American student-life

Hello all!

Finally the time has come to talk about the atmosphere of the summer language programme and our daily schedules. The three week experience started the day after we arrived at the campus.

After we woke up in the morning with sleepy faces, but without jetlag feeling, we started to brunch with our RAs in the basement of Elizabeth George Hall (a. k. a. our dorm). After getting to know each other more students arrived. 15 students from Lima, the capital of Peru, 3 from Chile, 3 boys who have already been living in the U. S. since years, but are actually from Nepal, a Mexican guy and a Belgian girl, 15 Chinese students and 3 South-Koreans and last, but not least the 3 of us from Hungary. Multicultural enough, right?

The age varied from 18 to 27, everyone was speechless at first, maybe because we didn’t even know the environment which is going to be our home in the next three weeks, we were on a different continent, different land with new people around us. But I can calm everyone down, our timidity dissolved rapidly thanks to our RAs and thanks to the whole NAZ universe we’ve entered in. We finally started to admit that we’re in the USA, we’re a super and powerful team together, and this is the adventure of our lifetime, and soon everyone became communicative and interested about every surrounding impulse.

As I already mentioned, there were admitted university students supported by their host-universities, and students who paid the whole 3-week-programme for themselves. After the greetings, we walked around the campus with our host students.

Nazareth College lies on a huge territory. Besides the university buildings (Faculty of Health Sciences, Art, Business, Sciences, Languages, Music, and many more), we gained insight the campus life by visiting several spots, for example the sport centre with swimming pool, sauna, aerobic room, or the dining hall, and the big movie room. We’ve got familiarized with the athletics field, the American football pitch. Moreover, we also walked by the library, the music centre (with piano and drum practice rooms), the Science building (where Indy, the Iguana greeted us from his terrarium) and the riding hall. During this walk we already had deep discussions about many interesting topics like Nepalese noodles, the Peruvian airport surrounded by mountains, or the lack of Facebook in China.

After we got closer to each other, time has come to meet with our Italian chef’s masterpieces. He didn’t disappoint us. Food at NAZ is awesome. Breakfasts contained fruits, yogurt, ham, cheese, bagel, bagel, bagel with cream cheese, salads and juices. Perfect sources of energy. We could eat as much as we wanted. For lunch and dinner too. Pizza, fried potatoes, chicken breast, salads, rice with vegetables, roasted vegetables, pastas, sometimes we even had a barbeque and ate grilled meats and hamburgers. So food was extraordinary. I almost forgot about the big ice-cream box. I ate an oreo ice-cream every day after lunch. And if I already started to reflect about my ritual which included a daily oreo ice-cream, I’ll tell You how I spent a usual day at NAZ.

English classes started at 8, breakfast from 7:30 a. m., so I went swimming with my Peruvian, Korean and Nepalese friends every day from 7. Than a fast breakfast, and a fast run to the class (sometimes with half-wet hair). Punctuality is rather preferred than being late, still sometimes I had to disappoint my teacher, when I was 1-2 minutes late. We had a break, but the classes lasted till 12:30. Than lunch, a short siesta, and after that we could go at the language centre, or at the library to do our homeworks, presentations, projects, team-works, etc.

Furthermore, each day we had well-organized leisure activities: kayaking at Bay Creek, attending baseball matches, going at a soccer match in the city, visiting the Farmer’s market, watching a movie at an open-air cinema on a hill near a forest, shopping, hiking, visiting an amuzement park, and a national park etc. After dinner we finished our homeworks, and went to the gym to burn some calories left from the pizza from lunch. In the evening we were tired as hell, but still had energy to entertain ourselves, and hang around together, and build stronger friendships day by day.

In my next posts I'll write about my feelings at Naz, and about phenomenal leisure activities, trips, and 'must see'-s.

P. s. : Sorry for the quality of the pictures, I’m not a professional photographer.

Thanks for reading, Dóra

(If You're interested about more writings of mine, click here).

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