First couple of days in Bellingham

Hi people,

Here I am again. It has almost been a week since we arrived in Bellingham. I’m having a blast so far, we did a bunch of stuff in and around Bellingham. Like I said before, we have to attend several lectures. At first I thought that we would be attending real classes with other students, but as a matter of fact that isn’t the case. The lectures we get are specially organized for the eleven of us. We are allowed to follow some additional classes though.

Besides having the lectures, we do a lot of fieldtrips and excursions. Before we went to Bellingham, I had never heard of it before. Therefore, the first thing that came to mind was that it should be a small and shady town. Actually, I was wrong, it is not a big city or something like that. It is a lovely town with a lot of nice restaurants and they are famous for their salmon.

A fun thing is, is that Bellingham is located near to a Dutch settlement, called Lynden. Our guide Ulli took us there, to see if we could recognize thing from The Netherlands. The first thing I thought was, that it would be very stereotypical (a lot of wooden shoes, and other funny things about our country). Actually it was a nice town and you recognize a lot of Dutch features, such as: windmills, buildings shaped as Dutch houses and a real Dutch restaurant where we could eat typical Dutch food. And the funny thing was, that some people that we met could actually speak Dutch.

The most exciting and scary thing what we did was our courthouse and prison visit. I was really excited going there, because we were allowed to attend a courtroom meeting. After that we got to see the prison from the inside. The first thing I thought was that all the prisoners would be locked away for the tour and that is wouldn’t be that exciting. But when we came in I found out that the prison just operated as it usually would, this meant that we could see everything and even the prisoners. When this happened I got really scared because you never know what could happen. But in the end it was a great tour and I learned a lot and it was great to see how a prison operates. I didn’t want to miss it.

Well this is it for today, catch you guys next time.