Dr. Lori

Wow, what an adventure this is turning out to be! We started off the trip yesterday morning at 8 am, when we left UMM.  For the first part of the trip we had to drive to Boston to the airport; we then flew to Dublin. It was hard for us to grasp the concept of the time change.  When we left Boston, it was 6:20 pm--we arrived in Dublin at 5:30 am.  There is a 5 hour time difference, the flight was actually 5 hours not 11!  From Dublin we flew to Amsterdam where the time changed one more hour, but our flight was delayed due to fog in Amsterdam, which caused some hiccups in scheduling picking up the Russian students at the airport when their flight arrived.  As we drove from the airport to our housing for the week, we encountered swans gracefully gliding down all of the canals, old and new windmills of every shape and size, and scenery very different from Maine.  

When we arrived at our housing, we got settled while Dr. Lori went to pick up the Russian students.  The bungalow that we are staying in is a cozy 4 bedroom with a common living area.  Afterwards we went into town to the grocery store and to dinner.  Grocery shopping proved to be a bit difficult--none of the students from the US can read Dutch, so we had to rely on other clues to tell us what the products were that we were looking at.  Dr. Lori then took us to a restaurant, that translates to the 'Lazy Hunter' in English.  The food was so different from anything that we have back home, it was delicious!  

Now that we have seen a little bit of the area, we are excited to explore more as the week goes on, and to get to know all of the students from the other countries.  It will be so neat to work together in person to finalizes our papers, after only working together virtually. Can't wait to see how the rest of the week goes!  Stay tuned for Trey tomorrow!  Krystal Moores