Home Stay in Aduard

Okay so I have finally have time to post pictures and stuff from the last weekend and the last couple of days. So here we go. On Saturday we drove out to Groningen which is in the far northwest side of the country. We drove on the outer dike that is between the North sea and the Ijselmeer. The small picture is a panoramic shot of the North sea. As you can see from my hair it was really windy that day. It was also really wet too.


Matt leaning into the wind with Caleb, someone from our group.







When we finally got to Aduard, small city outside Groningen, we had lunch at Prof. Hoeksema's cousin's house. Then we had a scavenger hunt like thing where we went through the town looking for their church and school. Then we came to a friend's house. We had tea and coffee and some desert/pastry things. Then we got to make cookies. :) mmmmm In the picture to the side, Prof. Hoeksema's cousin is the one standing in the back with the camera, and two of his kids are the two girls in the front.






Those cookies were really good.


















After we ate cookies we went to the church to meet our host families for a potluck dinner. There was a lot of food there. Matt and my host family was a nice young couple who had two young girls, 4 & 5 years old. They are sitting at the table with Matt. The guy with curly blonde hair, Paul, who was actually born in South Africa, and grew up in Austrailia. And his wife the lady in the black, Heidi.






These are their two girls and Heidi is pregnant with their third. Chanel is on the left, the youngest and Naomi is on the right, the oldest. We had a lot of fun with our host family, they spoke English very well because they had lived in Australia for 3 years and had just moved back 2 years ago. And they are planning to move back there at the end of the year.







On Sunday after church, our group got together to go to this old church that was outside the city.

















The church was great and I saw this on the wall, it says "de hoogh". Even though it isn't actually my maiden name that it was referencing it was still cool. It was actually just talking about the high place which is what "de hoogh" means.








And then we took a nice Sunday afternoon stroll through the woods and came to this castle. We couldn't go inside but it was beautiful. (btw, it was really cold and windy throughout this walk, I couldn't feel my fingers and toes towards the end, and I was wearing gloves and two pairs of soaks. Brrr)
After that Matt and I needed to get back in town quickly, so Thys, Hoeksema's cousin's oldest son, who had just gotten his license drove us back. We were definitely going 170 kph which is about 105 mph. Crazy but we got back to town on time to go to church. So that was the weekend.