Happy New Year!

So, Christmas is over. New Year's has come and gone.

Christmas is celebrated much the same way I gather most Belgian holidays are celebrated: with loud, cheery dinner parties that will often start around five or six and end at three or four. We spent Christmas Eve (after we got home from school—how awful are exams on Christmas Eve?) at Claudine's house. Claudine is both my principal and my friend Samm's host mum. When she found out my host dad would be working on Christmas Eve, she invited us over for dinner and a gift exchange.

We skyped with her son, Gael, who is currently living in Texas. Gael is very kind but it's hard to listen to him skype his family. Firstly, I feel just like I'm intruding on family time. It's the same when my host family skypes their own daughter in Oregon. I'll say a quick hello but then I'll leave the family to catch up with each other. I don't know Pauline, and if she wants to complain about Americans, she should be able to complain in the privacy of real family, you know?

We went out four nights in a row to dinner parties like this. I swear, my Circadian rhythm reversed from just staying out to three in the morning so many nights in a row.

I also went skating in La Hestre. I went with my host-cousin Solène. Solène is eleven, adopted and really, really nice to me. As of our skating session, she is also better than the average Belgian at ice skating. It was only her second time on skates, which to me, a small-town girl from Northern Ontario, is completely bizarre. In Belgium, this is a completely normal thing to have never done. How weird is that? My host dad is forty and he's been tobogganing three times in his life. Two of those times have been with me.

I gave Solène an impromptu skating lesson and I'm pleased to say she can now skate forwards, backwards and turn without help from the boards or from me. We're going to try and go skating again before the rink in La Hestre disappears, but since I'm moving, I don't know when that will be.

Oh, you read that correctly.

I'm changing host families later today (It's seven AM now, and I switch in three hours). Now, I must say, compared to the stories I've heard from the inbounds I'm closest with here in Belgium, I'm incredibly lucky to have the host families I have. I've heard so many odd stories about difficult families and all of my families (all of whom I've already met) seem normal (which sounds silly but is a huge relief) and I have host sisters in every family!

It's weird for me to have a sister because I have brothers. All of my families have sixteen year old girls, and one of my families has a boy the same age as my baby brother back home.

My new host family is really nice. I've met them a few times and I've been to their house for dinner already two or three times. They have a pet rabbit and their house is huge! Even by rural Canada standards and not Belgian standards. Back home, this new house is just a big house, here in Belgium it's practically a castle.

And this family is really big on Carnival, which is this big festival I'm certain I'll be able to explain to you really, really well very soon.

I want to wish everyone who reads this blog a whole hearted Happy New Year. "Bonne Année". I hope that everyone's year is amazing and I hope everyone's horizons are as bright as mine. I hope everyone is well. I miss home. I miss the fireworks and watching the big ball drop in New York. We didn't count down the seconds to midnight this year, it just kind of happened during a loud party of youths. We certainly didn't count down the seconds with my family and with everyone in New York City and, I'm certain, 80% of people in that time zone. I didn't get to see the big ball drop this year and that was really hard. I didn't realise how much I liked that.

Wish me luck today with my new family. Wish me luck saying goodbye to my old one.