Latvia won. We didn’t see the final, Estonia against Latvia , because everyone was so tired we went home. Ice hockey is a pretty interesting sport although I didn’t understand all of the rules. For example you could push your opponent against the boarding and that’s no problem or penalty.

Sunday we had a really early meet up at 9am because we had a game at 1pm in Alytus. It was a long travel that lasted about 3 hours. On the way to Alytus I slept a lot. The game started and guys: Finally I made my debut in the Lithuanian basketball competition! My documents were finally fixed, I got an ID number and that was good enough to play. It is kind of hard to play, because I am not playing like my old/Dutch game/play. Because I am not playing the way I did in the Netherlands. Hopefully this will come back soon. At the moment I can’t give my team what I want to give them, which is kind of frustrated frustrating for me. Hopefully this comes back soon, so I can play with a better feeling.

Hopefully you like this blog and if you have any questions about Lithuania or about me, feel free to contact me.

Warm regards, Lotte who is still happy even when the weather is kind of really bad in Lithuania.